Minoo Moallem is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Moallem received her MA and BA from the University of Tehran and her Ph.D. from Université de Montréal. She has also done postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Berkeley from 2008-2010 and the Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at San Francisco State University from 2001-2006. She has published in many academic journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism, Sociologies et Sociétés, Das Argument, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Brown Journal of World Affairs, Radical History, Nimeye Digar, Documentation Sur La Recherche Feministe, and Journal of Feminist Studies of Religion. She is also the co-editor (with Alarcom and Kaplan) of Between Women and Nation: Transnational Feminisms and the State, Duke University Press, 1999, and the guest-editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, on Iranian immigrants, exiles and refugees (Vol. XX, Nos. 1&2, Duke University Press, 2000). She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, Filmic Archive, National Memory, and Iran-Iraq War Movies, and a new research project on gender and the politics of petroleum. Trained as a sociologist, she writes on transnational and postcolonial feminist studies, commodity cultures, cultural studies, immigration and diaspora studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Iranian cultural politics and diasporas.
Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war (Duke University Press, 2012; Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association of Asian American Studies, 2014). She is also co-editor with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam of a special issue of positions: asia critique on Southeast Asian American studies (20:3, Winter 2012), and co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007). Her following project is called The Promise of Beauty. She proposes the concept of the promise of beauty as a critique of the conditions beauty requires to flourish, with and against the threat of its disappearance or destruction; and as a call to action to transform those conditions to sustain such life that the beautiful promises to us. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University, and she has since joined its executive board.
