UC Faculty Abroad Profiles

Last Updated: Thursday October 01 2009

Australia Brazil China Chile Egypt France Germany India Italy	Japan Mexico Russia Scandinavia (Denmark & Sweden) Spain UK/Ireland  Study Center Address List

Australia Melbourne Professor Sharon Block, Study Center Director UCI, Department of History January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2010 Introduction pending.

China Beijing Professor King-Kok Cheung, Study Center Director UCLA, Departments of English and Asian American Studies January 1, 2008 through August 31, 2010 King-Kok Cheung received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and joined the English Department at UCLA in the same year. She is currently Professor of English and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her interests include American Ethnic Literatures, Asian American Literature, Renaissance British Literature, and Comparative Heroic Traditions. She has received several awards including an ACLS fellowship, a Mellon fellowship, a Fulbright lecturing and research award to Hong Kong, a Fulbright Senior Specialist Award to Germany, and a resident fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford. Her publications include Articulate Silences (1993), Words Matter (2000), An Interethnic Companion to Asian American literature (1996), and The Heath Anthology of American Literature (2002-2007). She is currently working on a monograph on transnational and interracial approaches to Chinese American literature.

China Shanghai Professor Hu Ying, Study Center Director UCI, Department of East Asian Languages & Literature January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009 Hu Ying is currently Associate Professor of Chinese literature at University of California at Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and her BA from Peking University. The focus of her research is the literature and culture of late 19th to early 20th century China, a fascinating period that witnessed rapid changes in every aspect of the Chinese world. This period of great ideological and cultural fluidity bred a generation of independent thinkers. She is working on a book manuscript that examines how three women of that period – a revolutionary executed by the government, an artist and philanthropist, and a poet and pioneering educator - understood and intervened in the great changes of political system, cultural values and gender norms. Her previous book Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898-1918 was published by Stanford University Press in 2000 and is recently translated into Chinese.

Egypt Cairo Professor Fadi A. Fathallah, Study Center Director UCD, Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010 Fadi Fathallah is an Associate Professor in the department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at UC Davis. He is a member of the Biomedical Engineering and the Exercise Science Graduate Groups at UCD. He directs the Occupational Biomechanics Laboratory and a member of the UC Agricultural Ergonomics Research Center, the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, and the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety. His research interests revolve around the assessment and prevention of occupational musculoskeletal disorders, especially among agricultural workers in California and in developing countries. He teaches an undergraduate course on Biomechanics and Ergonomics, and a graduate course on Occupational Musculoskeletal Disorders. Prior to joining UC Davis in 1999, he spent four years as a Senior Research Associate at the Liberty Mutual Research Center for Safety and Health in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Professor Fathallah received a BS in Industrial Engineering from Texas Tech University in 1986, a MS in Human Factors Engineering from Virginia Tech in 1988, and a PhD in Occupational Biomechanics/Ergonomics from Ohio State University in 1995.

France Bordeaux & Paris Professor Barbara B. Prézelin, Study Center Director UCSB, Department of Biology, Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology (EEMB) July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010 Introduction pending.

France Lyon Professor Christopher Newfield, Study Center Director UCSB, Department of English July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010 Introduction pending.

Germany Göttingen Professor Margaret Morse, Study Center Director UCSC, Department of Digital Arts/Film & Digital Media July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010 Introduction pending.

India Delhi Professor Vinay Lal, Study Center Director UCLA, Department of History July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2009 Vinay Lal joined the history faculty at UCLA in 1993 after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He holds a joint appointment in Asian American Studies and is also Chair of the South Asia Interdisciplinary Program (IDP). Vinay was raised in India, Japan, Indonesia, and the US, and, appropriately enough, among his present interests is the question of how to theorize diasporas, and the particular trajectories taken by the worldwide Indian diaspora. He also writes widely on Indian history, the popular and public culture of India, global politics, and the politics of knowledge systems. He also has a column on American affairs in the "Economic and Political Weekly", India's most respected left-wing journal. His most recent books include Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002), The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003), Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Penguin, 2005), Introducing Hinduism (London: Icon Books, 2005), and, co-edited with Ashis Nandy, The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin, 2005).

