Professor Emeritus, University of Washington

Charles Johnson is author of 16 books, among them the novels Middle Passage, Oxherding Tale, Faith and the Good Thing, and Dreamer; the story collections: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award), Soulcatcher and Other Stories, and Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories; and works of philosophy and criticism such as Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 and Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. He is also a screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist, international lecturer, and for 20 years served as fiction editor of Seattle Review. He received the 1990 National Book Award (fiction) for Middle Passage, NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, a Writers Guild Award for his PBS drama Booker, two Washington State Governor’s Awards for literature, the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and numerous other prizes and honorary degrees. In 1998 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (“genius” grant), and in 2003 literary scholars founded the Charles Johnson Society at the American Literature Association.

Professor of Japanese Language and Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Rebecca Copeland’s research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary women's writing in Japan, modern literature and material culture, and translation studies. Her research and teaching are informed by questions of both gender and genre. She focuses almost exclusively on modern Japanese women writers, examining the way their gender has defined and often confined their literary production. Women writers in the 19th century were expected to conform to socially accepted notions of femininity. Women in the early 20th century often wrote with a self-conscious awareness of their gender, performing to almost hyperbolic extremes ideas of femininity. Their works are draped in kimono and covered in make-up. Later 20th-century women writers were known to parody these notions, creating monstrous aberrations of womanhood. And there were certain genres that were deemed unsuitable for a woman. One was the hardboiled mystery, which is another of Copeland’s interests.

In addition to scholarly projects and translations, Copeland is moving into creative writing. Her work travels between Japan and the Blue Ridge Mountains, tracing the lines of memory, identity and self-discovery. The Kimono Tattoo, Copeland’s debut novel was published by Brother Mockingbird Publishers in late 2020. The Kimono Tattoo takes readers on a journey into Kyoto’s intricate world of kimono design. As Ruth struggles to unravel the cryptic message hidden in the kimono tattoo, she is forced to confront a vicious killer along with her own painful family secrets.

A second creative project, the short story “Blue Ridge Yamamba,” appeared in the anthology Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch, co-edited with Linda C. Ehrlich and published by Stone Bridge Press. The anthology include short stories, poems, essays and interviews with performance artists, all on the topic of the enigmatic mountain witch.

For more on Copeland’s creative projects, and to follow her blog posts, see her webpage: www.rebecca-copeland.com.

Assistant Professor of Dance​, Performing Arts Department

Joanna Dee Das is an affiliate of the Program in American Culture Studies and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity. Her research interests include dance in the African diaspora, musical theater dance, and the politics of performance in the 20th century. She is the author of Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford 2017), which won the 2018 de la Torre Bueno Best First Book Award from the Dance Studies Association and an honorable mention Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African-American theater and performance from the American Society for Theatre Research. She has also published articles in Journal of Urban History, Dance Research Journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, Theatre History Studies, TDR and ARTS, as well as authored or co-authored book chapters in The Futures of Dance Studies, The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical and A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical. Her current book project examines the history of the Branson, Missouri entertainment industry. 

In addition to her scholarship, Das is a certified instructor of Dunham Technique and a choreographer. In December 2020, she co-directed a dance film with filmmaker Denise Ward-Brown called Seeking Josephine Baker: Dancing on the Land. Building from this creative project, Das and Ward-Brown currently run a Mellon-funded Research Working Group that is exploring Ms. Baker’s history in St. Louis. Before and during graduate school, she worked as a professional dancer and choreographer in New York, where she performed at Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts), the Cunningham Studio, WAXWorks, and DanceNow/NYC. Her interests have also led to some fun side gigs, including serving as a historical consultant for The Rockettes.

Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Departments of English and of African and African-American Studies

Gerald Early is an award-winning essayist, author and editor. He has served as a commentator for NPR and as a consultant for multiple documentaries with Ken Burns. Currently, he is finishing a book about Fisk University. Early is a noted essayist and American culture critic. His collections of essays include Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (1989); The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; This is Where I Came In: Essays on Black America in the 1960s (2003), and, most recently, A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (2011). He is also the author of Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood (1994). He was twice nominated for Grammy Awards for writing album liner notes, of which Early has written many including Black Power: Music of a Revolution (2004), Miles Davis, Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary (2009), Q: The Musical Biography of Quincy Jones (2001), Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection (2007), Motown: The Complete Motown Singles, Volume 2: 1962, The Sammy Davis Jr. Story (1999), and Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words from the Harlem Renaissance (2000).

Assistant Professor in Illustration, Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts

Shreyas R Krishnan is an illustrator-designer from Chennai, India, with an eye for the everyday and an affinity for the drawn image. She makes nonfiction comics, zines and documentary drawings exploring memory and identity. She explores intersections between visual culture and gender, and personal and collective memory, attempting to understand, through her writing and drawing, how, why and what we remember.

Krishnan is an editor of the Bystander Anthology: Stories Observations & Witnessings from South Asia — a graphic narratives anthology from South Asian storytellers — and a senior editor of comics at South Asian Avant-Garde Anthology. She also founded and co-organizes Bad Drawing Club, a monthly drawing group for women, nonbinary, trans and gender nonconforming folks. Her personal website is https://www.shreyasrkrishnan.com/. 

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish; and Associate Director, Center for the Humanities

Ignacio Infante’s main fields of research include modern poetry, modernist and avant-garde poetics, Iberian cultural studies, transatlantic literary studies, comparative literature and translation theory/history. His most recent book, with Michael Leong, is Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven, a translation of a major Latin American avant-garde book-length poem by Vicente Huidobro that was recognized by Entropy as one of the best poetry books of 2020–21. 

Infante is also the author of After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (Fordham UP, 2013). This book examines from a transnational and interlingual approach the role of translation in the transatlantic flow of modern poetry and poetics, and includes chapters on poets Fernando Pessoa, Vicente Huidobro, Federico García Lorca and the Berkeley Renaissance, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, and Kamau Brathwaite. His second scholarly monograph, “A Planetary Avant-Garde: Experimental Poetics, Transnational Literature Networks, and the Legacy of Iberian Colonialism (1909-1929),” under contract with the University of Toronto Press (Toronto Iberic), is a comparative study of the poetic and socio-historical features of key experimental literature networks emerging across the world during the Historical Avant-Garde, and their various responses to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal.

Professor Emeritus, University of Washington

Charles Johnson is author of 16 books, among them the novels Middle Passage, Oxherding Tale, Faith and the Good Thing, and Dreamer; the story collections: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award), Soulcatcher and Other Stories, and Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories; and works of philosophy and criticism such as Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 and Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. He is also a screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist, international lecturer, and for 20 years served as fiction editor of Seattle Review. He received the 1990 National Book Award (fiction) for Middle Passage, NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, a Writers Guild Award for his PBS drama Booker, two Washington State Governor’s Awards for literature, the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and numerous other prizes and honorary degrees. In 1998 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (“genius” grant), and in 2003 literary scholars founded the Charles Johnson Society at the American Literature Association.

Assistant Professor, Department of History

Diana Montaño’s teaching and research interests broadly include the construction of modern Latin American societies with a focus on technology and its relationship to nationalism, everyday life and domesticity.

Her first book, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City, examines how ordinary citizens (businessmen, salespersons, inventors, doctors, housewives, maids and domestic advisors) used electricity, both symbolically and physically, in the construction of a modern nation. The book weaves together how these “electrifying agents” first crafted a discourse for an electrified future and secondly, how they shaped its consumption. It shows how these agents of modernity promoted and created both imaginary and tangible notions of this technology. Taking a user-based perspective, this study reconstructs how electricity was lived, consumed, rejected and shaped in everyday life.

Associate Professor, Department of English
Associate Professor and Chair, Performing Arts Department

Julia Walker’s teaching interests focus primarily on drama and performance, and range across the broadly defined historical period of modernity (c. late-18th century to the present).

Walker’s most recent book is Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage. How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media — this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.