Kevin Driscoll is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies. He specializes in technology, culture, and communication. His recent research concerns alternative histories of the internet, the politics of amateur telecommunications, and the moral economy of consumer software. In collaboration with Julien Mailland from Indiana University, he published "Minitel: Welcome to the Internet," a cultural and technological history of the French videotex network (MIT Press, 2017).
Mamadou Dia is an award-winning Senegalese film director, screenwriter, and co-founder of the production company, Joyedidi. Often based on his life growing up in West Africa, Mr. Dia’s films explore the tension between fact and fiction, realism and abstraction.
Natasha Heller is a cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism with research interests spanning the premodern period (primarily 10th through 14th c.) and the contemporary era.
My research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of postcolonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa, especially Sufism and Ifa. My research falls into two general areas: a) the intellectual history and literary studies of the Islamic and indigenous traditions of West Africa, and b) employing the insights and ideas from these traditions to contribute to contemporary philosophical debates relevant to a variety of disciplines.
My research focuses on the classic texts of rabbinic Judaism (midrash, Mishnah and Talmud). My most pressing questions have to do with how rabbinic literature functions as literature, and how it conveys meaning. Orality theory has taught me to see rabbinic texts as moments in a larger conversation and my work often tries to reconstruct the thinking that drives the conversation. I also make use of literary theory to discern patterns in the texts that point towards themes and tropes. I am particularly drawn towards theological and ethical topics in rabbinic literature. I have also writte
Tessa Farmer is Assistant Professor in the Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures Department and the Global Studies Program at the University of Virginia, where she serves as the Track Director for the Global Studies-Middle East South Asia (GSMS) major. Tessa received her MA (2007) and PhD (2014) in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She conducted fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt between 2009 and 2019.
Sarah Betzer is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia.
Joshua M. White is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the social, legal, and diplomatic history of the early modern Ottoman Empire and Mediterranean world, he is the author of Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Michael J. Puri is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire, published by Oxford University Press, and is currently completing another monograph that explores some fascinating but hitherto unrecognized relationships between Ravel and German music.
Neeti Nair is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. She is the author of Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2011.
