2022-2023 Faculty Research Fellows
Lucy Corin (English) is the author of two novels and two story collections. She is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and will be a MacDowell Fellow this summer.
"Les and Rae"
Les and Rae is a novel about a mild bourgeois woman who, when her spouse joins a gun group, leaves in order to live in the woods on edge of their neighborhood. Then she meets real and not exactly real animals, and spies on her former neighbors and love. Leaving is the gesture of survivalists, except my narrator has no idea what she’s doing, and attaches no conscious ideology to the act. (She’s a little handy, but she certainly has no special skills or background.) Leaving is also the gesture of finding no moral path within society and the desire not to have to in order to live. The ethics of this desire are, of course, suspicious, and I want to play it out. It’s part lazy, part utopian, part delusional, part exhausted—a response to the failure of government, the failure to access real community, failure of the species. I see it everywhere, and feel it in myself, and that’s where my fiction comes from: not from what I want or believe in, but from what I see and don’t really understand.
Erin Gray (English)is an assistant professor in the English department, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses in critical theory, cultural studies, and poetics. Erin holds a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. in Social and Political Thought from York University.
"In the Offing: Law-Founding Violence and the Moving Image of Lynching"
This project engages the circulation of lynching’s material, discursive, and affective remains throughout the long photographic century (1839 to the present) to contest narratives of U.S. lynching culture’s post-civil rights demise. It follows Ashraf Rushdy’s identification of the political origins of “end-of-lynching” discourse in Progressive-era antilynching reform movements to trace how the ruling-class consolidation of liberal antilynching discourse in the early Cold War period bolstered the visual power of the nascent neoliberal security state. Recuperating radical left articulations of legal lynching as a form of class warfare, the book theorizes lynching photographs as dialectical images that illuminate the constitutive relationship of racial terror to global capitalism. Through readings of images of lynching recirculated in Communist Party USA pamphlets, the midcentury popular press, an anti-nuclear photography exhibition, a post-revolutionary Cuban newsreel, and twenty-first century social practices, In the Offing devises an anti-racist framework for apprehending lynching as a fungible form of violence and regime of sensibility that continues to structure U.S. imperial power.
Amy Motlagh (Comparative Literature & Middle East/South Asian Studies) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East and South Asian Studies and the inaugural Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature at UC Davis. Her first book, Burying the Beloved: Realism and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press), focused on the connections between civil law, prose fiction, and gender in twentieth-century Iran.
"Invisible Men: A History of Racial Thinking in and about Modern Iran"
Motlagh’s current book project, Invisible Men: A History of Racial Thinking in and about Modern Iran critically examines the cultural history of Blackness in Iran and the Iranian diaspora through literature and cinema. Invisible Men argues that Iranian humanity emerges as a consequence of the erasure simultaneously of the history of slavery and of Black personhood. Informed by methodologies from critical race scholarship, cultural studies, and comparative literature, Invisible Men examines a range of prominent Iranian authors and filmmakers to explore the way in which the delineation of what is “modern” in Iran is connected to the suppression of Black subjectivity and the strategic use of Blackness, and the way in which these understandings have been not only been transmitted into the Iranian diaspora, but also challenged in the new cultural spaces of that diaspora, where diasporic Iranians themselves are viewed as racially liminal and non-white.
Emily Vazquez Enriquez, (Spanish & Portuguese) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Focused on Central and North America, her research studies the intersections between the Environmental Humanities and the fields of Border and Migration Studies. Her work has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals and her research has awarded her several grants and fellowships.
"Coexistence and Interference on American Migration Trails"
Framed within the fields of border and migration studies and the environmental humanities, Border Biomes: Coexistence and Interference on American Migration Trails, interrogates traditional conceptualizations of geopolitical boundaries and examines how the extant connections between the ecological aspects of border regions and the mechanisms and infrastructures of border-making processes intensify human-nonhuman relations. Situating these concerns in the Central America-United States migration corridors, my work addresses questions regarding the material reality of border landscapes. Geopolitical borders tend to be envisaged as linear and fixed inanimate containment devices, leading to the blurring of the ecological realities surrounding the land over which a territorial limit has been imposed. While conceptual orientations regarding borders tend to focus on human-centered approaches, my lines of inquiry draw on these foundational frameworks to put them into dialogue with the ecological realities of border landscapes.
Benjamin Weber (African American & Cultural Studies) is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American History, Critical Carceral Studies, and Black Social and Political Thought, and Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies at University of California, Davis.
"American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration"
American Purgatory explains how mass incarceration arose out of successive eras of empire-building across North America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and around the globe. Drawing on archival research from current and former sites of empire in the Pacific Northwest, Panamá, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, it shows how prisons developed as a system of racial-colonial control rooted in slavery and imperialism. Like other colonial practices, the prison system has produced racial hierarchy, in ever-adapting ways, over the past four hundred years. By centering Black critique, the book uncovers the root causes and continued workings of America’s carceral empire and amplifies a powerful protest tradition demanding a global view of solutions to this ongoing crisis.
Li Zhang (Anthropology) is Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis and a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of three award-winning books: Strangers in the City, In Search of Paradise, and Anxious China. Her research concerns social, political, spatial and psychological repercussions of the market reform in China.
"Encountering Aging and the Digital Divide in Globalizing China"
Massive aging population is arguably one of the most pressing issues facing China today. Recent integration of digital and smart technologies into everyday life has been hailed by many for enhancing the quality of life. However, a huge gap is emerging among Chinese citizens in terms of their ability to access and engage these novel and often complicated technologies. It is widely reported that millions of seniors are simply falling behind such fast-paced developments and are unable to meet their basic needs of life. My research explores the subjective experience and ethical dilemma of an aged-based digital divide in a rapidly aging China—a serious problem that not only deprives senior citizens of enjoying digital technological innovations but also prevents them from participating in essential daily activities.