[-empyre-] Week 1 on -empyre Welcome Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar

[Renate Ferro]

Our apologies to our empyre subscribers for beginning a bit late and
also for not having all of the
bios of all our guests quite yet. Our previously scheduled guest for
November was unable to
follow though just a few days ago so we are doing a bit of "pinch
hitting" this month.

Tim and I would like to welcome Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar
to the first week of -empyre soft-skinned space.  Both Bishnu and
Bhaskar will be
posting a bit about their recent work most particularly about their
collaborative project
that they presented at this past weekend's conference at Cornell.  We
appreciate their
willingness to start the month out.  Renate and Tim

Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches postcolonial theory, literature, and global
media studies in the English Department, University of California,
Santa Barbara. Much of her scholarly work—essays, co-edited volumes,
and two monographs (When Borne Across, 2004 and Global Icons,
2011)—variously investigate contemporary cultures of globalization.
She is currently working on two monographs on speculative knowledge:
The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization, a book on
spectral apprehensions of the global in contemporary postcolonial
cinemas, and Speculating Life in Pandemic Media, a comparative study
of prophylactic media in South Asia and South Africa.

Bhaskar Sarkar teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests
include media and globalization, Asian media cultures, and risk and
speculative media.  Author of MOURNING THE NATION: INDIAN CINEMA IN
THE WAKE OF PARTITION (Duke University Press, 2009) and co-editor of
DOCUMENTARY TESTIMONIES (Routledge, 2009), Sarkar is currently
completing a monograph on Bollywood's "plastic nationalism." He is
also involved in a collaborative project, SPECULATIVE GLOBALITIES. As
a Fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities this year, he is
exploring piracy as a productive cultural phenomenon that pushes
against hegemonic notions of property, law, territory, civil society,
and agency.


-- 

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre