Prof. Batiste's interests include the relationships between representation, performance, identity, race, and power. Her research and teaching focus on the ways in which cultural texts, like literature, theater, performance, film, art, and bodies, act as imaginative systems that create identity, cultural values, human interactions, and possibilities of justice. Her teaching reflects this in the broad array of materials she uses to bring students to an interdisciplinary understanding of texts, theory, and history. Her book, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance (Duke University Press, 2011) examines the complicated ways African Americans participated in American ideologies of cultural imperialism—ideologies like expansionism and primitivism. Professor Batiste's most recent work focuses on performance, affect, and violence in millennial Los Angeles.

Research interests: Gender studies and Feminist theory, the body, theories of subjectivity, British and European modernism, fin de siecle literature, critical and cultural theory, theories of mass culture. Her main publications include Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (1996); Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (2014); and various articles on masculinity, Walter Benjamin, and James Joyce. With Enda Duffy, she co-edited Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism (2011). She also translated Antonio Negri's book: Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999).

Prof. Cook's central interests include Eighteenth-century British and French literature and cultural studies. She is the author of Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (1996); and of articles on early modern scientific and poetic conventions for representing the natural world. Her current research is on early modern writing about forests and trees and on the history of environmental ethics. She co-edited Invaluable Trees: the Cultures of Nature 1660-1830, with Laura Auricchio and Guilia Pacini (SVEC, 2012).