{"id":961,"date":"2023-05-01T17:05:33","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T00:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/consortium\/?page_id=961"},"modified":"2026-04-09T16:48:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T23:48:53","slug":"people","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/consortium\/people\/","title":{"rendered":"People"},"content":{"rendered":" \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \"KAREN\n\n \n \n \n \n\n<\/div>\n\n \n <\/svg>\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n
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KAREN TONGSON, DIRECTOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, English and American Studies and Ethnicity<\/p>\n

Tongson is the author of\u00a0Why Karen Carpenter Matters<\/i>\u00a0(named one of Pitchfork\u2019s best music books of 2020), and\u00a0Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries<\/i>. In 2019, she received Lambda Literary\u2019s Jeanne C\u00f3rdova Award for Lesbian\/Queer Nonfiction for her body of work to date. She is chair of gender & sexuality studies, and Professor of gender & sexuality studies, English and American studies & ethnicity. She is also co-editor of the award-winning book series, Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press. Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in\u00a0NPR, LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), The Los Angeles Times, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly, L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, The Washington Post, S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Public Books<\/i>, among many other public, as well as scholarly venues. Tongson is currently finishing a book called,\u00a0NORMPORN: Television and the Spectacle of Normalcy<\/i>\u00a0(NYU Press). She co-hosts and executive produces the podcasts\u00a0Waiting to X-Hale<\/i>\u00a0with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh, and the limited series,\u00a0The Gaymazing Race<\/i><\/a>\u00a0with Nicole J. Georges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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ALLYSON M. HOLLEY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Producer<\/p>\n

Allyson is a sound artist with a degree in audio engineering and music production, multi-instrumentalist, marketer, brander, and social media strategist. Before earning her degree, she worked as Web Editor at KUT Public Media writing and editing stories for Texas Standard, and was Community Manager at The Daily Dot, managing all social media presences and creating sales and marketing content. She currently edits podcasts and audio stories for a variety of clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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SAM GLOVER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Administrative Assistant<\/p>\n

Sam graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in Economics and a minor in History of Consciousness. While at University, he was an active member of UCSC\u2019s student newspaper of record, City on a Hill Press<\/i>, where he was the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the 2021-2022 academic school year. Using change management principles, he established and supported the organizations transition into a post-COVID-19 environment. His interests include Social and Economic Geography, philosophy, and movies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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Amelia Ada<\/strong><\/p>\n

Co-Host of You Shouldn’t Let Poet’s Lie to You\u00a0<\/em>& Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing<\/p>\n

Amelia Ada is a poet. The author of the forthcoming book-length poem Hard and Glad <\/i>(DOPAMINE\/Semiotext(e) 2026) and a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at USC, her work has appeared in many journals including Annulet<\/i>, Denver Quarterly<\/i>, West Branch<\/i>, and Boston Review<\/i>. She is currently at work on her second book, a literary study of the form of attachment often called \u201clove.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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Naima Adams<\/h3>\n \n \n
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Naima Adams\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
PhD Candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity<\/div>\n
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Naima Adams’ writing and public programming operate at the nexus of Black feminist and queer theory, media studies, and science and technology studies. Her dissertation manuscript, Black Obsolescence: The Affective Ruse and Plastic World of Technological Revivalism<\/i>, charts how Black aesthetics and ecologies constitute the rise and revival of analog media technologies. This project foregrounds the material composition and life cycle of Black feminist\/queer media artefacts from the 1970s to 1990s. Their publications appear in GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies<\/i>, American Quarterly<\/i>, the Oxford African American Studies Center<\/i>, and Spit and Spider Press<\/i>.\u00a0They have programmed events in collaboration with 356 Mission, the Academy Museum of Motion Picture, Ajamu Studios (London), California African American Museum, California Arts Council, City of West Hollywood, Getty Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ONE Archives, Oxy Arts, Visual AIDS, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n
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EVELYN ALSULTANY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity<\/p>\n

Evelyn Alsultany is a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media. She is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She is the author of\u00a0Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9\/11<\/i>\u00a0(2012). Professor Alsultany co-authored criteria, the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims. She has served as an educator and consultant for independent filmmakers and Hollywood studios (Disney, Netflix, NBC Universal) on how to better represent Muslim characters. She has published op-eds in\u00a0The Hollywood Reporter, The Washington Post<\/i>, and\u00a0Newsweek<\/i>. She serves as a consultant for Hollywood studios through the boutique firm, History Studio.<\/p>\n

