PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES
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Bethany Albertson is a doctoral candidate in political
science at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include
public opinion, political psychology, and race and religion in the
U.S. She is coordinator of the Political Psychology Workshop and
has worked on the National Tragedy Study at NORC.
Winifred L. Amaturo studied American and English
literature at Georgetown University and Cambridge University, and
then went on to receive her Masters at the London School of Economics
in international relations. More recently, she completed the Scholars
Program in psychoanalytic theory at the Western New England Institute
for Psychoanalysis, and is now in the last months of her PhD in
political science at Yale University. Her current research focuses
on Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud, and examines confluences between
psychoanalytic theory and theories of liberalism. General interests
include political philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology.
Lauren Berlant works on public feelings in the
United States from the nineteenth century to the present, from Marxist
and psychoanalytic perspectives. Her national sentimentality quartet--from
The Anatomy of National Fantasy to her forthcoming book
on trauma culture, Cruel Optimism--addresses both the mechanisms
of affective collectivity and refines how we think about emotion
and attachment in both personal and transpersonal intimacies.
Gregg Bordowitz is a writer and film and video
maker. His films, including "Fast Trip Long Drop" (1993),
"A Cloud In Trousers" (1995), "The Suicide"
(1996), and "Habit" (2001) have been widely shown in festivals,
museums and movie theaters, and have been broadcast internationally.
His writings have been published in anthologies such as AIDS:
Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, Queer Looks,
Uncontrollable Bodies, and Resolutions; and in
numerous publications and journals, including: The Village Voice,
Frieze, Artforum, American Imago, Art Journal, Documents,
and October. A collection of his writings titled The
AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings: 1986-2003 will
be published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. He has received a
Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards. In addition
to being a member of the faculty of the Film/Video/New Media Department
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he is on the faculty
of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of English and Women's
Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author
of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism
(University of Rutgers Press, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings:
Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke University
Press, 2003). She recently guest edited, with Ann Pellegrini, a
special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online on “Public
Sentiments” (available at www.barnard.edu/sfonline).
She has also been working with Columbia University’s September
11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project.
Caitlin Delohery is an independent scholar, living
in Brooklyn, New York. She recently graduated from Stanford University,
where she earned her B.A. in Feminist Studies. She is currently
the program director for a free expression organization, as well
as a freelance writer.
Ferd Eggan is an anti-depressant enthusiast, an
independent scholar/writer, and longtime queer anti-racist activist.
He is the author of Your LIFE Story by someone else (Editorial
Coqui, 1989) and Pornography (Bench Press, 1991), and appeared
in/directed many pioneering video and film productions, including
The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd (1970). In another
incarnation he has authored many political and scientific papers
on US wars, AIDS and LGBTIQ issues. Retired from a position as AIDS
Coordinator for the City of Los Angeles, he is at work on a weekly
serial e-novel, available on his website.
Elizabeth Ettorre is Professor of Sociology, University
of Plymouth, UK. Her research is in sociology of substance use,
gender, bioethics, new genetics, occupational health and mental
health. She has been involved in a number of European research projects
in genetics, bioethics and reproduction and has published widely
in women's studies and sociology of health. Her books include: Lesbians,
Women and Society (1980); Women and Substance Use
(1992); Gendered Moods (1995) with Elianne Riska, Women
and Alcohol: A Private Pleasure Or A Public Problem? (1997);
Reproductive Genetics, Gender And The Body (2002); Before Birth
(2001) and Revisioning Women and Drug Use (forthcoming).
Alyssa Harad received her Ph.D. in English from
the University of Texas at Austin in August, 2003. Her dissertation,
"Ordinary Witnesses," argues for the concept of "everyday
trauma" and its many uses by examining the long term after-effects
of U.S. trauma histories as represented in contemporary literary
testimony. Her current project looks at the overlap between rhetorics
of trauma and mysticism and their everyday presence in social justice
movements. She has published on adolescent sexuality and feminism,
and trauma and pedagogy.
Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell is Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She
received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1999. Her research explores
a variety of topics in the field of African American politics, including
issues of gender and religion. Her book, Barbershops, Bibles,
and B.E.T.: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, is forthcoming
from Princeton University Press in April. In addition, her articles
have appeared in Women and Politics and Journal of
Black Studies She is currently working on a new book project
that explores the politics of black women's mental health.
Allan V. Horwitz is currently a Professor of Sociology
in the Department of Sociology and Institute for Health, Health
Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. He is the
author of four books and over 50 articles and chapters about a variety
of aspects of mental health and illness, including the social response
to mental illness, the impact of social roles and statuses on mental
health, and the social construction of mental disorders. His most
recent book, Creating Mental Illness (University of Chicago
Press, 2002) won the best publication award from the Mental Health
Section of the American Sociological Association.
Petra Kuppers is Assistant Professor of Performance
Studies at Bryant College and the Artistic Director of The Olimpias
Performance Research Series, a collaborative art series that investigates
the relationships between community arts, identity politics and
new media. She has recently published Disability and Contemporary
Performance: Bodies on Edge, with Routledge, and she is working
on her new study, provisionally entitled Bodily Fantasies: Medical
Performances/Medical Visions.
Irmeli Laitinen is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
who works at The University of Plymouth Counselling Service and
NHS (National Health Service) Eating Disorders Clinic in Cornwall,
UK. Previously, she worked at the Women's Therapy Centre, London,
on the Disability Project. She received her Bachelors and Masters
degrees in both Theology and Social Policy at the University of
Helsinki, Finland. Currently, she is a PhD student at the University
of Helsinki and is writing up the results of the Women and Depression
Project. In 2000, she published a book, Survival Guide in Workplaces
and Social Situations (in Finnish), on the method she created
for guided self-help groups for depressed women.