Italy Immersion Programs Professor Marina Pianca, Study Center Director UCR, Department of Hispanic Studies July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2009 Professor Marina Pianca joined the University of California Riverside in 1990. She is currently Professor of Latin American Studies, Theatre, Film and Visual Culture and former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program. She came to UCR after having taught in Universities in Argentina, Panama, and the Eastern United States. Professor Pianca received her Ph.D from UCLA in Romance Linguistics and Literatures. While at UCLA she also pursued an MFA in Film and Television. Also trained at the Université d’Aix-Marseille and at the Sorbonne, she is well versed in the articulations of Latin American, European and United States cultures. After serving as co-curator of the First International Latin American Theatre Festival in San Francisco, California, in 1972, the American Theatre Association awarded her a Letter of Commendation for “having established the first bridges between Latin American and Chicano/Latino theatres in the United States” thus joining the pioneers of a then emerging discipline in the United States: Latin American Theatre. Since then she has published several books on Latin American Theatre and Cultural Studies, including Testimonios de Teatro Latinoamericano which enters into dialogue with the theatre and performative practices that emerged in extreme circumstances: concentration camps in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, war zones in Nicaragua and Peru, women’s prisons, exile and neo-exile. Since 1984 she is founder and editor of the journal Diogenes: Anuario Critico del Teatro Latinoamericano. Professor Pianca also undertook Full Psychoanalytic training and practiced for close to a decade in California. Her current book project, The Dislocated Self addresses the many forms of dislocation present in this “globalized” Post-Cold War era –from psychic dislocations produced by profound violence to hope, to geographic, historical, cultural and ideological disarticulations of previous places of attachment, In this work, she explores both the causes and the impact of these dislocations on memory, identity, cultural production, social engagement and power.

Japan Meiji-Gakuin Professor Janet S. Shibamoto Smith, Visiting Professor UCD, Department of Anthropology, Graduate Group in Linguistics April 1, through July 31, 2009 and September 1, through December 31, 2009 Janet Shibamoto Smith is Professor of Anthropology and a member of the Linguistics Group at the University of California, Davis, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. Her academic specialty is Japanese language, gender, and sexuality, with a particular emphasis on the dynamic interaction between ideology and practice. She also is involved in a project aimed at elucidating the cultural models of romantic love through textual analyses of popular print and televisual materials spanning the period 1970 to the present. Recent publications include the edited volume Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People (with Shigeko Okamoto, Oxford University Press 2004). She is currently at work on a book entitled, Texting True Love: Romance in Japan.

Japan Tokyo Professor Susan Blakeley Klein, Study Center Director UCI, Departments of Religion, East Asian Languages and Literatures July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2009 Susan Klein joined the East Asian faculty at UC Irvine in 1992. She is currently an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture, and from 1999 to June 2007 she was Director of the Religious Studies Program, which she helped to found. The main focus of her research has been on the ways that literature and theater attempt to symbolically resolve certain cultural problematics. In so doing, she pays close attention to both thematic and performative aspects of the texts, and how those aspects may be symptomatic of their historical context. As a feminist scholar she is particularly interested in identifying the blind spots and limitations of contemporary western theory when confronted with texts from differing temporal and cultural contexts. She began her scholarly career examining the political and social context for the emergence in the early 1960s of the postmodern dance form Ankoku Butoh (Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness, 1989); she then turned her research focus back in time to medieval Japan and Noh Theater. She is currently working on a two-volume research project. The first volume, (Allegories of Desire: Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan, 2003) examines the development of a group of thirteenth century secret esoteric commentaries that religiously allegorize two tenth-century secular texts, The Tales of Ise and the first imperial waka poetry anthology Kokinwakashu. The second volume (Dancing the Dharma) will be on the use of those commentaries by fifteenth and sixteenth-century playwrights to create Noh plays which function as complex religious and political allegories. In the future she hopes to return to a project (which she began working on in 1989) on changing constructions of gender and subjectivity in Japanese literature and theater, with special attention to the historical development of ghosts and other supernatural creatures. She has been the recipient of a number of fellowships and grants from the Fulbright program (to Japan), Woodrow Wilson/Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her M.A. and Ph.D. in East Asian Literature was granted by Cornell University.

Mexico Mexico City Professor Max Parra, Study Center Director UCSD, Department of Literature September 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010 Max Parra holds a PhD from Columbia University and has taught Latin American literature at UC San Diego since 1990. His scholarly work focuses on Mexican literature and intellectual history, including regional cultures and nation building, photography and literature, and border studies. He has published numerous articles on early 20th-century narratives and popular poetics, as well as on modern political literature. His book, Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution: Rebels In The Literary Imagination of Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2005), explores the politics of representation of popular subjects in post-revolutionary literature. He is currently writing a book on regional memory and history in northern Mexico, based on personal narratives, ballads, and photographic archives. In 2007–2008 he served on the board of the California Council for the Humanities. He is an affiliated faculty of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UCSD and a founding member of UC Mexicanistas, where he serves on the steering committee. Concurrent with his EAP Study Center Director appointment, he holds the position of Executive Director of Casa de la Universidad de California in Mexico.

Russia Moscow Professor Viktor K. Zhivov, Study Center Director UCB, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2009 Viktor Zhivov joined the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCB in 1995. He previously taught at Moscow State University, Russia, and, as a visiting professor at UCLA and several German and Italian universities. He retains a position at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since his Berkeley appointment, he has taught there graduate and undergraduate courses in Slavic historical linguistics, and history of Russian literature and culture, history of Orthodox culture (mainly of the medieval and early modern periods) and has participated in various departmental activities (serving as a chair of the Teaching committee, as a member of the Admissions committee and so on). His scholarly interests are broad ranging; they include Russian and Byzantine cultural history, Orthodox Church history and history of medieval Christian religious culture, Russian and Slavic historical linguistics, and language typology. In these fields he has published more than ten books and over two hundred other scholarly contributions. He is presently working on two major projects. One of them is a monumental two-volume history of the Russian written language (the project is now in its final stages); the other deals with sin, salvation and penitential discipline in Orthodox religious history.

Scandinavia (Denmark and Sweden) Copenhagen and Lund Professor Robert Alan Lindemann, Study Center Director UCLA, School of Dentistry July 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009 Robert Lindemann has been a faculty member at the UCLA School of Dentistry since 1980 and was appointed Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Personnel in 1997. Prior to his UCLA appointment, he served with the Swiss Public Health Service as Medecin-Dentiste Scolaire in the Canton of Vaud. He is a 1974 graduate of the University of the Pacific School of Dentistry and he completed a General Practice Residency at Denver General Hospital in 1975. He received a MA.Ed. in Education from the California State University at Northridge in 1984 and a M.S. in Oral Biology from UCLA in 1985. He teaches clinical restorative dentistry to dental students and maintains a part-time private practice in general dentistry at the UCLA Faculty Group Dental Practice. Recently, he served as a Mentor for the American Dental Education Association’s Academic Dental Careers Fellowship Program and was involved with a novel HRSA Grant, entitled “Bioterrorism Curriculum for Students in the Health Professions”. Dr. Lindemann’s scholarly activities have focused on human natural killer cells, special patient populations, and, most recently, student learning strategies.

United Kingdom/Republic of Ireland Edinburgh Professor Michael Parrish, Study Center Director UCSD, Department of History July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009 Introduction pending.

United Kingdom/Republic of Ireland London Professor Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Study Center Director UCSB, Department of Sociology July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010 Kum-Kum Bhavnani is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Women, Culture, Development Program (Global and International Studies) at UC Santa Barbara. She has recently disseminated her research in the form of a feature length documentary, THE SHAPE OF WATER, narrated by Susan Sarandon. Her previous research includes books published by Cambridge University Press, and edited collections published by Sage, Oxford University Press, Zed Press and Routledge (forthcoming). She received her B.SC from Bristol University (Soc. Sci., Hons.), her MA from Nottinghma University (in Child and Educational Psychology) and her Ph.D from King's College, Cambridge University (Social and Political Sciences). She has been chair of her campus Planning and Budget Committee and has just completed a 2 year term as Vice-Chair of the UCSB Academic Senate.

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