Alsultany hosts\u00a0Muslims as Seen on TV<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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SARAH MESLE<\/b><\/p>\n

Professor and Author<\/p>\n

Sarah Mesle\u00a0(PhD, Northwestern) is a professor, writer, and editor\u00a0 based in Los Angeles, California and the author of Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now\u00a0<\/i>(Chicago UP, 2025). She is faculty at USC, the former Senior Humanities Editor of the\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books,\u00a0<\/i>founding co-editor of the LARB channel\u00a0Avidly<\/i>\u00a0and the NYU short book series\u00a0Avidly Reads. Mesle\u2019s many essays about gender, popular culture, writing,\u00a0literature, television, and more have appeared in venues such as\u00a0The Chronicle of Higher Education, The<\/i>\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books<\/i>,\u00a0Talking Points Memo<\/i>,\u00a0Guernica<\/i>,\u00a0InStyle<\/i>\u00a0magazine, and\u00a0The New York Times<\/i>\u00a0Magazine<\/i>. Her book\u00a0Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity<\/i>\u00a0is forthcoming from Beacon Press in August 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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HAJAR YAZDIHA<\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of Sociology<\/p>\n

Hajar Yazdiha is an expert on memory, race, and political culture writing about the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures. She is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and author of the multi-award winning book,\u00a0The Struggle for the People\u2019s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Hajar is also a public scholar whose writing and research has been featured in outlets including NPR, The LA Times, Time Magazine, BBC News, The Hill, and The Guardian. A daughter of political refugees and revolutionaries, Hajar’s work continually grapples with the violent erasures, silences, and hauntings of empire and the people’s movements that resist them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n

\n\n \n \n \n\n The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton University Press) \n <\/svg>\n<\/a>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n \n \n
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kelso Becktol<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ph.D. student in American Studies and Ethnicity<\/p>\n

kelso is a Ph.D. student in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC with M.A. and B.A. degrees in Women and Gender Studies from San Francisco State University and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from CSU, Long Beach respectively. Influenced by their upbringing in rural Oklahoma, they focus on rural transgender practices of resistance and world building. Their MA work on this topic won them a Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in 2021. Kelso also has 4 years of LGBTQ+ content creation experience for small businesses, artists, and organizations. Their interests in digital worlds are grounded in digital communication\u2019s transformative ability of community connection in the physical world. Outside of this work, kelso enjoys women\u2019s soccer, theory, and endless crafting and tinkering projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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CHRIS BELCHER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Writing and Gender and Sexuality Studies<\/p>\n

Chris Belcher is a writer, curator of queer nightlife, and a jointly-appointed Assistant Professor (Teaching) in the Writing Program and Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at USC. In 2016, she completed her PhD in English at USC, where she wrote about class, whiteness, and the queerness of rural America across the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0and 21st<\/sup>\u00a0centuries. Since then, under her working name, Natalie West, she edited the acclaimed anthology\u00a0We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival<\/i>, published by the Feminist Press in 2021. Her writing has appeared in the\u00a0New York Times,\u00a0<\/i>the\u00a0LA Times, Catapult, BOMB, Electric Literature, Autostraddle, Public Books<\/i>, and\u00a0them<\/i>. She is broadly interested in sexual politics and sexual labor, and the history of feminist thought and activism as it intersects with both. She is working on a project that centers on the 1982 Barnard College “Towards a Politics of Sexuality” conference and the so-called \u201cfeminist sex wars.\u201d Her debut memoir,\u00a0Pretty Baby<\/i>, was published in 2022 by Simon & Schuster\u2019s Avid Reader Press, and she\u2019s currently working on a pitch and pilot for its TV adaptation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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CORINE COLLINS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Assistant Professor of English<\/p>\n

Corrine Collins’ research focuses on interracial sociality and sexuality in 20th<\/sup>\u00a0and 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century African diaspora literature and popular culture, and her book-in-progress\u00a0Injurious Love: Interracial Intimacy and the Post-Racial Future<\/em> (working title) examines the racialization of familial and social love in interracial families and friendships. Collins is also at work on a second book project which examines British culinary nationalism.<\/p>\n

