Faculty Coordinators

Paula M. L. Moya - 2003-2006

Paula M. L. Moya is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University, where she recently completed a term as Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and Chair of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) major. Her publications include essays on feminist theory, multicultural pedagogy, race and emotion, and Latina/o and Chicana/o literature and identity. She is the author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002) and co-editor (with Michael Hames-García) of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000). Another edited volume, Identity Politics Reconsidered, is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2006. In addition, she is a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.

Michele Elam - 2005-06

Michele Elam, Associate Professor of English, was a Visiting Professor in 2003-05 and a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford's Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE) in 2002-03, where she began her current book project, Mixed Race in the New Millenium. Professor Elam is the author of Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and has published articles in African American Review, American Literature, and Genre, among others. The recipient of the St Clair Drake Outstanding Teaching Award at Stanford, Professor Elam teaches seminars on Slave Narratives; Mixed Race Literature and Theory; W.E.B. Du Bois and American Culture; the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; Introduction to African American Literature; graduate seminars on African American Literary History & Theory and Black Feminist Theory, among others.

Monica McDermott - 2004-05

Monica McDermott is an assistant professor of Sociology at Stanford University where she teaches courses on race and ethnicity, urban sociology, qualitative methods and theory. Her primary research interests involve race and ethnic relations in the U.S., especially white identity, racial attitudes, and race/class interactions. She is currently completing a book manuscript based on her participant observation research on interracial interactions in Atlanta and Boston, where she worked as a convenience store clerk for a year.

Graduate Student Coordinators

Julie Avril Minich - 2005-06

Julie Minich is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese specializing in contemporary Chicana/o literature. Her additional research interests include feminist theory, LGBT studies, disability studies and film.

Ulka Shapiro Anjaria - 2003-05

Ulka Shapiro Anjaria is a Doctoral Student in the Program for Modern Thought and Literature where she studies the way Indian literature— particularly realist novels— written in the two decades before independence (1920s-1947) dealt with the ideological and material struggles that were heightened when Congress-led nationalism began to take an expressly statist form. Her focus is specifically on liberal individualism and the urban-rural relationship in authors such as Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand and others. She is also interested in the politics of representation, Marxism, subaltern studies and theories of the realist novel.