About the Contributors

Joshua G. Adair is an associate professor of English at Murray State University, where he also serves as director of the Racer Writing Center and coordinator of Gender & Diversity Studies. His work has appeared on Harlot, Notches, and in numerous academic journals. His current project, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, 2nd edition, edited with Amy K. Levin, will appear from Rowman & Littlefield later this year.

Connie Freid decided to pursue her life-long interest in art over twenty ago, following a career in economic development. She had studied previously at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and the Westchester County Workshop. Classes at SUNY Purchase, Silvermine Guild of Art, the International Center of Photography and the Greenwich Art Society gave her new skills and direction. An avid traveller, she has had the opportunity to see a varied, complex cultural and social landscape that she tries to incorporate into her work. Her award-winning paintings have been exhibited in numerous juried shows nationally and internationally, most recently at the Caelum Gallery for Art Takes Manhattan as part of NY Art Week 2017.

Yishay Garbasz is a Berlin-based, British-Israeli crossover artist. Her main interest is exploring the inheritance of traumatic memories. She uses various mediums to engage with the topic, especially large format photography. Garbasz studied photography at Bard College in New York and received a Watson Fellowship 2005, which resulted in her first book, In My Mother's Footsteps. Garbasz has exhibited widely in galleries, museums, and photography festivals around the world, including the 2010 Busan Biennale (South Korea), solo shows at Wako Works of Art (Tokyo), Ronald Feldman Fine Art (New York), Norderlicht Foto Festival (Groningen, The Netherlands), Chiang Mai Museum of Art (Thailand), and Tokyo Wonder Site (Japan). Group shows including her work include exhibitions at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art of North Miami, and the Stanley Picker Gallery (Kingston, England). Garbasz’s work has also been featured in Artforum and the New York Times, and she was recently listed by the Huffington Post as one of Ten Transgender Artists Who Are Changing the Landscape of Contemporary Art.

Uddipana Goswami’s writing explores notions of ethnicity, identity and womanhood against the backdrop of political and personal violence in Northeast India, one of the most sustained conflict zones of South Asia. She is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her published works include Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam (Routledge 2013); two poetry collections We Called the River Red: Poetry from a Violent Homeland (Author’s Press 2010) and Green Tin Trunk (Author’s Press 2014); a short story collection No Ghosts in This City (Zubaan 2014); an edited volume, Indira Goswami: Passion and the Pain (Spectrum 2012); and an anthology of folktales retold, Where We Come From, Where We Go: Tales from the Seven Sisters (Westland 2015).

Leigh Johnson is an Assistant Professor of English at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. Her recent work appears in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and the edited volumes Women Versed in Myth and A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. Her research explores how Chicana feminist theory manifests in social activism and literature.

Elinor Meeks is an artist whose work often focuses on expressive and abstract portraits and figurative studies in mixed media. She is a writer and non-profit consultant specializing in arts, education, and social innovation. Recent projects include developing a pilot program introducing 3-D printed prosthetics to Haiti and curating The Creatively Connected Online Film festival, an initiative of The Foundation for Art & Healing. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Vukasin Nedeljkovic is a Ph.D. candidate at Dublin Institute of Technology and the initiator of the multidisciplinary project Asylum Archive. Asylum Archive’s objective is to collaborate with asylum seekers, artists, academics, civil society activists and immigration lawyers, amongst others, with a view to creating an interactive documentary cross-platform online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory. Asylum Archive is a platform open for dialogue and discussion inclusive to individuals who have experienced a sense of sociological/geographical “displacement,” social trauma and violence. It is an act of solidarity to bring a different perspective on the life of people who came to Ireland to seek protection. www.asylumarchive.com

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He received a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. Shandler’s books include While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (1999); Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (2005), Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (2009), and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (2014). Forthcoming titles include Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press) and Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press). Among other books, he is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002) and co-editor of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (2003) and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (2012). Shandler he has curated exhibitions for The Jewish Museum of New York, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Rachida Yassine is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Ibn Zohr University, Morocco. She is Director of the Ph.D. program in Race, Ethnicity, and Alterity in Literature and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from the University of Nottingham, UK; an M.A .in Linguistics and Translation from the University of Bath, UK; an MA in English and American Literature and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Comparative Literature from the University of Essex, UK. She is the author of Re-writing the Canon: Aspects of Identity Reconstitution in Postcolonial Contexts (2011). She has published many articles and book chapters on colonial and postcolonial literatures, postcolonial feminism, Arab women writings, and cultural studies. Her present research interests include critical theory and cultural studies, Arab feminism, gender and women’s studies, and Comparative literature.

Helena Zeweri is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Helena received her M.A. in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Her research examines the ways in which humanitarian efforts around forced marriage in Australia are reconfiguring the public and private lives of Muslim immigrant women, their kin relations, and meanings of refugee health, security, and welfare. Through examining a law that lies at the intersection of gender-based violence, human trafficking, and immigration, her project traces the ways in which a legal and moral regime based on freedom, care and empowerment, makes women’s intimate kin relations a site of state and public interest. Her broader interests center on the how mechanisms of measuring, accounting for, and assessing the contours of violence, coercion, and consent function in late liberal regimes of governmentality. Helena is a member of the New York-based Afghan American Artists and Writers' Association, which is a forum for emerging artistic and political voices in the Afghan diaspora in North America to grapple with transnational forms of belonging. She also does volunteer work with adolescent Afghan American refugee girls in New York.