CWC Global: From Ground Zero

Mona Damluji is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked as a freelance producer and editing assistant for independent documentary filmmakers and television outlets including PBS, NBC Olympics, and the National Geographic Channel. Mona’s teaching, research, and creative work engages underrepresented media histories and cultural studies of energy, cities, and infrastructure centered in the Middle East and its diasporas.

Her current book project, Pipeline Cinema, is a history of how multinational petroleum companies have shaped local cultural norms and global popular imaginaries of oil in Iran and Iraq through film use and cultural sponsorship in the twentieth century. She is the producer of two seasons of the short documentary series The Secret Life of Muslims, and a co-curator of the traveling exhibition Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture and Multitudes: An Art Exhibit after #muslimban. Mona recently authored Together (Seven Stories Press), a children’s book and poem celebrating the power of collective action.

Elisabeth Weber received her PhD from the University of Freiburg, Germany, with a dissertation on the concepts of trauma and persecution in Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy. Her research and teaching focuses on the ways in which literature and critical theory can contribute to an exploration of trauma, of human rights and their violations, and to a reflection on concepts whose definitions have become more and more uncertain, including concepts of the human, democracy, justice, and rights. She is an instructor in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s “Foundations in the Humanities” prison correspondence program, and one of the co-conveners of the IHC Research Focus Group “Catastrophes: Thinking Shoah and Nakba Together.” Among her books are Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of U.S. Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare (Punctum 2017); Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace (Fordham 2013); Speaking About Torture, co-edited with Julie Carlson (Fordham, 2012); and Questioning Judaism (interviews with leading French philosophers and historians, Stanford 2004).

Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media cultures, environmental media, and critical public health studies in English and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her early writings on global media cultures include When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) while her current research on media and risk is published in the co-edited Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020) and in The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).