Conference Organizers
Professor Christine Garlough
Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, Garlough’s research constellates around issues of rhetoric, philosophy, feminist theory and performance. Her work on ethics of care and acknowledgment has been published in journals like Quarterly Journal of Speech, Women Studies in Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, and her monograph, Desi Divas: Activism and Acknowledgment in Diasporic Performances. She works primarily with grassroots feminist activists in India and the U.S. who re-envision vernacular culture for political purposes and create caring contexts for social change. Toward this end, she also has produced two digital archives of feminist protest materials http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/GenderStudies and served as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum System, Asian Pacific American Center.
Assistant Professor Lili Johnson
LiLi Johnson is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies. Her research focuses on Asian American family and kinship, multiculturalism, and cultural studies of science. Her work has been published in journals including Photography & Culture and Adoption & Culture. She is currently working on a book project titled Family Conceptions: Technologies of Asian American Family Formation, which theorizes different technological systems and non-biological forms of kinship to examine Asian American family formation from the twentieth century to the present.
Assistant Professor James McMaster
James McMaster is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies. He is currently working on a book project that puts the discourse of care theory into conversation with queer, feminist, and Asian Americanist critique and cultural production. His writing has appeared, or will soon, in the Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, TDR/The Drama Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory where he is also the co-editor of a special issue titled The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together with Olivia Michiko Gagnon. He completed his PhD in the department of Performance Studies at NYU.
Assistant Professor Annie Menzel
Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and former midwife, Menzel’s research focuses on race, gender, and reproductive politics in North America. A political theorist with emphases on reproductive justice, Black political thought, Black feminisms, feminist political theory, queer theory, and biopolitics, her work brings these literatures to bear on the histories and current shape of health and medicine. Her first book, The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality, is under contract with the University of California Press.
Michael Peterson
Professor of Art and Director of the graduate program in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, Peterson is co-founder of the arts collaborative Spatula&Barcode, which is centrally concerned with themes of hospitality and conviviality, and co-edited a recent issue of the journal Performance Research on the theme “On Generosity.” He teaches a First-year Interest Group course titled “How to Live: Art, Ethics, and the Everyday.”