Participant Biographies

Edward J. Ahearn
▪ University Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at Brown University
Professor Ahearn’s teaching includes "City (B)lights: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of the City," National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminars in Paris, and city courses as distinguished visiting professor at Brandeis and Wellesley.  He was awarded the Harbison and Workman prizes for teaching and Fulbright and NEH fellowships.  In addition to books on Rimbaud, Marx and literature, and visionary writing, he has just published Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001 (Ashgate 2010).

M.J. Andersen
▪ Journalist and Writer
Andersen writes for the editorial pages of The Providence Journal and is the author of a memoir, Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner. She is a graduate of Princeton University and holds a master's degree from the creative writing program at Brown University. In 2002-03, she was a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. She lives approximately 100 yards from a bridge that has been closed because of structural problems.

David L. Pike
Professor of Literature at American University
Professor Pike teaches literature and film at American University. His books include Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001, Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945, and Passage Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds, all from Cornell University Press. He is co-author of Literature: A World of Writing and co-editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, and has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century urban literature, culture, and film. He is currently completing a history of Canadian cinema since the 1980s and beginning a study of Cold War bunkers since the end of the Cold War.

Bruce Robbins
▪ Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University
Professor Robbins’s research interests include fictional and filmic representations of the welfare state, cosmopolitism, and world literature. His many books include Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton UP, 2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU P, 1999), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Co-editor, U of Minnesota P, 1998), Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993), The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia UP, 1986), The Phantom Public Sphere (Editor, U of Minnesota P, 1993), and The Longman Anthology of World Literature (Co-editor, 2003)

Michael D. Rubenstein
▪ Assistant Professor of English at the University of California Berkeley
Professor Rubenstein specializes in narrative and novel theory, modernist literature, postcolonial literature, Irish Literature, and James Joyce.  His forthcoming book, Public Works: Infrastructure and Narrative Form in Modern Irish Literature (U of Notre Dame P), tracks the relationship between the engineering cultures of the postcolonial Irish Free State and Irish literary modernism of the period.  He has published articles on related topics in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, The Field Day Review, and Social Text.  An article on Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner,” will soon appear in Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, a collection of essays edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop and published by Routledge.   

Nelson H. Vieira
▪ University Professor and Professor of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University
Professor Vieira is the North American founding editor of Brasil/Brazil: a Journal of Brazilian Literature and former President of Latin American Jewish Studies Association.  His major critical studies and editions are:  Jewish Writing in Contemporary Brazil (2009), A Experiência Cultural Judaica no Brasil: Recepção, Inclusão e Ambivalência (Co-ediotr, 2004); The Jewish Diaspora of Latin America, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (Guest-editor, Spring 2001); Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity (1995); Construindo a imagem do judeu: algumas abordagens téoricas (Editor, 1994); Brasil e Portugal: a imagem recíproca (1991); and Roads to Today's Portugal (Editor, 1983). He has also translated various works of Brazilian fiction.
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