Her articles and essays have appeared in\u00a0The Journal of Commonwealth Literature<\/em>,\u00a0Gastronomica: The Journal of Food\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0and Culture<\/em>,\u00a0Public Books<\/em>,\u00a0Air\/Light Magazine<\/em>,\u00a0and\u00a0Mixed-Race Superheroes<\/em>\u00a0(Rutgers UP, 2021). She teaches classes on Black British literature, Caribbean literature, multiraciality, and African Diaspora foodways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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ELIOT DUNN<\/strong><\/p>\n

Postdoctoral Fellow (Teaching) in Gender and Sexuality Studies<\/p>\n

Eliot Dunn is a researcher who works at the intersection of trans studies, contemporary literature, and queer digital cultures. Their work is primarily focused on articulating forms of trans temporality as reliant upon, but distinct from, theories of queer time from the 2000s and 2010s. Eliot completed their doctorate in English at USC in 2023, where their dissertation addressed the temporal intricacies of queer digital objects from video games to memes to short fiction. Interested in phenomenology, the social construction of the body, and gender-punk aesthetics, Eliot is currently at work on a project examining the post-apocalyptic futures imagined by trans authors, media makers, and communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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LAN DUONG<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate\u00a0Professor in Cinema and Media Studies<\/p>\n

Lan Duong is the author of Treacherous Subjects:\u00a0Gender,\u00a0Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism<\/i>. Dr.\u00a0Duong\u2019s second book project,\u00a0Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the\u00a0Archives of Memory<\/i>,\u00a0examines Vietnamese cinema and its history through the lens of the archive.\u00a0Duong is a Founding Member of the Critical Refugee\u00a0Studies Collective (criticalrefugeestudies.com<\/a>) and co-edits the Collective\u2019s\u00a0book series for\u00a0UC Press. Her poetry appears in the journals\u00a0Oberon<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Spoon\u00a0River Review<\/i>. Her book of poems,\u00a0Nothing\u00a0Follows<\/i>, was published by\u00a0Texas Tech University Press\u00a0in 2023, which foregrounds the idea of refugee girlhoods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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EDWIN HILL<\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of French and Italian and American Studies and Ethnicity<\/p>\n

Professor Hill’s first book,\u00a0Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Sound in the Francophone Black Atlantic<\/i>\u00a0(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)considers the torn aesthetic and ideological relationships between Antillean music and literature from the 1920s to 1960s to be a colonial struggle over the meaning ofCaribbean vernacular culture. Informed by an interdisciplinary formation (BachelorDegree in Music Performance, PhD in French and Francophone Studies). Hill’s current book project,\u00a0Black Static<\/i>, locates rage as a sonic\/affective vibration routed through the circuits of African diasporic musical culture, travel, and communication. It focuses on a range of musicians and writers, from Nina Simone and militant rap artist Casey to Frantz Fanon and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Professor Hill is also at the beginning stages a third book project: a critical biography of L\u00e9on Gontran-Damas.<\/p>\n

Hill hosts\u00a0Dance Hubs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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VANESSA HOLYOAK<\/strong><\/p>\n

PhD student in Comparative Media & Culture<\/p>\n

Vanessa Holyoak is an interdisciplinary writer and artist and a PhD student in Comparative Media & Culture at the University of Southern California. Working across\u00a0installation, photography, sculpture, video, performance, and language, she constructs uncanny, minimalist environments that allude to notions of memory, loss, and the affective dimensions of hybrid identity.<\/span>\u00a0Through dreamlike juxtapositions of objects, moving and still images, light, and sound articulated through a speculative fiction lens, her work raises questions about cultural and ecological displacement and disappearance.\u00a0She also writes art criticism and hybrid fiction and is researching the liberatory potential of dreams, sleep, and darkness in the literary and visual arts practices of contemporary Asian diasporic, Francophone, and queer writers, artists, and filmmakers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Holyoak\u00a0holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Barnard College of Columbia University in French Literature, Translation, and Philosophy.\u00a0She\u00a0received\u00a0the Graduate Certificate in Performance Studies from the USC Roski School of Art & Design in 2024.\u00a0<\/span>Her writing has been published in Artforum,<\/i>\u00a0BOMB<\/i>,\u00a0e-flux Criticism<\/i>, East of Borneo<\/i>, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, frieze,<\/i>\u00a0<\/span>Hyperallergic, <\/i>among other\u00a0publications, and her artwork has been exhibited in galleries and artist spaces that include\u00a0<\/span>Au Pair,\u00a0Casa L\u00fc,\u00a0LA Artcore, Eastside International,\u00a0<\/span>Harkawik,\u00a0Hauser & Wirth, and Human Resources.<\/i><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Her first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark<\/i>, explores the longing for forestial darkness in an era of hyper-illumination, and was published by Sming Sming Books in May 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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SARAH KESSLER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Assistant Professor of English<\/p>\n

