Faculty and Coordinators

Mark Phillip Bradley

Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College

Mark Philip Bradley is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2016), Vietnam at War (2009), and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is the coeditor of Making the Forever War (2021), Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley’s work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and Dissent.

A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays, Bradley is currently working on a history of the global South and serves as the general editor for the four volume Cambridge History of America and the World.

Bradley was recently appointed editor of the American Historical Review, beginning in August 2021. He served as the elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and as coeditor of the Cornell University Press book series, The United States in the World.

Email : mbradley@uchicago.edu | Office Telephone: (773) 702-3558
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Leah Feldman

Director of Graduate Studies Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature

My research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary and cultural entanglements, focusing critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, Marxist aesthetics and anti-colonial theory, which traverse the Caucasus and Central Asia. My book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018), winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Prize, exposes the ways in which the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. I am currently writing on the rise of the New Right in late/post-Soviet Eurasia and a book tentatively titled Feeling Collapse on Soviet film, art and performance from Central Asia and the Caucasus amidst the collapsing sensorium of the Soviet Empire. My work has appeared in Slavic Review, boundary 2, Ab Imperio, and Global South and I serve on the editorial collective for boundary 2. I am also co-writing a queer anticolonial communist children’s book with the artist collective Slavs & Tatars.

My work with graduate students has spanned a broad range of topics from affect in Turkish women’s literature to the cultural politics of Post-Soviet Central Asian nationalism. I have also worked with undergraduate art students on developing conceptual foundations for their performance related projects.

Email: feldmanl@uchicago.edu | Office Telephone: (773) 702-5809
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Hoda El Shakry

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

I am a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. My interdisciplinary research extends across the fields of Arabic and Francophone literatures, aesthetic theory, Islamic philosophy, film and visual culture, comparative literary theory, as well as gender and sexuality studies. I specialize in Arabophone and Francophone literature, visual culture, and criticism of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia).

My first book, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (Fordham University Press, 2020) was awarded the ACLA’s 2018 Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award and the MLA’s 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. It explores the influence of Qurʾanic textual, hermeneutical, and philosophical traditions on Arabophone and Francophone fiction from the Maghreb. My current book project, Printed Matter(s): Critical Histories of Maghrebi Cultural Journals, theorizes twentieth century Arabophone, Francophone, and bilingual journals from the Maghreb. The study investigates the concepts, intellectuals, and readership networks that Maghrebi cultural journals staged across North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. These rhizomatic flows of cultural capital signal subversive geopolitical exchanges operating outside the dominant logics of colonial mediation.

I serve on the Editorial Board of Middle Eastern Literatures, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Advisory Board of the African Feminist Initiative. Before joining the University of Chicago, I was an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State and a Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Email: helshakry@uchicago.edu | Office Telephone: (773) 702-8486
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Michael Peddycoart

Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Student Coordinator of Global South Workshop

My research examines the intellectual and social histories of Palestinian leftist groups in the second half of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in how these groups participated in and grappled with the period’s evolving discourses on Marxism-Leninism, class, gender, youth mobilization, cultural production, and political spectacle. My research has been supported by the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the American Councils for International Education, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Program. I hold a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree with honors in International Relations from Stanford University.

Email: mpeddycoart@uchicago.edu

Anh Q Nguyen

Doctoral Student in the Department of History and Student Coordinator of Global South Workshop

Informed by Critical Theory’s critique of modernism, colonialism, and nationalism, my current research concentration lies at the intersection of print culture, urban politics, gender, and emotion in modern Asia.

I have found my research engaging with two sets of questions. The former concerns the condition of freedom: the encounter with the Other, forms of agency in tragedies, and the possibility of politics in everyday life. The latter confronts the condition of historical writing: concept work, the possibility of writing world history and history in the plural, and positionality.

Email: aqnguyen@uchicago.edu

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