“Gimme the Light”: Black Self-Representation through Music Videos is a history of music videos by black artists and producers from the late 1970s through the early twenty-first century. The study examines music video production and cultural representation of blacks by considering the technological and aesthetic significance of the genre. One central question is: How and why does the medium of video become an important tool for black cultural producers to experiment with visual signs of blackness (...)
General Research
SAS - American Studies
Media , Performance , Popular culture , Race and ethnicity (...)
Transnational capital needs a global work force to perform immaterial (service) labor, like care-giving and call centers. At the same time corporations must mute the attendant difference of location and culture to deliver the consumer service. These global sensations are often staffed by and are dependent on unseen labor from and in the global south: Filipinos as caregiver, Afro-Caribbeans as nurses, Indians as call center agents. The book project examines the production of racial difference in (...)
General Research
SAS - American Studies, SAS - English, SAS - Women's (...)
American Ethnic Studies
Literary thought—both theory and criticism—is the prerequisite for situating literature and its function in a society, especially one that viewed letters as its preeminent civilizing enterprise. Over the course of early and medieval Chinese history, the character wen 文came to stand for the dynastic enterprise defined as a civilization of culture, scholarship and literature. The arc and substance of a literary tradition are not merely, or even mostly, penned by authors, but are no less equally inscribed (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Asian Languages and Cultures
Literature
Book project: John Singer Sargent and the Unmaking of History
While the work of Paul Cezanne is often seen as the zenith of modernism, the paintings of John Singer Sargent are considered by many to be its nadir. This book project works to reveal the complexities of the portraits Sargent painted in England from the late 1880's to the early 1900's, a period of intense economic, social, psychological and aesthetic upheaval. Close studies of individual portraits--particularly the layered, ever-shifting (...)
General Research
SAS - Art History
Art History
Few scholars have explored the religious landscape of medieval China (200-1000 CE). China was then at a crossroad where foreign religions met native traditions. The result was the appearance and development of many new religious ideas and practices. Some of them can still be observed in contemporary Chinese communities; but many more have been forgotten. My work as a historian of culture is to recover and reconstruct these ideas and practices in an effort to study the people and the society that (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Asian Languages and Cultures
History, Religion