Kessler’s interdisciplinary research spans the fields of comparative media studies, queer and gender studies, voice and sound studies, and television studies. Her articles and essays have appeared in\u00a0Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, In These Times, Public Books, Theory & Event, Triple Canopy, Women\u2019s Studies Quarterly<\/i>, and elsewhere. She is the TV section editor at\u00a0Public Books<\/i>. Her book-in-progress,\u00a0Anachronism Effects: Ventriloquism and Popular Media<\/i>\u00a0(working title), argues that the seemingly archaic cultural phenomenon of ventriloquism is a key site for understanding Western processes of racialization, gendering, and sexualization through audiovisual media, performance, and other technologies of the voice. Kessler is also in the early stages of working on two additional book projects. Stemming from her TV criticism, she is developing a single-authored collection of critical essays on binge-watching. Her second academic monograph-in-progress,\u00a0A Sentient Animal: Whales and Media in the Anthropocene<\/i>(working title), will take her interest in the interplay between the human and the non-human in an eco-critical direction, investigating how the whale\u2014as animal, idea, and cultural medium\u2014became an object of human projection in the decades that fomented today\u2019s fascination with environmental decay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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DORINNE KONDO<\/strong><\/p>\n

Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology<\/p>\n

A cultural anthropologist, Kondo\u2019s books include\u00a0Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace<\/i>\u00a0(J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research, for a book that has influenced the field of Anthropology), and\u00a0About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater<\/i>\u00a0(Cultural and Literary Studies Prize, Association for Asian American Studies). Her new book,\u00a0Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity<\/i>, based on twenty years of participation in theater as dramaturg, scholar, and playwright, brings the aesthetic sublime back to earth by theorizing backstage creative labor.\u00a0Worldmaking<\/i>\u00a0bends genre, combining first-person entr\u2019actes, the political-economic mise-en-sc\u00e8ne of the theater industry, theoretical\/ analytical essays spotlighting the creative process of artists Anna Deavere Smith and David Henry Hwang, and Kondo\u2019s full-length play Seamless, based on family history, about memory, the (im)possibility of knowing the past, and the historical trauma of Japanese American incarceration.<\/p>\n

Kondo hosts\u00a0The Arts of Racial Reckoning<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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ONEKA\u00a0<\/strong>LABENNETT<\/b><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity &
\nGender and Sexuality Studies<\/p>\n

LaBennett\u00a0is the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn<\/em> (NYU Press 2011), and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century<\/em> (UC Press 2012). The only ethnographic monograph on Brooklyn\u2019s Caribbean adolescent girls\u2019 identity mediations vis-\u00e0-vis popular culture, She\u2019s Mad Real<\/em> anticipated the emerging subfield of Black girlhood studies as a critical departure point for addressing questions related to coming of age in the African diaspora, Black feminism, and the delineation of raced\/gendered\/age-based\/classed power.<\/p>\n

LaBennett\u2019s OpEds and public commentary have appeared in platforms such as Ms. Magazine<\/em>, The Guardian<\/em>, and Politico<\/em>. Elle Magazine<\/em> ranked her course, \u201cWomen in Hip Hop,\u201d among the top ten in a list of \u201cCollege Classes that Give Us Hope for the Next Generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her forthcoming book, Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond<\/em> will be published by NYU Press (2024). Previously ranked among the hemisphere\u2019s poorest countries, Guyana is poised to become the world\u2019s highest per capita oil producer\u2014offering a critical vantage point for parsing the environmental consequences of the resource extraction that fuels our modern world, as well as pernicious forms of erasure that structure Caribbean women\u2019s lives. Global Guyana<\/em> develops a powerful set of heuristics to trace the entwined histories of descendants of enslaved Africans and Indian indentured laborers, alongside the contemporary dynamics of the outsized Guyanese diaspora, and the broad reach of the nation\u2019s extractive industries. The book explores distinct yet interrelated realms, including media depictions, women\u2019s kinship ties, sonic routes, and the circulation of oil and sand, to uncover how this understudied place reshapes transnational gendered racializations and the very topography that has come to be emblematic of the Caribbean region\u2014beaches and shorelines.<\/p>\n

