Students

Mal Ahern Randall Albers Kenneth D. AllanEduardo de AlmeidaDavid AlworthSamuel BakerW. Ian BourlandJames E. Brunson IIIAnna Brzyski Valeria CammarataKris CohenJennifer Ruddock-CordileoneBenjamin DavidRebecca DeRooTanya FernandoTimothy ErwinRobert Friedman Maki FukuokaBernard Dionysius GeogheganDavid GrubbsMing Dong GuHannah HigginsJames Hodge Matthew HoferZachary R. Hooker Adam JollesElizabeth A. KesslerJulia Langbein Jacob Henry LevetonDarby Lewes Riccardo MarchiStephen Paul MillerKristine NielsenAlison PearlmanAnthony RaynsfordRebecca Reynolds John Paul RiccoChrista Noel Robbins Michael RobbinsJeffrey SaletnikRaél Jero SalleyEdward ShankenDanielle ShiHarmon Siegel Levi SmithMargaret SoltanFreida High W. TesfagiorgisDaniel TiffanyOrrin WangAmanda WongPanpan Yang Tina YarboroughPaul YoungRebecca Zorach

Mal Ahern: malahern@uw.edu

Mal Ahern is a media theorist and Assistant Professor at the University of Washington where she draws on the methodologies of labor history and history of technology to explore the nature of artificially produced images. Her first book project Factory Forms directly expounds on the invention of new media technologies (especially film) in the wake of World War II and how they found their expression in both popular culture and the art world.

Previously, Ahern worked in the collection of Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY, where she helped complete a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project to catalog the Museum’s silent- and early sound-era holdings. She is especially interested in the historical and theoretical intersections between film and photography (and archives!).


Randall Albers: ralbers@colum.edu
Chair Emeritus, Fiction Writing Department
Columbia College
Chicago 600 South Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60605

Randall Albers chaired the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago, home to the Story Workshop and one of the largest graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs in the country. He is also founding producer of the Story Week Festival of Writers, now one of Chicago’s largest literary festivals. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review, Northfield Magazine, Mendocino Review, F Magazine, Writing From Start to Finish, and elsewhere. A chapter from his novel-in-progress, All the World Before Them, appearing in the Summer 2001 issue of F Magazine, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Selections from his roundtable discussion with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Bharati Mukherjee, April Sinclair, Don De Grazia, and Geling Yan, “Censorship and the Writer’s Voice,” is forthcoming in F Magazine (Fall 2002). He is also co-writer and co-producer of the Story Workshop creative writing video tapes, “The Living Voice Moves” and Story from First Impulse to Final Draft,” and has appeared at numerous national conferences on writing and the teaching of writing. A Certified Story Workshop Master Teacher, he is a former recipient of the Columbia College Teaching Excellence Award.


Kenneth D. Allan: allank@seattleu.edu
Associate Professor of Art History
Seattle University
Department of Fine Arts
901 12th Avenue P.O. Box 222000
Seattle, WA 98122-1090

Ken Allan is an Associate Professor of Art History at Seattle University who specializes in post-World War II American & European art. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2005. Recent upper-division courses and seminars have included, “Space & Site in Contemporary Art” and “Art of the 1960s: Origins of Postmodernism.” He is currently working on a book on artistic practice, social space and spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles. Recent publications include a book review of Cecile Whiting’s Pop L. A.: Art and the City in the 1960s for Art Journal and an essay on the notion of the avant-garde in 1950s Los Angeles in Archives of American Art Journal. He has also published catalog essays on Lee Lozano and David Reed in Blanton Museum of Art: American Art since 1900 (University of Texas at Austin, 2006), and articles and reviews on figures such as Ed Ruscha, Walter Hopps, Tim Hawkinson and Mark Allen in X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly (where Allan is on the editorial board). Allan is also on the editorial board of the Association for the Study of Arts in the Present (ASAP). He has presented his work at conferences in the UK, Canada and the US. In 2007-2008, he was invited to speak at the Getty Center for the conference “Cote a Cote-Coast to Coast: Art and Jazz in France and California,” and at a symposium accompanying the Ed Ruscha and Photography exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago.


Eduardo de Almeida: dealmeid@uchicago.edu
Ph.D. Student
Department of English
University of Chicago

Eduardo de Almeida is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English. His research interests include early American literary and cultural production, media theory, Asian American literature, and critical theory. His dissertation attends to the poetics of repetition and form in examining the ways in which contingency and contagion are mutually inflected in Asian American literature. Currently, Eduardo’s research is focused on exploring the relationships between modalities of colonizing imperatives in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century transatlantic print and visual culture. One final thing: there sits, atop the list of texts he hopes never to encounter, the following title: “eXistenDing Digits: Transcoding the Anaesthetics of Puppetry.”


