Executive Committee

Humanities Institute Executive Committee

The University at Buffalo Humanities Institute (HI) has three advisory and governing bodies, providing different kinds of support to the Institute and the director. HI policies and programs are established by the Executive Committee, chaired by the director and made up of faculty members from across the Humanities departments in the College. This committee, as a whole or in sub-groups, determines all competitive allocations offered by the HI and takes an active role in planning for the annual conference and other initiatives. It meets several times a semester to do concrete planning and takes a hands-on role in managing programs.

2018-19 Committee Members

James Currie

Associate Professor of Music
James Currie is a writer, performer, and Associate Professor in the Department of Music, where he teaches music history to undergraduates, and seminars on the interactions between music and philosophy at the graduate level. He is also a faculty member of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. His academic work takes place at the points of intersection between music history, aesthetic formalism, politics and non-academic written forms, and he is presently at work on a book in praise of boundaries and closure, entitled “Temenos: Boundaries of Musical Life.” Outside of the academy he has been active as a performance artist and writer, and in recent years has worked on a number of operatic collaborations with composers for commissions from, amongst others, Radio France, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and IRCAM at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Details>>

Jaume Franquesa

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Franquesa holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto, he joined UB as an Assistant Professor in Anthropology in 2011. In 2013, Franquesa published Urbanismo neoliberal, negocio inmobiliario y vida vecinal, a monograph on the political and economic transformations leading to the housing bubble and their effects upon everyday life. Details>>

Erin Hatton

Associate Professor of Sociology
Dr. Hatton’s research is centered in the sociology of work, while also extending into the fields of social inequality, cultural sociology, labor, law, and social policy. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Details>>

Hal Langfur

Associate Professor of History
Dr. Langfur focuses on the history of Brazil, Latin America, and the Atlantic world with an emphasis on race relations; comparative indigenous, frontier, and borderlands histories; colonial violence; state territorialization projects; and conquest and colonization narratives. He is the author of The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750 – 1830 (2006) and the editor of Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500 – 1900 (2014). Details>>

Martha Malamud

Associate Professor of Classics
Dr. Malamud’s fields of expertise and research lie in Imperial Latin Literature, Roman Epic, Late Antique Literature, and Reception of Classical Literature. She is the author of A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology. Details>>

Stephanie Rothenberg

Associate Professor of Art
Professor Rothenberg creates provocative interactions that question the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. Through participatory performance, installation and networked media, her work investigates the mediation of the physical, analog body through the digital interfaces of commodity culture. Details>>

Tamara Thornton

Professor of History
Dr. Thornton’s teaching and research interests are on American cultural and intellectual history, early republic and antebellum America, capitalist culture, American elites, history of reading and writing, history of science, and the structure of intellectual life. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University. Details>>

Hershini Young

Professor of English
Young completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and began her teaching career at UC Riverside. Specializing in the work of Black women writers in the Diaspora, she is the author of two books, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body (2005) and Illegible Will: Coercive Performances in Southern African Spectacles of Labor (forthcoming). Details>>

Krzysztof Ziarek

Professor of Comparative Literature
Krzysztof Ziarek teaches 20th-century comparative literature, especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Details>>

Ex officio Members

David Castillo

Director, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

Elizabeth Otto

Executive Director, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies