Liza Grandia (Native American Studies)

Liza Grandia comes to Native American Studies from Clark University where she was an Assistant Professor in the International Development and Social Change Program. She has a B.A. in Women's Studies from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley (2006), and she was a postdoctoral fellow in Agrarian Studies at Yale (2006-2007). Her research focuses on Mesoamerican ethnography, law, environmental anthropology, and political ecology and economy, connecting indigenous rights to broader questions of agrarian justice and corporate globalization. She works in Canada as well as Central America. Her books include Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce among the Q'eqchi' Maya Lowlanders (U of Washington Press, 2012) and the Spanish language version, Tz'aptzooq'eb': El Espojo Recurrente al Pueblo Q'eqchi' (AVANSCO, 2009).

Yuming He (East Asian Languages and Cultures)

Yuming He received her B.A. and M.A from Peking University and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her research interests include dramatic performance and texts as well as social and intellectual history, particularly history of the book, in late imperial China (14th-19th centuries). Before coming to UC Davis, Professor He has held appointments at Reed College and the University of Chicago. She is the author of numerous articles and of the book Home and the World: Editing the "Glorious Ming" in Woodblock-printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which will be published this fall by the Harvard University Asia Center.

Carol Hess (Music)

Professor Carol Hess is a distinguished scholar of Spanish and Latin American music in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Currently at Michigan State University, she is a prolific and award-winning scholar currently nearing completion of her fourth book. Hess's work engages sweeping questions about music, identity, and the way we think about music history, yet it remains solidly grounded in historical detail and attentive to the many different perspectives of North and South American musicians, critics, and government officials. She has received fellowships and grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Spain's Ministry of Culture. Her first book, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898-1936 (University of Chicago, 2001), received four prizes, including the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Robert M. Stevenson prize from the American Musicological Society. More recent works include Sacred Passions: The Life and Music of Manuel de Falla (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference and the Pan American Dream (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012).

Katherine Lee (Music)

Katherine Lee recently earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation entitled "Encounters with SamulNori: Narratives, Circulations, and the Cultural Politics of a South Korean Percussion Genre, 1978-2008." Her research focuses on (South) Korean music ensemble traditions with roots in rural Korean drumming ensembles. A scholarly paper of hers won two important awards in 2009: the Society for Asian Music's Martin Hatch Prize, and the Society for Ethnomusicology's Charles Seeger Prize, the highest honor available to graduate-level ethnomusicologists. An article version of the presentation, "The Drumming of Dissent during South Korea's Democratization Movement," will be published in Ethnomusicology, the field's flagship journal.

David Lloyd (English)

Brett Snyder (Design)

Matthew Vernon (English)

Matthew Vernon, currently a Faculty Fellow at New York University, completed his Ph.D. in Medieval Studies at Yale in 2008, following a B.A. in English at Cornell in 2004. His work focuses on the intersections of medieval and African American literatures and draws on his facility in Old English, Latin, French, and Icelandic. His courses have brought together medieval manuscripts with graphic novels, and legends of Arthurian knights with American detective fiction. His writings and conference talks have ranged from the contemporary African American novelist Gloria Naylor and playwright August Wilson back to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Layamon's Brut. He has also published on immigration law. Matthew's current book project is tentatively titled The Black Middle Ages.

Toby Warner (French)

Toby Warner, a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, works on modern Francophone, Anglophone and Wolof literatures. His dissertation, "The Limits of the Literary: Senegalese Writers between French, Wolof and World Literature," argues that the category of the literary emerged in colonial Senegal through the exclusion of some indigenous textual cultures and the translation of others. Building on extensive archival research, he demonstrates that imperially-organized literary study tried to cultivate "modern" ways of seeing and speaking about the world in order to reform local practices of textuality. In addition to the Ph.D. from Berkeley, Toby holds a B.A. from Cornell University and completed a general curriculum at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Sénégal.

Chunjie Zhang (German)

Chunjie Zhang received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2010. Her research focuses on the representation of cultural difference in Germany around 1800. She has published articles on a wide variety of subjects, including German Orientalism, Sinophobia and Sinophilia, colonial fantasies, and melodrama. Most recently, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at Stanford.