Hosam Aboul-Ela is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston who teaches courses in postcolonial literature, literary theory, and American literature. His research takes a radically comparative approach, combining exploration of the various fields of transnational studies, postcolonial theory, literature of the Americas, translation studies, and Arab cultural studies. He is the author of Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition (U of Pittsburgh P, 2007) as well as critical articles appearing in American Literature, Arab Studies Journal, CR: The New Centennial Review, Edebiyaat, MELUS, mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, and Rethinking Marxism. He has also translated Voices by Soleiman Fayyad (Marion Boyars, 1993), Distant Train by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid (Syracuse UP, 2007), and Stealth by Sonallah Ibrahim (New Directions, 2014). He is also co-editor with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of Theory in the World, a new publication series translating critical theory from outside Europe and North America. He is among the founding faculty of the graduate certificate programs in both translation studies and empire studies. He received a BA and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Purnima Bose is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Bose researches British colonialism, nationalist movements, and neo-liberalism, with regional interests in Afghanistan, India, Ireland, and Pakistan.  She is author of Organizing Empire (Duke University Press, 2003), which examined discourses of individualism in accounts of nationalism, the Indian and Irish women's movements, and the Raj. She co-edited the anthology Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation (Indiana University Press, 2010), which analyzes self-representations of specific corporations in relation to their impact on communities and the environment. She is currently working on a book-length project, Intervention Narratives: Afghanistan, the United States, and the War on Terror, an analysis of cultural narratives about the intervention that have circulated in the United States. She received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Fran Buntman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at George Washington University. Her primary teaching and research interests focus on prisons and other institutions of punishment and “correction,” law and power, and inequality, especially in the United States and South Africa. She is interested both in open and hidden expressions of power and resistance, and how social institutions tell us a great deal about our social values and commitments. Her teaching, research, and writing seek to integrate and facilitate inter-disciplinary dialogue between and among theory and practice, scholarly contribution and civic involvement, global and local realities. She received two Columbian College of Arts and Sciences’ awards for Advising and Teaching, specifically the 2012-2013 Excellence in Undergraduate Departmental Advising Award for 2012-2013 and the Robert W. Kenny Award for Excellence in Teaching an Introductory Course for 2013-2014. She is also the director of GW’s new interdisciplinary Law and Society minor and was the Faculty Director of the Brasilia Without Borders Innovative Leadership in a Transnational World Pre-College Program at GWU. She is an active university and DC citizen, whether promoting student research, ethical and engaged Jewish communal life, diasporic connections, or improved public education. She received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Eve Dunbar is an Associate Professor of English at Vassar College. Her scholarly articles and review essays appear in African American Review, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, and Journal of American History. Her more public-facing writing can be found in The Nation, Jezebel, Colorlines and Literary Hub. Dunbar's book, Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (Temple University Press, 2012) is an American Literatures Initiative selection. Dunbar is completing her second book project Monstrous Work: Black Women Writing Life and Labor Beyond Sovereignty, supported by the American Council of Learned Societies Burkhardt Fellowship (2016-17).  She received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Visiting Professor at Birkbeck School of Law University of London. Her most recent books are The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (Fordham University Press 2017), The Workhouse: The Breitenau Room (with Ines Schaber) and Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and most recently she’s been writing about captivity, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. She serves on the Editorial Committee of the journal Race & Class and is the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM Santa Barbara.

Joseph Slaughter is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South, particularly Latin America and Africa. He is especially interested in the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship, Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016. His essays and articles include: “World Literature as Property” in (Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2014), “However Incompletely, Human” (The Meanings of Human Rights: Philosophy, Critical Theory, Law, 2014) and “It’s good to be primitive’: African Allusion and the Modernist Fetish of Authenticity” (Modernism and Copyright, 2011). He received a BA from the University of Florida and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Jennifer Wenzel is jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009), was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Her essays on postcolonial theory, ecocriticism and environmental humanities, memory studies, postconsumerism, petrocultures, and African and South Asian literatures, have appeared in journals including Alif, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture, Research in African Literatures, and Resilience. She has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, NEH, and Princeton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies. She is currently at work on two book manuscripts: Reading for the Planet: World Literature and Environmental Crisis, and Contrapuntal Environmentalisms: Nature, North and South. She has co-edited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger an anthology of keywords on energy, Fueling Culture: Energy, History, Politics, forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She received a BA from Austin College, an MA from Indiana University, and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.