Global Port Cities Symposium January 22–23, 2026
Lavin-Bernick Center, Room 203 (Stibbs)

Tulane Global Humanities Center (TGHC) hosts its first major symposium on “Global Port Cities,” a theme that invites scholars, artists, and architects to explore port cities as terraqueous spaces, as historical sites, as zones of engagement where transnational flows of peoples, goods, and ideas forge creative spaces. Port cities have many characteristics in common, both negative and positive; they struggle with environmental crisis, susceptibility to epidemics, and endemic forms of crime, poverty, and corruption. Yet they are distinguished by high levels of multilingualism, social relationality, cosmopolitanism, and creativity. Leveraging the complex layers of history in New Orleans, TGHC envisions this symposium as a harbor for connections across time and space and a means by which to expand our community.

Arjun Appadurai
Keynote Speaker

• Victor Campbell
• Myriam J. A. Chancy
• Mahmoud Chouki
• Keller Easterling
• Brent Hayes Edwards
• Brian T. Edwards
• Allison Emmerson
• Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez
• Aarthi Janakiraman
• Justin Leidwanger
• Vijayanthi V. Rao

Biographies

Arjun Appadurai (NYU)

Arjun Appadurai (NYU) Arjun Appadurai is Emeritus Professor Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is a Founding Editor of Public Culture, and is a widely recognized expert on globalization, media, nationalism and higher education. He is the author of more than fifteen books and a hundred and fifty articles, and is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was educated at Elphinstone College (Mumbai), Brandeis University and The University of Chicago. He has taught at many outstanding American and international universities. In 2026, he will serve as the Niklas Luhmann Distinguished Chair in Social Theory at the University of Bielefeld.

Iñaki Alday (Tulane)

Iñaki Alday is Dean of Tulane University School of Architecture and the Built Environment. Together with Margarita Jover, he founded aldayjover architecture and landscape in 1996 in Barcelona. The multidisciplinary, research-based practice focuses on innovation and is particularly renowned for its leadership in a new approach to the relation between cities and rivers, in which the natural dynamics of flooding become part of the public space, eliminating the idea of “catastrophe.” Alday has taught at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the University of Navarra and the University of Virginia.

Kate Baldwin (Tulane)

Kate Baldwin is Professor of English, Communication, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tulane University, where she specializes in 20th-century U.S. and Russian literatures, Cold War culture, feminist theory, and creative fiction. She is the author of Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red (Duke, 2002) and The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side (Dartmouth, 2016). Her publications include numerous articles, book chapters, and op-eds in popular and academic sources.

Myriam J. A. Chancy (Scripps)

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author most recently of the novel Village Weavers (Tin House), a Time Best Book of April 2024 and winner of the 2025 Fiction OCM Bocas Award in Caribbean Literature. Her work has received multiple awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Guyana Prize in Literature, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Gold Prize, and the Isis Duarte Book Prize. Her past novels include: What Storm, What Thunder, The Loneliness of Angels, The Scorpion’s Claw and Spirit of Haiti. She is also the author of several academic books, including Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters and Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in California.

Keller Easterling (Yale)

Keller Easterling is a designer, writer and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. She is currently working on a book about land activism in the US after the Civil Rights Movement. Other books include Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT 1999). Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934-1960. Easterling lectures and exhibits internationally. Her research and writing were included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist in Architecture and Design.

Brian T. Edwards (Tulane)

Brian T. Edwards is the Herb Weil, PhD Professor of the Humanities and Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane. His books include Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb (Duke, 2005), Globalizing American Studies (co-edited with Dilip Gaonkar, Chicago, 2010), and After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia, 2016) as well as essays, Op Eds, and creative nonfiction in a wide range of publications both scholarly and mainstream. His most recent publications are “Port Cities, Creative Cities” in Public Culture 36.3 (2024) and “Logics of Port Cities” in Water Logics (2026). With his longtime collaborator Driss Ksikes, he is currently writing a book entitled Navigating the World to Come: Thinking with Port Cities, based on research in port cities on five continents including Tangier, Dakar, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Salvador, New Orleans, Naples, and Marseille.

Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia)

Brent Hayes Edwards, is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the editor of the journal PMLA. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003) and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017). His most recent publications are the co-edited volume Écrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a collection of the interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, and Easily Slip into Another World (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, which won the American Book Award.

Allison Emmerson (Tulane)

Allison Emmerson is a Roman archaeologist and Associate Professor in the department of Classical Studies at Tulane University. She is particularly interested in the “marginal” aspects of ancient urbanism, not only literal city edges and the activities they attracted, such as waste management and the treatment of the dead, but also the people who have been marginalized both in ancient life and in modern reconstructions of it, including women, the enslaved, and the nonelite. She has worked at Pompeii for nearly two decades, and currently directs Tulane’s “Pompeii I.14 Project,” investigating a block on the southern side of the ancient city.

Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez (Tulane)

Born in Actopan, Mexico, Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez is the author of four novels, including Season of the Swamp, which was a finalist for the 2024 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction and winner of the The Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015 and included in many Best-of-Year lists, including The Guardian‘s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books, going on to win the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. All of his novels have been translated into English by Lisa Dillman. Herrera-Gutiérrez teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Aarthi Janakiraman (Tulane)

Aarthi Janakiraman, Assistant Professor of Preservation and Urbanism at Tulane, is an urban planner and designer whose work explores the spatial politics of heritage conservation. Focusing particularly on UNESCO’s World Heritage program within cities in the Global South, her research examines the relationship between the built environment and social justice through the lens of heritage. Aarthi’s current book project investigates the role of colonial-era World Heritage in postcolonial societies in the Indian Ocean Region.

Justin Leidwanger (Stanford)

Justin Leidwanger is an Associate Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Classics at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and, by courtesy, in the Department of Oceans at its Doerr School of Sustainability. In the field and lab, his work examines maritime mobilities, interactions, and traditions, especially through the lens of ports and shipwrecks in Türkiye and Sicily. By exploring the connections and practices that shaped coastal communities amid economically, socially, and politically changing worlds, he aims to understand Rome’s integration and fragmentation and the longer historical arc along which we situate Mediterranean antiquity.

Andrew McDowell (Tulane)

Andrew McDowell, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane, researches care, contagion, pharmaceuticals, diagnosis, and inequality in North and Western Indian social worlds entangled with tuberculosis. His book, Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India, traces the complex relationships between development, disease, inequality, and biomedicine to theorize atmospheric but life changing connections forged by breath. Breathless won the AIIS’s 2023 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences.

Tatsuya Murakami (Tulane)

Tatsuya Murakami, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane, focuses on the materiality of sociopolitical processes in Central Mexico. His research is especially concerned with developing a set of concepts and methodologies to discern the complex social landscapes of power and identity based on multidisciplinary approaches, including the application of archaeometric methods. He has conducted research at the Classic period site of Teotihuacan and the Formative era site of Tlalancaleca, Puebla, Mexico. His current research is investigating broader regional and macroregional processes leading to the development of early cities and states in Central Mexico.

Vyjayanthi Rao (Yale)

Vyjayanthi V. Rao is an anthropologist, writer, artist and curator, currently teaching at the Yale School of Architecture. Her work focuses on the built environment and urbanism in India and the United States, specifically comparing Mumbai and New York. She has published extensively on urban transformation and she serves as an Editor in Chief of the journal Public Culture (Duke University Press). She is the chief curator of the third editor of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, opening in November 2026.

Chelsea Stieber (Tulane)

Chelsea Stieber, Associate Professor and Gore Chair in French Studies, specializes in nineteenth-century Caribbean literature, history, and culture with an emphasis on Haiti. She is the author of Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 (New York University Press, 2020) and co-editor with Brandon R. Byrd of the critical translation of Louis-Joseph Janvier’s Haiti for the Haitians (Liverpool University Press, 2023). She is currently working on two book projects: The first is an exploration of writing from free people of color in the Antilles during the period of general emancipation and its aftermath and the second is a project on Caribbean Fascism, for which she was awarded an ACLS fellowship.

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (Tulane)

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian, is a literary scholar working at the intersection of Maghrebi literature, Mediterranean Studies, and Critical Ocean Studies. She is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean (2017) and, most recently, the co-editor of Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Environments (2025) and Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (2026).