People
Dilip Gaonkar
Founding Director
Dilip Gaonkar is Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues. He was closely associated with the journal, Public Culture, serving as the Executive Editor (2000-2009) and as Editor (2009-2011). Gaonkar has two sets of scholarly interests: rhetoric as an intellectual tradition, both its ancient roots and its contemporary mutations; and, global modernities and their impact on the political.
He has published numerous essays on rhetoric, including “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science” that was published along with ten critical responses to the essay in a book, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan G. Gross and William Keith (1996). Gaonkar has edited a series books on global cultural politics: Globalizing American Studies (with Brian Edwards, 2010), Alternative Modernities (2001), and Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (1995). He has also edited several special issues of journals: Laclau’s On Populist Reason (with Robert Hariman, for Cultural Studies, 2012), Cultures of Democracy (for Public Culture, 2007), Commitments in a Post-Foundational World (with Keith Topper, 2005), Technologies of Public Persuasion (with Elizabeth Povinelli, 2003), and New Imaginaries (with Benjamin Lee, 2002). He is currently working on a book manuscript on Modernity, Democracy and the Politics of Disorder.
In addition to his work for the Department of Communications Studies, Gaonkar also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of African American studies, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and the graduate program in Screen Cultures.
Vidura Jang Bahadur
CGCC Graduate Associate
vidurajangbahadur.com
vidurabahadur2023@u.northwestern.edu
Vidura Jang Bahadur is a photographer and is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Studies in the program of Rhetoric and Public Culture. His doctoral thesis explores Indian identity, and citizenship from the perspective of the ethnic Chinese living across the country. The project builds on Bahadur’s extensive photographic work on the community (2003-2015) and disputes easy understandings of nation, national culture, identity, and belonging.
Ryan Bince
CGCC Graduate Associate
Ryan Bince is a fourth year student in the Rhetoric and Public Culture PhD program. His research focuses on the communicative and cultural components of togetherness. Bince uses field methods to research gathering as an organizational, political, and ecological experience. His current project deals with crowds and mass coordination.
Eva Celem
CGCC Graduate Associate
Eva R. Célem is a second-year student with a BA and MA in Design from PUC-Rio. In her recent work she developed a critical analysis of feminist subjectification processes through the case study of second-wave feminist practice of Consciousness-Raising, engaging with the tensions between feminism, identity, liberalism, and how said practice has influenced the development of identity politics both in the US and in Brazil. In 2019, Eva held a Visiting Scholar appointment at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, where she conducted vast archival research that supported this work. Her current interests include memory construction processes and truth-producing discourses within the Brazilian political context.
Skylar Clark
CGCC Graduate Associate
Skylar Clark is a second-year student in the Rhetoric and Public Culture Doctoral Program. She completed her BA in English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. Her research interests center around the rhetorical, political and affective potential of bodies touching and moving together, particularly through the ontologically constitutive and institutionally resistant practices of protest, dance, performance, and music making. She is currently working towards producing a master’s thesis which will cover the relationship between community, identity discourse and musical production in the context of feminist and queer intersectional social justice organizing in Poland. As part of this project, she recently traveled to Poland for an archival and ethnographic research trip graciously funded by the slavic department’s Radulovacki Grant.