Research

Our department is on the cutting edge of new debates about globalization and diaspora, popular culture and mass media, nationalism and identity, race and sexuality, and the politics of tradition and modernity. We explore these issues through a range of theoretical orientations that include postcolonial and Marxist theory, feminist and critical race theory, psychoanalysis and psychology, political ecology and science and technology, and much more.

Our faculty has strengths (Latin America, Africa, the US, Europe, the Caribbean, the Middle East, East Asia) or elsewhere. They may also pursue interconnections between places through flows of various kinds—media, culture, labor, capital, pop culture, advertising—or study the construction of ("imaginary") places and identities through, for example, movies, fiction, virtual reality. Recent dissertation projects include those on African American churches in North Carolina; strip clubs in Atlanta; tourism in Cuba; miners in Romania; Turkish militarism; the sex trade in the Black Sea area; Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon; soap operas in Japan; a Christian development organization in Canada and Somalia; rural militias in Sierra Leone; migrant domestic workers in Kuwait; skateboarding youth in Japan; Pentecostalism in Ghana