Faculty - M.A. Program in Cultural Production

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman
Department of English and American Literature

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s research interests are 19th and 20th-century African American literature and culture; Gender and sexuality studies; Critical race theory; and Multiethnic feminisms. Her current research project examines "The Erotics of Race: Identitiy, Sexuality, and Black Figuration," which operates from the central premise that sexual ideologies fundamentally underlie racial definitions.

Ulka Anjaria
Department of English and American Literature

Ulka Anjaria's research interests are in postcolonial literature; South Asian literature and film; theories of the novel and narrative theory; literary and social theory; modernity, nationalism and the postcolonial state.

Mark Auslander, Director
Department of Anthropology

Dr. Mark Auslander, Director of the interdisciplinary Master's program in Cultural Production. is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis. He is a sociocultural anthropologist with strong interests in political and symbolic processes. His principal ethnographic research has been in Eastern Zambian Ngoni communities and among African American families in rural Georgia (USA).

Mary Baine Campbell
English and American Literature

Medieval and Early Modern Literature, 20th-Century Poetry, Poetry of Women in English, Travel Literature, History of Science, Cultural Studies.

Cynthia Cohen
Intercommunal Coexistence Program

Cynthia E. Cohen, director of coexistence research and international collaborations for the Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence, focuses on the contributions of cultural work and the arts to coexistence and reconciliation.

Judith Eissenberg
Department of Music

Judith Eissenberg is a founding member and second violinist of the Lydian String Quartet, as well as the founder and director of MusicUnitesUS, a program that links the creative arts with academic inquiry in explorations of culture, history, and tradition. 

Tory Fair
Fine Arts

Tory Fair is an Artist-in-Residence who teaches sculpture and drawing.

Jane Hale
Department of Romance and Comparative Literature

Jane Hale teaches French and Comparative Literature. Her areas of  interest include theater, education, and West African and Caribbean literature.

Paul Jankowski
History Department

Modern European and French history.

Peter Kalb
Fine Arts

20th century and contemporary art.

Allan Keiler
Department of Music

Professor Keiler specializes in Heinrich Schenker and the history of theory, 19th-century music (especially Liszt), and interdisciplinary studies that emphasize structuralism and historiography

Thomas King
English and American Literature

Thomas King's research interests include: Early Modern English Drama and Social Performance, Performance Studies, Queer Studies, and Gender Studies.

James Mandrell
Romance and Comparative Literature

James Mandrell teaches modern Spanish and comparative literature. He also participates in Film Studies, Italian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Women's Studies. His current research focuses on food and fashion in nineteenth-century Spain and "queerness" in postwar US popular culture.

Charles McClendon
Fine Arts

Dr. McClendon's research and publications focus on the close connection between art and architecture in the centuries from the decline of the Roman Empire to pre-modern times; and he has directed excavations in Italy, the results of which were featured in his book, The Imperial Abbey of Farfa: Architectural Currents of the Early Middle Ages (Yale University Press, 1988).

Laura J. Miller
Department of Sociology

Laura Miller's research brings together several sets of interests: the intersection of cultural and economic factors within information industries, the cultural meanings attached to marketing and consumption, and the role of commercial institutions in community life.

Richard J. Parmentier
Department of Anthropology

Richard J. Parmentier is a cultural anthropologist specializing in semiotic approaches to language and material culture. His principal ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in Belau (Micronesia) from 1978 to 1980. Dr. Parmentier's academic writings deal with Oceanic ethnography and history, semiotic theory (especially C. S. Peirce), pragmatic linguistics, and the anthropology of religion.

John Plotz
English and American Literature

Research interests: Victiorian Literature, Politics, The novel, aesthetics.

Dirck Roosevelt
Education Program

Professor Roosevelt aims to educate prospective elementary school teachers to teach in ways that elicit, honor and strengthen children’s capacities for inquiry and the fundamental human “impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or of art,” in the words of John Dewey.

Fernando Rosenberg
Department of Romance and Comparative Literature

Professor Rosenberg’s current research project examines recent production in literature, performance, and film, in the context of debates that pertain to the judicial sphere and issues of justice in general.

Jonathan Sarna
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies

Jonathan Sarna is one of America’s foremost commentators on American Jewish history, religion and life. Dr. Sarna chairs the Academic Advisory and Editorial Board of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. In addition, he serves as chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History and of the 350th commemoration of Jewish life in America, 1654-2004.

Harleen Singh
German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures

Harleen Singh's specialty in postcolonial studies (an underrepresented field at Brandeis) focuses on the cultural legacy of empire, the interactions between Europe and its colonies, and the literatures of the Third World.

Ellen Schattschneider
Department of Anthropology

Ellen Schattschneider is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in psychoanalytic, phenomenological and practice approaches to culture. Since 1991, her principal ethnographic work has been conducted in the Tsugaru region of northern Tohoku, Japan. Dr. Schattschneider's academic writings give particular attention to ritual performance, gender and embodiment, spirit mediumship, sacred landscapes, visuality and the power of images, popular religious experience and comparative capitalist cultures.

Nancy Scott
Fine Arts

Nancy Scott is an art historian whose specialty fields are 19th century European art and early 20th century American modernism. Most recently, she has worked on the issues surrounding public art and the intersection of traditional sculpture and the "counter-monument."

Ellen Smith
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies

Ellen Smith has interests in Jewish museums and Jewish-American cultural history, as well as the broader cultural politics of museums, memorials, and heritage sites.

Faith Smith
English and American Literature; African and Afro-American Studies

Faith Smith's areas of specialization are African and Afro-American literature and the Anglophone Caribbean. Her current work includes an edited collection of essays on "Sexuality and Citizenship in the Caribbean," pursues some of the issues addressed in a special issue on Genders and Sexualities that she guest-edited for the journal Small Axe in 2002, and a book manuscript on conceptions of modernity across the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Andreas Teuber
Philosophy

Dr. Andreas Teuber, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, has interests in film theory and criticism, philosophy and literature, and the intersections of political thought and aesthetic form.