Jonathan Michel Metzl is Assistant Professor of
Psychiatry and Women's Studies and Director of the Program in Culture,
Health, and Medicine at the University of Michigan. In this capacity
he works as an attending physician in the adult psychiatric clinics
and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on gender, health,
and cultural representation. He has written for the American
Journal of Psychiatry, the Harvard Review of Psychiatry,
Academic Medicine, Gender and History, Social Science and Medicine,
Ms. Magazine, and SIGNS:The Journal of Women, Culture,
and Society. His book, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing
Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs, was recently published by
Duke University Press.
José Esteban Muñoz is Associate
Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He is affiliated
faculty in the program in American Studies, the English department,
and the program in Religious Studies. He is the author of Disidentifications:
Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota,
1999) He is completing two manuscripts: Feeling Brown: Ethnicity,
Affect and Performance (Duke, forthcoming) and Cruising
Utopia: Queer Futurity (NYU Press, forthcoming). He has published
in various journals, including American Quarterly, Social Text,
Theatre Journal, Screen and TDR. He also has published
chapters in various collections on queer theory, ethnic studies
and American studies. He is co-editor of several volumes including
Pop Out: Queer Warhol, Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in
Latin/O America, as well as special issues of the journals
Social Text (Queer Intersections) and Women and Performance
(Queer Acts). He is currently finishing a new special issue of Social
Text, co-edited with David Eng and Judith Halberstam, titled
"What's Queer about Queer Theory." He has served on the
programming committee for ASA and on several executive committees
for the Modern Language Association. He serves on the editorial
boards of Aztlan and Social Text.
Jackie Orr is an assistant professor of sociology
at Syracuse University. She writes in the fields of feminist technoscience
studies, cultural studies of psychiatry, and contemporary theory.
For over a decade, she has been a panicky theorist, exploring the
entanglements of bodies, technologies, capital, psyche, and scientific
discourse that inform the experience and social management of panic
and anxiety. Her book, Panic Diaries: Performing Terror In The
Age Of Technoscience, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
Raj Ramanathapillai is a native of Sri Lanka and
received his Ph.D. from McMaster University, Canada. He held the
position of Program Director of the M.K. Gandhi institute at Christian
Brothers University in Memphis, Tennessee. Ramanathapillai is currently
serving as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Global Studies
at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
Susan Roxburgh is Associate Professor of Sociology
at Kent State University. Her research focuses on the investigation
of the relationship between work, family life, and well-being. In
addition to further research investigating the time pressures/well-being
relationship, current projects include an examination of gender
and Black/white differences in depression, a study of the epidemiology
of dissociation, and research that examines the relationship between
parenting and well-being.
Lynn M. Sanders is Associate Professor in the
Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. She has studied
democratic discussion, racial politics, and the relationships of
opinion surveying to each. Her recently completed book, Interracial
Opinion in a Divided Democracy, asks how political survey research
is segregationist. As a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in
Health Policy Research from 1998-2000, she began studying links
between politics and mental health. Her next book project, tentatively
titled Mad Citizens and Enlightened Witnesses, examines
relationships between state actors, advocacy groups, citizens and
therapists.
Sarah Schulman is the author of seven novels and
two nonfiction books -- most recently Shimmer (Avon) and Stagestruck:
Theater, AIDS, and The Marketing of Gay America (Duke). She
is co-director of The Act Up Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org).
Her most recent play productions are The Burning Deck at
The La Jolla Playhouse with Diane Venora, and Carson McCullers
at Playwrights Horizons with Jenny Bacon, directed by Marion McClinton.
She is adapting Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A Love Story
for The Cleveland Playhouse. Awards include: Guggenheim in Playwrighting,
Fulbright in Judaic Studies, Revson Fellowship for the Future of
New York at Columbia University, Stonewall Award for Improving the
Lives of Lesbians and Gays in the United States, two American Library
Association Book Awards, and a finalist for the Prix de Rome in
Fiction.
Jeffrey Skoller is a filmmaker who frequently
writes on experimental media. His films have been exhibited internationally
and his book Shadows, Specters and Shards: A Poetics of History
in Avant-Garde Film is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota
Press. Skoller is currently Associate Professor in the Department
of Film/Video and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago.
Stephanie Snyder is a Ph.D. candidate in the English
department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Benjamin W. Van Voorhees's research interest is
in reducing the lifetime risk and burden of depression through the
implementation of prevention interventions in adolescence and young
adulthood. He has developed a primary care/web based depression
prevention intervention for young people in collaboration with a
psychologist and a psychiatrist. Dr. Van Voorhees, an internist-pediatrician,
received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College and graduated
from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He completed
a fellowship in general internal medicine and earned a master of
public health degree at Johns Hopkins University. Additionally,
Dr. Van Voorhees has served as a naval officer and has practiced
medicine in a community setting.
Claire Woodward is an undergraduate student at
Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. She plans to major in psychology.
A sufferer from depression herself, Claire hopes someday to work
with teens suffering from depression. Claire is making her first
academic conference presentation at the University of Chicago Society
of Fellows Depression Conference.
Wayne D. Woodward is an associate professor of
communication at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He has a Ph.D.
in communication from the University of Illinois. His research in
the areas of communication theory, mental health communications,
theories of dialogue, participatory communication, and technology
and cultural/social values has been published in such journals as
Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Mass Communication,
Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, Communication
Review, and Studies in Symbolic Interaction.
Carrie Yury is an artist currently pursuing a
Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Irvine. Her
recent work deals with social constructions of medicine and psychological
trauma. Ms. Yury has shown her work in Chicago, San Francisco, and
Southern California. She is an alumnus of the University of Chicago,
where she received her Masters in English.
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