Sondra Hale is co-editing a book under contract with the University of Michigan Press called Perspectives on Genocide in Sudan. She has also submitted a manuscript on “Demobilized Eritrean Women Fighters and the Production of Perpetual-Conflict Subjectivities,” for a volume on “(Post) Conflict and the Remarking of Place and Space….”  Hale is also co-editing From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture (feminist art), a volume which will soon be mounted on a website.

Hale’s research interests are in gender and social movements (especially Islamist movements and communist and/or liberation movements in the Middle East and Africa); women, war, conflict, and genocide; gender and citizenship; cultural studies; and international gender studies. She has also been working on a book on Sudanese art and artists in exile. Her regional areas of interest are the Middle East and Africa.

Recent awards include: UCLA’s Luckman Award for distinguished teaching; the Women’s Studies Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching; and the Fair and Open Academic Environment Award from the UCLA Academic Senate, Committee on Diversity.

Elisabeth Le Guin's current research interests are in Spanish music as it developed in Spain in the later part of the 18th century, particularly with reference to comic genres in the Madrid public theaters. She is looking at how Spaniards of that time saw themselves reflected in the interestingly self-aware experiments in identity-formation that one can trace in period theater, before the disastrous invasion of Napoleon in 1808. An intersection with women's studies comes around questions of agency among the women performers of musical comedy, who were immensely popular with the public, though often vilified by the Church (even after the Inquisition was expelled from Spain in 1766!) These women  lacked formal training as singers, but the evidence makes it clear that some had considerable vocal gifts. Their presence and stylishness as actresses can be inferred from the surviving texts. And a significant number of them ended up as directors of acting companies.

Christine Littleton is currently working on a series of articles about sexual harassment in the U.S. and Europe.  She is also co-writing a treatise on sex discrimination with Saru Matambanadzo, a doctoral student in the Women's Studies Programs, and co-editing an anthology on equality theory with Devon Carbado, a colleague at the School of Law.

Anne Mellor's current research focuses on women writers in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--with a special interest in the ways in which certain writers (Marianna Starke, Elizabeth Inchbold, Hannah Cowley) developed a more sophisticated and profound concept of "cosmopolitanism" than did their male peers (including Immanuel Kant). They insisted that to be a true cosmopolitan, one must be the hybidized child of a transnational, transracial, and interfaith marriage. She is also working on the ways in which women responded to the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century, calling attention to the arrogance of the master-narratives of natural history promoted by Gilbert White, Linnaeus and Buffon (in the case of Charlotte Smith) and of physical chemistry promoted by Sir Humphrey Davy (in the case of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). Professor Mellor regularly discovers and promotes the works of non-canonical women writers in her teaching and research, most recently the work of the Whig historian Lucy Aikin, who revised the account of human creation in Genesis (in her Epistles on Women, 1810) to suggest that it was Cain, rather than Eve, who caused the fall from paradise. She recently completed a study of the female-authored British elegy (1660-1830) for the Oxford Handbook of the Elegy which analyses the ways in which women grieve differently from men, both in practice and in verse.

Felicity Nussbaum is a specialist in British literature
(1660-1800), postcolonial and Anglophone studies, and gender studies. She is completing a book on actresses, performance, and material practices in eighteenth-century British theatre. She hopes to show how the first and second generations of women on the English stage transformed ideas about celebrity, property relations, and nation. Along with Saree Makdisi, she is editing a collection of essays on The Arabian Nights in historical context. She is the author, most recently, of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge UP), and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins UP).

Catherine Opie
Professor, Art
csopie@ucla.edu
Website

Vivian Sobchack is currently working on tracking the history of the Maltese Falcon movie prop(s). Her book, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, was published in 2004 by the University of California Press. Many of the essays in the book touch on gender, particularly two essays: one called "Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space" and one called "Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects."