Elena Kim is a professor of Social Sciences at the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She is currently a visiting psychology professor at Bard College, New York. Elena’s teaching and research focus is on gender and international development, gender-based violence, and gender politics in Central Asia. More specifically, her ethnographies concerned practices such as child marriage, bride kidnapping, and foreign-funded crisis intervention in Kyrgyzstan.

Elena has served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environmental Program, and UN Women on matters of investigating intersections between gender, women, and violence. Her publications include chapters in several books and articles including the Child Indicators Research, Violence against Women, Journal of Gender Studies, Gender, Technology and Development, Central Asian Survey, Rural Society, and Women and Therapy. You can contact her at ekim@bard.edu

Agata Lisiak is a Migration Studies professor and Academic Director of the Internship Program at Bard College Berlin. She earned an M.A. in International Relations (University of Economics Poznan, 2002), an M.Phil. in Literary Studies (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2005), and a Dr. Phil. in Media and Communication Studies (University of Halle-Wittenberg, 2009). She was a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University’s Institute of Social Sciences (2013-2017) and a Marie Curie Actions/EURIAS fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna (2013-2014).

She also worked in the cultural sector as a project coordinator and curator. Agata works at the intersections of migration studies, urban sociology, and cultural studies. Together with Elena Vacchelli, Agata is co-founder of migART: a platform showcasing activist, research, and teaching projects that creatively and collaboratively engage with migration.

a.lisiak@berlin.bard.edu

Alys Moody is an Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, Annandale. Her areas of expertise include 20th- and 21st-century European, American, and world literature, with an emphasis on modernism and its contemporary heirs. She received her doctorate at the University of Oxford after completing undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on how the persistence and proliferation of modernism’s aesthetic ideas have shaped the way authors, scholars, and the public think about literature and its role in society. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2018) and coeditor, with Stephen J. Ross, of the anthology Global Modernists on Modernism.

She has written on literature and contemporary art for such publications as the Journal of Beckett Studies, American Literary History, and Theatre Journal; authored book and theater reviews in, among others, Irish Studies Review, Syndicate, The Comparatist, and Beckett Circle: Newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society. Professor Moody is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and a Humanities Traveling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. You can contact her at amoody@bard.edu

Mohira Suyarkulova is an associate professor at the Department of International and Comparative Politics at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, UK (2011) with a thesis focusing on Tajik-Uzbek relations. Her research is interdisciplinary and bridges academia, activism, and art. Mohira focuses on politics in Central Asia, focusing on politics of environment, gender, and sexuality in the region. Most recently she has been engaged as a postdoctoral fellow in an international project on the environmental and social history of the Naryn/ Syr Darya River. She is also engaged in leftist, feminist, and LGBTQ+ activism. You can reach out to her at suyarkulova_m@auca.kg