Polymathic Pizza: "Do You Have the Time?" - ReconFiguring Temporality

Dr. Sarah M.A. Gualtieri’s research and teaching bridge several fields, notably Middle East Migration Studies, Arab American Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies with a particular focus on questions of race, gender, and power.

Gualtieri’s first book, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora examines the history of Arab racial formation in the United States with a particular focus on the problematic of “whiteness.” Gualtieri’s second book, Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California uncovers the stories of Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian migrants in Southern California, focusing on connections to and through Latin America and the multiethnic solidarities that emerge from them. 

Professor Gualtieri teaches undergraduate courses on “Women and Revolution in the Middle East,” the “Modern Middle East”, “Race and Class in Los Angeles,” and “Arabs in America.” She teaches several graduate seminars, including “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Race and Ethnicity,” and has supervised Ph.D. theses on topics ranging from U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East, to Afro-Arab encounters, and Palestinian cinematic activism. She is especially proud of her role as co-founder of the Critical Southwest Asian and North African Research Cluster at USC – which has served as a mentorship hub for students and faculty. Gualtieri served for two years as Director of Graduate Studies for the department of American Studies and Ethnicity, overseeing admissions and professionalization. She also served as interim Chair of the department in 2023-24.

Professor Gualtieri’s scholarship has been supported by numerous national fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS); and Social Science Research Council (SSRC). She is also the recipient of several competitive USC awards and two undergraduate teaching awards. Most recently, with funding from the Boston Center for Antiracist Research, she led a team of five scholars in researching the racialization of Middle Eastern and North African American communities in the United States, using documents held by the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and its many branches. She conducts research in Arabic, French, Spanish and English.  

Gualtieri was Visiting Professor at Princeton University in Spring 2023.

Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux received a BFA from the Art Center College of Design and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Arceneaux constructs drawings, installations, video and film works as complex arrangements of association that examine adjacencies and points of contact between implausible relations. Arceneaux received the prestigious Mike Kelley Foundation Award in 2019 and the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship in 2020.

He played a seminal role in the creation of the Watts House Project, a redevelopment initiative to remodel a series of houses around the Watts Towers, serving as director from 1999 to 2012.  

In 2024, Edgar was an artist-in-residence with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and for the summer of 2025, he joined the Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida artists residency program in Reno, Nevada and the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V., in Berlin, Germany. 

Edgar had three solo exhibitions in the fall of 2025 at the Nevada Museum of Art, Dreamsong Gallery, Minneapolis and 68projects in Berlin, Germany. 

Constantly working in new modes, Arceneaux directed his first play Until, Until, Until.. at the Performa Biannual in NYC in November 2015 and was awarded the Malcolm McLaren, Best of Show Award. Until… celebrated its 10th year of touring in 2024 at the MCA Chicago Theater. One of his newest three plays Boney Manilli, loosely inspired by the infamous pop duo Milli Vanilli, was staged in Nigeria at the Lagos Theater Festival in 2019. US premieres were in 2023 at REDCAT and the Walker Art Center in 2025. The Mirror is You, co-written and directed by Arceneaux premiered at the Nuit Blanche Festival in Paris, France and The Western Auditions, centered on the extraordinary lives of Samuel and Edmonia Lewis, is slated to play at Tin Works in 2026.

He has participated in the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva Island, Florida, Art Pace in San Antonio; Skowhegan: Banff Center in Canada, the Fachhochschule Aachen, in Germany and most recently the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Solo exhibitions have been presented at the Vera List Center at MIT in Cambridge, Mass, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem and Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland. His work is in major museum collections at the Whitney Museum, MOMA NY, Carnegie Museum, Museum Ludwig in Köln, Germany, the Hammer Museum and LACMA to name a few. He is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles and Nathalie Obadia in Paris, and is an Associate Professor of Art for Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California. Recognized as a national leader in the arts, Arceneaux also serves on the Board of Directors at Creative Capital.