People

Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media cultures, environmental media, and critical public health studies in English and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her writings on global media cultures include two monographs, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) as well as a (co-edited) special issue of Cultural Critique (Winter 2022) on global-popular cinemas. Her current research on media and risk is published in the co-edited Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020) and in The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).

Javiera Barandiarán is Professor in Global Studies at UCSB and director of the CREW Center for Restorative Environmental Work. Her research explores the intersection of science, environment, and development in Latin America. Her books include Living Minerals: Nature, Trade and Power in the Race for Lithium and Science and Environment in Chile: The Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy, both with MIT Press. She has also written about Chile's 2022 constitutional reform effort in Demanding a Radical Constitution (Palgrave 2025) and, more recently, about efforts to protect glaciers from mining and climate change. Barandiaran was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, and co-editor of Jadaliyya. 

Shiva Balaghi is a cultural historian specializing in the visual culture of the Middle East and its diasporas. She is Academic Coordinator of the Area Global Initiative, Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies, Center for Middle East Studies, and East Asia Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She previously served as Senior Advisor to the President of the American University in Cairo for Arts and Cultural Programs and taught History and History of Art at NYU and Brown University for nearly two decades. Her books include Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution (co-edited), Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East (co-edited), and Saddam Hussein: A Biography. Her writing has also appeared in Artforum, Hyperallergic, MERIP, and Iranian Studies.