The Consequences of Financial Turbulence in the Academy

Panelists

Srinivas Aravamudan received his Ph.D from and has taught at the and the . After joining Duke's English Department in 2000, he became director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. In 2002-03, Aravamudan was co-convener of the Franklin Humanities Institute seminar “Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory.” Aravamudan specializes in eighteenth-century British and French literature and postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anthropological Forum, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Duke UP, 1999) won the outstanding first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction (Pickering and Chatto, 1999). His book, Guru English: South Asian Religion in A Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton UP, 2006) was republished by Penguin India in 2007. He is working on two book-length studies, one on the eighteenth-century French and British oriental tale, and the other on sovereignty and anachronism. His edition of William Earle’s antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three- Fingered Jack, appeared in 2005 with Broadview Press.

William E. Davis has served as executive director of the American Anthropological Association since 1996. The nation’s oldest and world’s largest professional society of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology, the Association’s over 11,000 members include archaeologists, socio-cultural anthropologists, physical anthropologists, and linguists located in universities and colleges, research institutions, government agencies, museums, corporations, and non-profits throughout the world. The Association publishes 21 peer-reviewed scholarly journals and conducts the largest annual meeting of anthropologists in the world. Davis currently serves as president and chairman of the board of the Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives, and is on the governing board of the National Humanities Alliance. He previously served on boards or committees of the American Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the Consortium of Social Science Associations, the American Society for Public Administration, and the Greater Washington Society of Association Executives. He has written and taught on various association and non-profit leadership and management topics. In 1996, Davis founded, and served as the chairman of the board of, the non-profit American Council on Intergovernmental Relations. From 1994 to 1996, he served as executive director of the United States Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, an independent federal government research agency. Prior to 1994, he was director of the Center for Education and Information Resources, director of Election ’88, and director of the Office of Policy Analysis and Development at the National League of Cities. Davis completed his doctoral coursework and examinations in political science, and received his M.A. in political science from the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is presently chair of the Executive Committee of the ACLS Conference of Administrative Officers and serves as a member, ex officio, of the ACLS Board of Directors. B. Robert Kreiser received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 1971 and taught full-time at the University of Rochester from 1969 to 1982. He is the author of Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton UP, 1978) as well as professional articles, papers, and presentations in his academic discipline. For the past 29 years Kreiser has been a senior program officer at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), working primarily in the areas of academic freedom, tenure, and faculty governance. In addition, he has been an associate editor of Academe: Bulletin of the AAUP and the editor of the last five editions of the AAUP Policy Documents and Reports (the “Redbook”), and has consulted with faculty members and others on questions of professional ethics, discrimination, sexual harassment, and the rights of part-time and adjunct faculty. He has also authored or co-authored numerous AAUP reports on faculty rights issues and has dealt extensively with the current financial turbulence facing American higher education. Since 1996, Kreiser has also served as an adjunct professor of history at George Mason University, teaching courses in historical methodology, history, biography, and film, and criminal trials in American and European history. He has been the financial officer for the Society for French Historical Studies since 1994 and the organization’s delegate to the ACLS during that time.

David Marshall is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is dean of humanities and fine arts and executive dean of the College of Letters and Science. Marshall is chair of the University of California President's Advisory Committee on Research in the Humanities, which oversees the UC Humanities Network. He is also a member of the board of directors of the National Humanities Alliance. David Marshall was a professor at Yale University from 1979 to 1997, serving as chair of the English department, director of The Literature Major, acting chair of comparative literature, and director of the Whitney Humanities Center, among other appointments. He received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1975 and then went on to receive an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on 18th-century fiction, aesthetics, and moral philosophy. He is the author of essays on Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Lennox, Mackenzie, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Hume, and Rilke, among other authors, and three books: The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot; The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley; and The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815. The Frame of Art was awarded the 2005-2006 Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Marshall also has lectured and published on issues in higher education and the humanities. Marshall was a Guggenheim Fellow and he received Yale's Morse Fellowship. He served on the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the advisory committee for PMLA. Service for the Modern Language Association includes the Committee on Honors and Awards. He also chaired the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Selection Committee and the Division Executive Committee for Comparative Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature. He was a member of the Modern Language Association’s Teagle Working Group on the Disciplines and Undergraduate Liberal Education, as well as the AAU/ACLS Humanities Steering Committee. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza is chief administrative and financial officer of the American Comparative Literature Association. She is the director of the program in comparative literature and Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds degrees from University of California, Berkeley, Oxford University and Columbia University and has held both Mellon and Fulbright fellowships. Trained in Greek as well as modern aesthetics, she works actively in eight languages. Her research concentrates on Orientalism, the Gothic, Cleopatra, Oscar Wilde, and European drama. She is currently finishing a study of decadent culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Richmond-Garza is renowned for her creative, multi-media approach to teaching and has been awarded numerous teaching awards.