Creative Writing, University of California, Riverside

Who Will Build the Ark? The Architectural Imagination in an Age of Catastrophic Convergence

A native Southern Californian with a varied background in activism, journalism, and urban studies, Mike Davis is the award-winning author of eighteen books. During the 1990s, Davis taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and published controversial polemics about Los Angeles in crisis, including City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1999).

More recently, Davis’ research has encompassed an impressive range of urgent contemporary issues: the Latinization of large American cities in Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (2001), the history of famine and empire in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Families and the Making of the Third World (2002), the future of poor cities in Planet of Slums (2006), and urban vulnerability in Dead Cities and Other Tales (2003), The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2006), and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007). He is currently working on a book about climate change in the urban Southwest. Mike Davis is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Kane Hall 120
Reception to follow in the Walker-Ames Room.

French and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa

Making Waves:
Documentary Film in Perspective

A scholar of twentieth-century French literature, intellectual history, and film, Ungar is the author of six books on French culture, including Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (1983), Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930 (1995), Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005; co-authored with Dudley Andrew), and Cléo de 5 à 7 (2008). Recent publications include articles on the literary figures Patrick Modiano, W.G. Sebald, and Milan Kundera.

Ungar’s current research project, entitled Making Waves: French Documentary Film 1945-1967 is a book-length study of fifteen postwar films that contributed to the emergence of the French New Wave. Chapters devoted to documentaries about Paris, anti-colonialism, and cinéma vérité analyze films by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Jean Rouch, and Georges Franju as points of entry to reconsider the social, cultural, and political histories of fourth and early Fifth Republic France.

Asian Languages & Literature, University of Washington

How to View a Mountain in Medieval China

One of the leading scholars of classical and medieval Chinese literature and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, David R. Knechtges is best known as the translator of the Wen-xuan, the most influential anthology of classical Chinese poetry. His recent work includes Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture, East and West, co-edited with Eugene Vance (Professor Emeritus, French & Italian Studies) and published in 2005.