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ELDA MARIA ROM\u00c1N<\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of English<\/p>\n

Ramon is an associate professor of English. As a scholar in literary and cultural studies, she researches the effects of race and class across groups, disciplines, and genres. Her first book, Race and Upward Mobility (StanfordUP, 2017) examines class dynamics in African American and Mexican American literature, television, and film from the 1940s-2000s. In this book, she analyzes narratives about socioeconomic stratification and demonstrate how these narratives give form to social patterns intertwined with issues such as residential segregation, violence by law enforcement, underrepresentation in workplaces and in the media, and alarmist discourse against the racialized poor and immigrants. She continues to examine how cultural production participates in shaping the way we think about socioeconomic hierarchies and group boundaries, as her current project explores redistributive efforts and narratives about fears of changing demographics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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ATIA SATTAR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor (Teaching) of Gender and Sexuality Studies<\/p>\n

Her interdisciplinary research and teaching engage with the fields of Comparative Literature, Medical Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Critical Race Theory, Motherhood Studies, and Mindfulness. Atia has practiced mindfulness for 10 years, started the BIPOC Mindfulness Practice Group at USC in 2018, and is currently a teacher for Mindful USC.<\/p>\n

Her writing emphasizes the significance of personal, lived experience as a site for knowledge production. Most recently, she is exploring the embodied intersections of gender, race, mindfulness, and motherhood. Her articles and essays have appeared in\u00a0Academe<\/em>,\u00a0Journal of Medical Humanities<\/em>,\u00a0Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics<\/em>,\u00a0Lion\u2019s Roar<\/em>,\u00a0Tricycle<\/em>, and elsewhere. She has a forthcoming poem in\u00a0Rogue Agent: A Journal for Work that Inhabits the Body<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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LAURA ISABEL SERNA<\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of History and Cinema and Media Studies<\/p>\n

Serna is the author of\u00a0Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture<\/i>\u00a0(Duke University Press, 2014).\u00a0Making Cinelandia<\/i>\u00a0is a historical account\u2014based on deep research in multiple archives in both the United States and Mexico\u2014of the circulation, presentation, and reception of films and film culture in Mexico during the late teens and early 1920s, a moment when U.S. films dominated Mexican movie screens on both sides of the border. She has published essays on a range of topics in Mexican film culture during the silent era including border film production, censorship and nationalism, and regional film cultures in journals such as\u00a0Aztl\u00e1n: A Journal of Chicano Studies<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History<\/i>\u00a0and edited collections including\u00a0Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space<\/i>\u00a0(2014) and\u00a0Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands<\/i>\u00a0(2010). She has also published essays on Latino Stardom and the commercial practices, specifically the translation of intertitles, that enabled early Hollywood to reach global audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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MLONDI ZONDI<\/strong><\/p>\n

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature<\/p>\n

Mlondi Zondi is a scholar, performance artist, and dramaturg. They are currently working on a first book that traces colonialism\u2019s effects on bodily integrity in Africa and its Diaspora. Published essays by Mlondi appear in TDR: The Drama Review<\/i>, ASAP Journal, Contemporary Literature, Espace Art Actuel,<\/i>\u00a0Liquid Blackness<\/i>, Mortality<\/i>, Performance Philosophy, <\/i>and Safundi<\/i>. They have also contributed writing for exhibition catalogues at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC) and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n \n \n

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Gender & Sexuality Studies
\nUniversity of Southern California
\nMark Taper Hall of Humanities, 422
\n3501 Trousdale Parkway
\nLos Angeles, California 90089-4352<\/p>\n

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The Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture is generously funded by USC Dornsife<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":236,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-961","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPeople - Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/consortium\/people\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"People - Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/consortium\/people\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/uscconsortium\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-04-09T23:48:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@usc_consortium\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/consortium\/people\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/consortium\/people\/\",\"name\":\"People - 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