Cynthia Franklin

Contact:
cfrankli@hawaii.edu

In both my teaching and research, I am interested in contemporary works--primarily but not exclusively written in the U.S.--that challenge genre boundaries, and that engage issues in feminist and queer theory, life writing, studies of race and ethnicity, and cultural studies. My work increasingly takes up questions pertaining to Palestine. Courses that I have taught explore topics including: the humanities and human rights; memoir and disability; love and terror; decolonial love; education and culture; and multi-genre women's literature.

My most recent book, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea, was just published this spring of 2023 with Fordham University Press.  An essay “Eichmann and his Ghosts: The Unstable Status of the Human, and Uncivil States,” which appears in Cultural Critique 88 (Fall 2014) comes from that project, as does a recent essay in American Quarterly, "Narrative Humanity and Post-9/11 Dehumanization: Zeitoun as Case Study." I am also the author of Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today (2009) and Writing Women's Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies (1997).

Essays and review articles also appear in American Quarterly, Biography, Cultural Critique, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Hitting Critical Mass, Life Writing, LIT, MELUS, The Contemporary Pacific, and in Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating's This Bridge We Call Home, and in Fred Ho's Diary of a Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level.

A significant part of my work is collaborative. With Ibrahim Aoude and Morgan Cooper, I co-edited a special issue of Biography, "Life in Occupied Palestine," available for free download on Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/31638. This project emerged out of trip to the West Bank on a fellowship from PARC (Palestinian American Research Center). More about this project and events held in relation to it in London, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Palestine can be found on our website.  http://palestinianlives.net

I have co-edited two other special issues of Biography: with Miram Fuchs, "Translating Lives," and with Laura Lyons, "Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing." In that issue appears our introduction, "Bodies of Evidence and the Intricate Machines of Untruth," and our interviews with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Haunani-Kay Trask. I also have collaborated with Laura Lyons on articles entitled "Remixing Hybridity: Globalization, Native Resistance, and Cultural Production in Hawai'i" (in American Studies and Acoma); "From Grief to Grievance: Ethics and Politics in the Testimony of Anti-War Mothers" (in Life Writing and Trauma Texts); and “‘I Have a Family’: Relational Witnessing and the Evidentiary Power of Grief in the Gwen Araujo Case” (in GLQ).

In addition to co-editing the journal Biography with Craig Howes and John Zuern, I have served on the editorial board for American Quarterly. I am also a member of the newly established Editorial Collective for EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities). As well, I have served as Director of the Honors Program in English and on the International Cultural Studies Program Steering Committee, and have been active in campus-wide organizations including Mauna Kea Protectors at UH, Thriving University for a Thriving Hawai'i, the UH GMO Education Project and the University Peace Initiative.

I am particularly committed to doing Palestine solidarity work, and since 2013 have been part of the Organizing Collective of USACBI, the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. I also founded UH Faculty and Students for Justice in Palestine, and co-founded the Hawai'i Coalition for Justice in Palestine (HCJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace-Hawai'i. In spring 2018, I did a short-term residency at Al-Quds University and served on a team that developed a partnership between Al-Quds and UH.

 


Areas of Interest


Contemporary US literatures, critical ethnic studies, life writing, disability studies, queer and feminist theory, genre studies, cultural studies, university politics, Palestine


Awards


Frances Davis Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1998.
Board of Regents' Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2007.
PARC Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) Fellow, Faculty Development Seminar, 2013.


Education


BA, Stanford University; MA and PhD, University of California-Berkeley


Courses


Fall Semester 2024
  • ENG-311: Autobiographical Writing
  • ENG-455: U.S. Women’s Literature and Culture

Spring Semester 2024
  • ENG-775: Seminar in Cultural Studies: Humanism and the Human

Fall Semester 2023
  • ENG-311: Autobiographical Writing
  • ENG-464: Studies: Life Writing

Spring Semester 2023
  • ENG-272: Introduction to Literature: Culture and Literature: Love & Politics
  • ENG-775: Seminar in Cultural Studies: Colonial Love / Decolonial Love

Fall Semester 2022
  • ENG-311: Autobiographical Writing