Erin Graff Zivin, Director

Biography

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab and Acting Director of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. She is the author of three books—Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008)—and is completing a fourth book on experimental transmedial aesthetics. Graff Zivin is the founder of the international “Women in Theory” collective, serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, and oversees the digitization of the entire work of experimental filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch (a collaboration between the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, USC Digital Library, and the Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch).

EHL Friends

Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature

Natalie Belisle

Research Interests

Contemporary Caribbean Literature, Visual Media, and Cultural Studies; Caribbean Phenomenology; Postcolonial and Decolonial theory; Political Philosophy; Speculative Fiction; Race and the African Diaspora in Latin America

Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology

Jenny Chio

Research Interests

Media ethnography; Race, ethnicity, and nationalism; Anthropology of modernity; Collective memory; Cultural heritage; Tourism and migration; Documentary practice; Contemporary China

 

Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Literature

Julian Gutierrez-Albilla

Research Interests

Iberian cultural practices, namely cinema, dance, and performance art. Finitude, mourning, and trans-subjectivity in Latin American and European queer visual artists in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Queer theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis.

Associate Professor of French and Italian and American Studies and Ethnicity

Edwin Hill

Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity

Kara Keeling

Research Interests

Afrofuturisms and Radical Imaginations, Black and Queer Cultural Politics, Sound and Music Studies, Digital Media

Annenberg, Vice Provost for the Arts

Josh Kun

Research Interests

Civic Engagement and Social Justice Culture and Media, Media Industries and Journalism

Assistant Professor of English

Jonathan Leal

Research Interests

Music and Sound Studies; Transdisciplinarity / Undisciplinarity; Comparative Media Poetics; Relational Studies of Race and Ethnicity; Chicanx and Latinx Media and Literatures; Modernity/Coloniality; U.S.-Mexico Border Aesthetics and Narratives; Speculative Inquiry

Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature

Ronald Mendoza-De Jesus

Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and East Asian Languages and Cultures

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Research Interests

World cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies.

Postdoctoral Scholar – Research Associate

Laura Nelson

Research Interests

Literature, film, cultural history, and education

Associate Professor of English

Elda Maria Roman

Research Interests

Latinx and Black Cultural Production, Race and Ethnicity, Class, 20th and 21st Century American Literature, Television and Film, Popular Culture, Women of Color Feminism

Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna is the author of five previous books, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.