18 Apr Narrative-Making in the Aftermath of War Conference Participants
Lawrence Acker is an associate professor at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri, joining the faculty in January of this year. He is the Lindenwood College of Individualized Education’s Program Director of Health Management. Dr. Acker came to Lindenwood after serving as the Program Chair of Health Care Management at Harris-Stowe State University (in St. Louis) for over eight years. Most recently, Dr. Acker returned in July of 2012 from a deployment with the Marines as an Army civilian social scientist at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Dr. Acker’s main areas of interest are health care inequities and the history of U.S. health care.
John Becknell, Ph.D. works with Soldier’s Heart, an international not-for-profit NGO, that provides a unique and comprehensive model to address the emotional, moral, and spiritual wounds of veterans, their families and communities. His recent work considers how civilians are impacted or changed by listening deeply to veterans’ narratives of war.
Judith T. Broder, M.D. is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She is the Founder and Chair of The Soldiers Project. For her work with The Soldiers Project she has won several awards including, most recently the Presidential Citizenship Medal presented by President Obama at the White House. Before her retirement from private practice, she was a Training and Supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. She is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the International Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the Southern California Psychiatric Society.
Liam Corley is an Associate Professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he teaches American literature. A recent veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Dr. Corley has published essays on poetry and war in College English, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and War, Literature, & the Arts. His poetry has appeared in Chautauqua, Badlands, A Few Lines Magazine, Pomona Valley Review, and the anthology, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, and he has recently been shortlisted for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. He has just completed his first book-length collection of poems, Scout’s Honor.
Susan Derwin is a professor of Comparative Literature and German. She directs the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC Santa Barbara, and is currently overseeing the year-long series of public events at the IHC called Fallout: In the Aftermath of War. She is the author of the books The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud, and the Novel, and most recently Rage is the Subtext: Readings in Holocaust Literature and Film, which treats the relationship between testimonial narrative and healing. Each quarter she teaches a writing workshop for UCSB student veterans and military dependents. Currently she is working on a monograph about narrative-making and life after war.
Dale Flynn is on the faculty of the University Writing Program at University of California, Davis, where she teaches advanced composition courses and directs the Writing across the Curriculum program. She also teaches Medicine and Humanities for the Humanities Program.
Jacqueline Genovese is a master’s student in the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, and will graduate in May. Her degree is an MA in the medical humanities, and her thesis title is Post Traumatic Story Disorder: Using the Power of Narrative to Heal the Invisible Wounds of War. Before entering the medical humanities program, Jacqueline worked for two decades in communications, media and public relations and development at the University of San Diego, the College of William and Mary and the University of Texas Medical Branch.
Farzana Marie is a poet and Ph.D. student, studying Persian literature and creative writing at the University of Arizona. She served six years on active duty as an Air Force officer, and has spent three years in Afghanistan in both military and civilian capacities, including two years deployed in outreach and anti-corruption capacities. She is the author of the book, Hearts for Sale! A Buyer’s Guide to Winning in Afghanistan and president of CivilVision International, a nonprofit charitable organization focused on positively influencing international relationships through connecting, informing, and inspiring citizens.
Helene Moglen is Research Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. She has had extensive administrative experience (e.g. Dean of Humanities and Arts; Provost of Kresge College; Director, Institute for Advanced Feminist Research.) She was a member of the California Council for Humanities and Public Policy and served on the Board of Governors at the UC Humanities Research Institute. She has published in areas of literary criticism and theory, literacy, and cultural, feminist and psychoanalytic theory. She has developed a number of collaborative university-community projects in Santa Cruz and is founding co-director of Santa Cruz Commons, a collaborative project of community activists and activist academics.
Sheila Namir, Ph.D. was a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) in Los Angeles and a Senior Analyst at the Southern California Institute of Psychoanalysis (SCPI). She is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Santa Cruz, California. She was on the faculties of UCLA Medical School, California School of Professional Psychology, SCPI and ICP before moving to Santa Cruz, where she is on the board of the Santa Cruz Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Society. She has published in the areas of psychosocial aspects of cancer and AIDS, medical psychology, trauma and feminist psychoanalysis. She is currently working on integrating psychoanalytic practices and theories into social and political realms.
Allen H. Redmon is an Associate Professor of English and the coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Film Studies Minor at Texas A&M University-Central Texas in Killeen, Texas. His research and teaching frequently run into questions of narrative-making and war, in part, because so many of his students are stationed at Fort Hood. Most recently, he has taught a cultural studies of war course and examined films focusing on the transition from the war-front to the home-front.
Anne Shea received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC, San Diego. She is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Composition in the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Currently, she is at work on a project on Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and immigrant detention centers in the United States.
Carol Tanenbaum is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Psychoanalyst. She was a founding member of the Soldiers Project, Board Member, and is Chair of their Adopt A College Project which is an outreach program that provides Soldier Project liaisons to the college campuses throughout Southern California. Carol was former chair of the Ernest S. Lawrence Trauma Center at The Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies a community outreach project of that organization. She also spent 15 summers, from 1995-2008, working with war traumatized children and young adults in the Balkans. Carol continues to see military personnel and their families from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through the Soldiers Project, has a private practice in Sherman Oaks, California and is an adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpenteria.
Frank Usbeck studied American Studies, Modern and Contemporary History, Journalism, and American Indian Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany and the University of Arizona. He earned his Dr. Phil in 2010 with a study on the appropriation of the German euphoria for Native Americans in Nazi propaganda during the 1930s and ’40s. His current work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden aims at preparing his second book, which discusses the cultural work of, and ceremonial storytelling in, US soldiers’ milblogs.
Shannon Camlin Ward is author of the poetry chapbook, Blood Creek (Longleaf Press), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Great River Review, Superstition Review, and Tar River Poetry. She was a winner of the 2013 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition and has received support from Yaddo, Holly House, and the Anderson Center. She currently teaches composition at her undergraduate alma mater, Methodist University, in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Tim Wood is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York where he teaches courses on writing and literature, including composition and literature courses designed exclusively for veterans. Since 2010, he has also served as a scholar-facilitator for The New York Council of the Humanities Literature & Medicine Program at the Northport VA Medical Center. Next year, he will be a Fulbright scholar in Tuebingen, Germany.