Moderator

Mark Crispin Miller, NYU

Panelists

Rossana Reguillo ITESO, (Mexico), “La razón re-encantada: magia, neoreligión y rituales en la era del colapso”
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett NYU, “Jewish Responses To 9/11”
Julio Ortega Brown University, "La representación de la violencia: preguntas sin respuesta"

Biographies

Rossana Reguillo Cruz is Professor of Research in the Department of Sociocultural Studies at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, ITESO (Western Institute of Advanced Studies), Guadalajara, Mexico. She currently studies youth, urban cultures, communication and mass media, with special interest in the cultural relationship between communication and human rights. She has been a visiting professor in several Latin American universities and in Europe and the United States.

Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, University Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, teaches the aesthetics of everyday life, world's fairs, museum theatre, tourist productions, food and performance, Jewish performance, folklore and ethnography. She is the recipient of many awards, including Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her most recent book, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (1998) engages lively debates about the production of heritage, limits of multiculturalism, social efficacy of the arts and circulation of value in the life world.

Julio Ortega is a Peruvian playwright who has written plays since 1964, when he was a literature student at Universidad Católica del Perú. His pieces have been staged in several Latin American countries, and some of them have been performed in English and German. He won the Universidad de San Marcos Theatre Award with Mesa Pelada, about the Peruvian guerrilla movement in the sixties. His short novel, Adiós Ayacucho, translated to English by Edith Grossman, was adapted for the stage by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani and performed in several festivals in Latin America and Europe. Currently, Ortega is Professor at Brown University.