Rachel Carson College Faculty Fellows
Sikina Jinnah is Rachel Carson College's new faculty chair!
The Chair of the Faculty is an Academic Senate member, other than the Provost, who is elected by the college Faculty to serve a two year term, and will serve as a member of the Executive Committee.
Dr. Jinnah is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department, an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department, and a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, and in particular the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance.
- Title
- Professor Emerita
- Division Social Sciences Division
- Department
- Anthropology Department
- Affiliations Humanities Division, Feminist Studies Department, East Asian Studies
- Phone 831-459-3615
- Office Location
- Social Sciences 1, 323
- Office Hours By appointment
- Mail Stop Social Sciences 1 Faculty Services
Summary of Expertise
Lisa Rofel has consistently brought feminist, postcolonial and Marxist poststructuralist approaches to bear on questions of modernity, postsocialism, capitalism, desire, queer identities, and transnational encounters. She has written extensively about China. Rofel was trained in East Asian History at Brown University in the 1970s and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University in the 1980s. Her publications include: Desiring China (Duke University Press), which addresses how public culture events in China produce desiring subjects, including soap operas, gay public life, cosmopolitan practices, and financial news; Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in Post-Mao China, which addresses how modernity is not a universal logic or an evolutionary tale of progress but a disparate and shifting set of discourses and practices about otherness. Rofel is currently at work on a collaborative project on the Twenty-first Century Silk Road between Italy and China (with Sylvia Yanagisako), a co-edited volume on Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics (with Petrus Liu) and a co-edited volume on contemporary documentary filmmaking in China (with Chris Berry).
Research Interests
Teaching Specialties: Critical theory, feminist anthropology, popular culture, political economy, contemporary China, gender and sexuality.
Area of Research: Urban political economy and culture, popular culture, gender and science, transnational capitalism.
Area of Fieldwork: China
Biography, Education and Training
B.A., Brown University
M.A., Ph.D., Stanford University
Selected Publications
- Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture. Duke University Press. 2007.
- Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. University of California Press. 1999.
- Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State (with Christina Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, and Tyrene White). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1994.
- "Modernity's Masculine Fantasies," In Bruce Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 175-193. 2002.
- "Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9(3):637-649. 2001.
- "'Yearnings': Televisual Love and Melodramatic Politics in Contemporary China," American Ethnologist 21 (4): 700-722, November 1994.
