CSRPC Directory: 2005-2006 Resident Fellows

Charlotte Sáenz, Chicago Artist-in-Residence

Elizabeth Cooper, Dissertation Fellow, is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation research examines changes in expressive culture, work and racial ideologies in post-emancipation Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and Havana, Cuba (1890-1930). She is particularly interested in the ways quotidian struggles over time, space, and economic activities shaped the re-articulation of patron-client relations and emergence of national racial discourses of mestiçagem/mestizaje. In the future she would like to investigate similar questions in New Orleans. Other research and teaching interests include, working class political movements of the Atlantic world; mid-19th through mid-20th century articulations of race and class in the Americas; studies in comparative emancipation processes; the politics of music and race in the African diaspora.

Rosamond S. King, Postdoctoral Fellow, is assistant professor of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. She is currently revising her manuscript, Island Bodies: Race and Sexuality in Caribbean Literature, which elucidates the significance of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities to the lives of Caribbean people portrayed in literature and examines how individuals support or challenge Caribbean traditions of patriarchy and heterosexuality. Her other research interests include African literature, African Diaspora performance studies, and avant-garde literature and art. Recent or forthcoming articles include "Sheep and Goats Together--Interracial Relationships from Black Men’s Perspectives" in The Journal of African American Studies and "Dressing Down: Transvestism in Two Caribbean Carnivals" in Sargasso. Dedicated to public scholarship, she organized Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting Globalization, the largest-ever gathering of women writers of African descent, and Newark, New Jersey’s first city-wide reading programs. Dr. King’s creative work has appeared in over a dozen journals and anthologies, has been performed throughout the Americas, and is held in several private collections. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University.

Charlotte Sáenz, Chicago Artist-in-Residence, has worked for over ten years with communities in the United States, Mexico, and the Middle East using diverse art processes and tools to build better education and development strategies. In creative collaborations with others, her work focuses on individual stories of displacement and how these reflect complex global politics, economies, migrations, histories, and identities. Recent projects include a series of videos and performances made with diverse Arab youth in Lebanon over a two-year residency. Previously, she collaborated with a Mayan women's performance group in Chiapas, Mexico to make a video documenting their lives and work. This project was carried out through her involvement with Women's International Information Project (WIIP), which provides media access and education to grassroots women's groups around the world. In Tlaxcala, Mexico she created an interdisciplinary community arts and technology center with the state university. In Mexico City, she was Deputy Director of Academic Planning for the new National Center of the Arts. In Chicago, she worked as Co-Director of Street-Level Youth Media, a community organization that provides media arts training and free technology access to youth for self-expression, creativity and social change. She was also an executive board member for Women in the Director's Chair (WIDC), which supports and promotes independent and alternative media by women and girls from around the world. Sáenz was born and raised in Mexico City. She received a BA in Art from Yale University, a Masters in International Education from Harvard University, and a MFA in Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has also studied political philosophy at the University of Southern California.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Postdoctoral Fellow, received her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 1998 and is an associate professor of History at Ohio State University. Her current book project, tentatively entitled "Radical Orientalism: Asia, Asian America, and American Social Movements," examines the influence of Asian culture, politics, and people on American forms of radicalism from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. This work focuses on the travels of American activists of varying racial backgrounds to Asia as well as the journeys of Asian political and religious advocates to the United States. Her first book, Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, February 2005), is a biography of Margaret Jessie Chung (1889-1959), the first American-born Chinese female physician. Chung established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1920s. She also became a prominent celebrity and behind-the-scenes political broker during World War II, even as she adopted masculine dress and had romantic relationships with other women. This biography examines Margaret Chung’s strategies for traversing racial, gender, and sexual boundaries of American society from the late Victorian era through the early Cold War period. Professor Wu also has published a number of articles that examine issues related to racialized notions of beauty and sexuality as well as the impact of western religion and medicine on the status of Asian American women.