VISITING FACULTY 2010-2011
Simone Davis
Visiting Professor of American Studies, University of Toronto
Simone Weil Davis has recently returned to Toronto after an absence of 37 years. After a formative stint as an actress, a waitress and a “stand-up poet,” Davis turned toward the academy, taking a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, and going on to teach gender studies for three years in a Masters’ program at New York University. Along the way, she has taught academic writing to performance studies students and feminist theory to curatorial students. She received tenure at Long Island University, and spent 2003-2009 as a visiting associate professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. In her 2000 book, Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s, Davis explored the impact of the American ad industry on selfhood and gender identity in that country during the Twenties, delving into advertising archives and popular novels to do so. Numerous articles that treat issues of contemporary gender and culture include "The Door Ajar," a piece about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the anthologized "Loose Lips Sink Ships," about labiaplasty, which first appeared in Feminist Studies in 2002. Current projects include a screenplay about a Depression-era blackmail attempt and a book prompted by her work in recent years on imprisonment: Raising the Jailhouse Roof: Women, Incarceration and Writing. Davis serves on the steering committee of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, and while at Mount Holyoke, she taught a series of college-level, semester-long Inside-Out courses in Springfield, Massachusetts, to a mix of incarcerated and “outside” college students.
Christopher Lynn Hedges
Senior fellow at in The Nation Institute in New York City; F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Visitor of American Studies, Fall 2010.
In residence October 18 to November 5, 2010: Prof. Hedges will be teaching an advanced undergraduate seminar, "The Christian Right and the Open Society," in partnership with the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion. For more information about this course, please click here.
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent who specializes in US and Middle Eastern politics. Currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute in New York, Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans; he has reported for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times (for which he as a foreign correspondent for 15 years). In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He is also a best selling author, perhaps best known for his book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; his most recent work is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009). In 2002, Hedges received in 2002 the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia, NYU, and Princeton. He currently writies a column for Truthdig.
