Sarah Casteel Founding & Current Co-Director
Sarah Casteel is a Professor in the Department of English where she teaches postcolonial and diaspora literatures and Graduate Supervisor of the Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Her research areas include Caribbean literature and hemispheric approaches to the literatures of the Americas as well as theories of diaspora and transnationalism. She is the recipient of the Marston LaFrance Fellowship, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Carleton University (2021-22), Norman Raab Foundation Fellow, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC (2022), and was named as the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair in Global Modernities, University of Potsdam, Germany (2021). She is the author of Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2016), Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (University of Virginia Press, 2007) and the co-editor of Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Most recently, Casteel published Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art (Columbia University Press, 2024).
Birgit Hopfener Co-Director
Birgit Hopfener is an art historian of contemporary art and theory in a global framework. She is Associate Professor in the School for the Study of Art and Culture at Carleton University, cross-appointed with the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. In her research and teaching the question “what shapes contemporary art’s historicity in a global framework?” is the starting point to examine what multiple and transculturally entangled historiographies and epistemologies constitute art, and are operative through art’s various agents, institutions and concepts. She authored the book Installationskunst in China. Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen (2013) and co-edited the volumes Negotiating Difference: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Context (2012) and Situating Global Art. Topologies – Temporalities – Trajectories (2018). She serves on the editorial boards of Art Journal, 21: Inquiries, and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and is a founding member of the international research groups Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Cultural Exchange (trACE) and Worlding Public Cultures. From 2021-2023, Hopfener was the inaugural recipient of the Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations (RMPP).
Ming Tiampo Founding & Current Co-Director
Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History, and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. She is interested in transnational and transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for critically reimagining global narratives. Tiampo’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honorable mention for the Robert Motherwell Book award. In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim Museum in NY, and co-edited Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Brill Academic Press). Her latest book, Jin-me Yoon, was published with Art Canada Institute in 2023. Her current research projects include Mobile Subjects: Contrapuntal Modernisms, a monograph and digital humanities project that examines post-Imperial histories of migration with an emphasis on artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the former French and British Empires, as well as Intersecting Modernisms, a co-edited sourcebook on global modernisms. Her research collaborations include Asia Forum, the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex, and Worlding Public Cultures, for which she is the co-lead. Tiampo serves on the boards of ici Berlin, the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Catherine Khordoc Founding Co-Director
Catherine Khordoc is Professor of French at Carleton University, and former Associate Dean and Interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Khordoc is currently Deputy Provost (Academic Operations and Planning) at Carleton University. She teaches courses on Québécois Francophone and Québécois literatures, with a focus on transcultural and transnational writing. She is also cross-appointed to the School of Canadian Studies and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Her research focuses on contemporary Québécois literature treating issues of personal and collective identity in relation to immigration, multiculturalism (or interculturalism), exile and integration. She is interested in exploring how this body of literature contributes to reconsiderations of Québec’s culture and nationhood. She also has interests in comparative francophone literatures, as well as comparative literatures of Canada and Québec. She has published articles in books and journals on such authors as Monique Bosco, Francine Noël, Ernest Pépin, Jorge Semprun and Hédi Bouraoui and has co-edited a book of essays titled Comparing Migration: The Literatures of Canada and Québec / Migrance comparée : Les littératures du Canada et du Québec (2008). Her book, Tours et détours: Le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine, was published in 2012 by the University of Ottawa Press.
Emily Putnam Managing Director
Emily Putnam is the Managing Director of the CTCA. She is interested in the question of what we owe to each other, how we build more-than-self spaces, and how we imagine more compassionate possible worlds. A PhD candidate and occasional contract instructor at Carleton University, Emily is a specialist of contemporary art in Canada. Her research areas include socially engaged art, public art, processes of archiving, memory studies, and global urban histories. Her doctoral dissertation, Archival Imaginaries in Public Cultures looks at contemporary artists in Toronto that work with concepts/processes of archiving as a method of storytelling, history-writing, and speculative futures. Selected curatorial projects include Emma Nishimura: Generations of an Archive (Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre until July 2024), fragmented body (Glad Day Bookshop, Toronto, 2023), Norman Takeuchi: Long Division (Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa, 2022), Sites of Memory: Legacies of the Japanese Canadian Internment (Carleton University Art Gallery, Sept 2019-Jan 2020). From 2021-2024, Emily served as an Advisory Board member for the City of Ottawa’s Heritage Commemoration policy project, “Remembering Ottawa: Stories and Legacies.” As the CTCA’s Managing Director, she organizes discursive events and conversations about the ways art and culture connect us globally, and manages the day-to-day operations and administrative work.