Nancy C. Iff’s (participated 2015-2017) research and scholarship focus on new media, cinema studies, popular culture, textual theory, and classics. She received a Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Textual Studies in 2011 from the University of Washington, along with Doctoral Certification in the Cinema and Media Studies Program and the Program in Theory and Criticism. Dr. Iff has taught English, Comparative Literature, Film, Comparative History of Ideas, and Classics courses, both at the University of Washington in Seattle and at Hunter College in New York on topics such as comics, food, mythology, the undead, and detective fiction, amongst others.
Logan O’Laughlin (participated 2016-2017) is a graduate student in the department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at UW. They received their M.A. in Feminist Studies in 2015, conducting critical discourse analyses on popular representations of intersex fish and frogs exposed to toxins. Logan's doctoral dissertation continues to explore representations of toxicity in popular culture, paying specific attention to the way that toxic spills co-articulate species with race, gender, and sex. Logan has taught courses such as Interdisciplinary Writing for the Social Sciences in Feminist Studies and Masculinities: Circulation, Contestation and Transformation. Logan is involved with the Critical Animal Studies Working Group and co-organizes the UW Que(e)ry Project, which is compiling a campus-wide survey to assess queer and trans students’ experiences with discrimination.
David Giles’ (participated 2015-2016) research experience includes five years of ethnographic participant-observation in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Melbourne (Australia), and smaller North American cities, with chapters of Food Not Bombs—a globalized movement of autonomous groups that scavenge, glean, or dumpster-dive for food discarded by local markets, distribute it freely in public places, and in the process contest local geographies of homelessness and disparity. This research reflects his commitments to an anthropology that is both public and politically-engaged. His teaching interests have included the Political Economy of Homelessness, Urban Studies, Protest, the History of Liberal Political Philosophy, Post-Colonial Studies, Existentialism, and the Anthropology of Popular Culture. He has also studied and performed extensively within a range of musical traditions, including free jazz, ska, and punk rock. And he is an avid fan of the television show Doctor Who.
Kathryn (Katie) Gillespie's (participated 2015-2016) work explores geographies of food and agriculture and structures of power and privilege related to nonhuman animal lives, bodies and deaths. She is working on a book, The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 [under contract with University of Chicago Press], about the lives of cows in dairy production in the Pacific Northwestern United States. She is co-editor of Critical Animal Geographies [Routledge, 2015] and Economies of Death [Routledge, 2015].