New Faculty 2012-2013 |
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Sharon Heijin Lee
Assistant Professor/Faculty FellowDepartment of Social and Cultural Analysis
Sharon Heijin Lee joins the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in Gender and Sexuality studies having recently received her Ph.D. in American Culture with a certificate in Women’s studies from the University of Michigan. Prior to that, Lee received her M.A. degree in Asian American studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and her B.A. in Ethnic studies and Spanish from the University of California, Berkeley.
Lee is currently working on a manuscript that maps the discursive formation of plastic surgery in South Korea, Asia and Asian America by asking how it has become economically necessary as a viable form of self-management. Her research agenda theorizes the concealed relations between seemingly unrelated and often uninterrogated spheres—popular and consumer culture, medicine, tourism, the military and other governmental institutions. Lee's work examines how such institutions have come to influence women's everyday choices and ideas about beauty. Having done extensive archival and ethnographic research in Seoul, South Korea as a Fulbright-Hays and Korea Foundation fellow, Lee's manuscript brings together an interdisciplinary methodology with a transnational framework that bridges the fields of Asian American and Asian studies through a comparative feminist epistemological lens.
Lee's work has been published in journals such as Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory and The Massachusetts Review. Her research interests include Transnational Feminist Cultural studies, the intersections between Asian American and Asian studies, Korean studies, Transnational American studies and Gender and Sexuality studies. Lee is teaching "The Geopolitics of Beauty" this fall semester.
Mariana Mogilevich
Visiting Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Social and Cultural Analysis
Mariana Mogilevich joins the Metropolitan Studies program as Visiting Assistant Professor this year. Her research focuses on the history and theory of the American built environment, with a particular interest in evolving conceptions of the public realm in the postwar United States. Mogilevich is currently at work on a book investigating the politics of urbanism in New York City during the mayoral administration of John V. Lindsay (1966-1973). The project emphasizes the critical role played by psychological discourse and political processes in the development of new forms of public space and how urban design has both affected and been affected by American political culture.
Mogilevich’s work on design and spatial politics combines urban history with the history of architecture and political theory. Her writing has been published in Praxis, On Site, Film Quarterly and edited volumes in architectural and urban history. She has taught courses in architectural history, urban design, and the history and theory of urban planning. Outside the academy, she has served as a consultant for the New York City preservation organization Place Matters and was for many years Senior Editor at the urban affairs magazine Next American City. Mogilevich was co-curator of the exhibition Nueva York: 1613-1945 at the New-York Historical Society/El Museo del Barrio.
Mogilevich holds a PhD in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning from Harvard University, and a BA in Literature from Yale University.
Dean Itsuji Saranillio
Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Social and Cultural AnalysisDean Itsuji Saranillio is the newest Assistant Professor joining the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He received his master’s degree in Asian American Studies at UCLA and a doctorate in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Between 2009-2011 he was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and prior to coming to NYU, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His interests are in critical race and indigenous studies, cultural studies and history, and settler colonialism.
His work contributes to an emerging body of scholarship critically assembling settler colonialism with U.S. imperial formations. He has taught courses that examine the intersections of Asian American studies and Indigenous critical theory, U.S. Imperialism in the Pacific Islands, and Native American federal jurisprudence. His current interdisciplinary project titled The Theatricality of the Settler State: Hawai‘i Statehood and the Liberal Politics of Empire Building contributes to the archive formation of Native Hawaiian opposition to U.S. colonialism by uncovering new sources that reveal Native opposition to the admission of Hawai‘i as a U.S. state. Pulling formations of settler colonialism and imperialism together, he shows that U.S. ambitions for global hegemony during the Cold War found a discursive alliance with portrayals of Hawai‘i as a racially harmonious U.S. state that facilitated the establishment and maintenance of U.S. military bases throughout much of Asia and the Pacific. Some of the Indigenous sources he utilizes, beyond denaturalizing imperial violence, sustain memory and commitment to materializing arrangements of power where the conditions of possibility are set by nature, not profit.
Saranillio’s work has been published and reprinted in several journals and anthologies. His publication in the American Quarterly was a part of an issue titled "Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies" which received special recognition from the Constance M. Rourke Prize committee at the 2011 national convention for the American Studies Association. His essay in the Journal of Asian American Studies was nominated for "Most Thought Provoking Article in Native American and Indigenous Studies" by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association national conference in 2011.
