Dena Goodman is the Lila Miller Collegiate Professor, History and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan. A leading specialist in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern France, her monographs include Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (2009) and The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994), both with Cornell University Press.

Despite extended periods of political continuity, Mexico has traditionally been imagined as a space of instability. Mexican philosophers, poets, scholars, and statesmen have long reflected on the idea of Mexico as potential not yet realized, at once utopian and dystopian, an identity always in formation. The ambivalence of this cultural energy is intensified in the US context, where Mexico functions as a key referent in an astounding variety of culture wars.

Professor Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Stony Brook University, teaches courses on European fairy tales and British children's literature. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries, contextualizing genres in their socio-historical cultures of origin, assessing them in terms of publishing history parameters, and utilizing linguistics in discourse analysis. Her languages of research are English, German, and French, occasionally Italian and Spanish.

Oonya Kempadoo is the author of Buxton Spice and Tide Running (for which she has recently completed a screenplay).
She has won the Casa de las Américas Prize, and was named a "Great Talent for the 21st Century" by the Orange Prize judges.
She was a fellow at the International Writer's Program at the University of Iowa in 2011.

An International Conference at the University of Pittsburgh

Thursday, March 29
Welcoming Reception: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Session I: Revolutionary Dynamics (6:00pm - 8:00pm)
Asef Bayat (University of Illinois): "Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution -- Again"
Samer Shehata (Georgetown University): "Too Little, Too Late: The Mubarak Regime's Response to Dynamic Protest"
Mohammed Bamyeh (University of Pittsburgh): "On Spontaneity and Organization"

Friday, March 30
Breakfast: 9:00am - 10:00am

The pre-circulated text for discussion in this seminar will be Professor Ng's forthcoming article, "Dutch Wars, Global Trade, and the Heroic Poem:
Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (1666) and Amin's Sya'ir Perang Mengkasar (1670)." The essay is attached.

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Ng is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

"You taught me language, and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse," thus Shakespeare's Caliban accused his master Prospero of linguistic colonialism. But how accurate was this picture of transnational communication? When Europeans entered the sphere of the Indian Ocean, in what language or languages did they speak? This paper considers early modern European translingual exchanges with Southeast Asia, the aim of European long-distance voyaging as the ultimate source of sought-after spices, examining in particular the role of Malay, a lingua franca of the spice trade, as a global language.

2012 JFilm Festival
Pittsburgh Premiere
Director: Lincoln Mayorga
2011, USA, 93 minutes
Russian and English with subtitles