David Alworth: alworth@fas.harvard.edu
Research Associate / Visiting Full Professor
Department of English
Harvard University / Stony Brook University (SUNY)

David J. Alworth took his Ph.D. in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His first monograph, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton 2016) conceptualizes the social as an association of humans and nonhumans by examining site-specific literary and visual art in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere––upon publication, Alworth won the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the Media Ecology Association.

Additionally, Alworth completed The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature (with Peter Mendelsund, Ten Speed/Crown/Penguin Random House, 2020) and has ben selected as the editor of a forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of American Literature. His public writings have appeared in venues ranging from Public Books and The Los Angeles Review of Books to New Literary History and American Literary History. Most recently, Alworth’s research was featured in a special edition of New Literary History devoted to “New Sociologies of Literature.” His areas of specialization include twentieth-century literary and visual art, post-World War II U. S. cultural and intellectual history, social theory, media studies, ethnography, and the multidisciplinary research field known as the “cultures and histories of the human sciences.”


Samuel Baker: sebaker@austin.utexas.edu
Associate Professor
Department of English
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78713

Over the course of several monographs and research groups Sam Baker has explored the intricacies of how media representations shape public perceptions of artificial intelligence, how new media portray artificial intelligences, and how Walter Scott developed an ethos of stewardship rather than individual authorship in his antiquarian romances. You can find Baker’s works (and even works in progress) here. In 2021, he chaired the Good Systems Texas Grand Challenge which has allowed him to explore contemporary technological questions from a multidisciplinary perspective, fostering conversations around speculative fiction and the impact of COVID-19 on the future of academic research.

Baker’s first book Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture, suggest that the Romantic idea of universal culture took shape within imaginative horizons fundamentally shaped by Britain’s maritime-imperial aspirations. Before returning to academia to take his Ph.D., Professor Baker worked as a journalist and book reviewer, as well as in museums and libraries. These experiences left him something of a generalist, and he maintains broad interests in literature and art, in film and media studies, and in politics.

His current enthusiasms include works by Samuel Prout, Elizabeth Bishop, and Raul Ruiz. On a more conceptual level, he is preoccupied by the artistic and philosophical evocation of place, especially as it intersects with a cultural analysis of the built environment (infrastructure studies); by ethical theory, especially in relation to politics and gender and sexuality; and by problems in the aesthetics and sociology of representation (media studies, informatics).


W. Ian Bourland: wib@georgetown.edu
Associate Professor
Department of English
Georgetown University

Ian Bourland is Associate Professor of Art History at Georgetown University, and a critic for a range of leading publications such as frieze and Artforum. His research broadly focuses on the intersection of colonial modernity and its rhetorical forms, especially in the global south. He is the author of Bloodflowers (Duke 2019), about an afro-diasporic photographer working across the Atlantic world during the 1980s, and an entry on the group Massive Attack for the 33 1/3 series, exploring subaltern sonic cultures in England. As a former student of Tom Mitchell, issues of landscape, extraction, and the built environment—from southern Africa to the southwestern US—are key themes in many of Bourland’s writing, including the book Black/Gold, forthcoming from Penn State in 2025.


James E. Brunson III: jbrunson@niu.edu
Northern Illinois University

James Edward Brunson III is an art historian who specializes in American modernism. Brunson received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Northern Illinois University, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Scholarly interests include race and gender in Nineteenth Century America. His work has been published in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game (edited by John Thorn), NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, and Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal. Recently, McFarland Press published his book, The Early Image of Black Baseball: Race and Representation in the Popular Press, 1871-1890. Brunson’s follow-up work is tentatively titled: The Last Colored Base Ball Book (a title obviously inspired by The Last Dinosaur Book). A practicing artist who specializes in watercolor painting (Brunson painted his book cover), he teaches Hip Hop and Visual Culture at Northern Illinois University.


Anna Brzyski: Anna.Brzyski@uky.edu
Associate Professor Department of Art
University of Kentucky 207 Fine Arts Building
Lexington, KY 40506-0022
Homepage: http://www.uky.edu/~abrzy2/Index.htm

Anna Brzyski joined the faculty of the Art Department at the University of Kentucky in 2003. She teaches courses in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century European art, as well as theory, methodology, and criticism. She has taught courses on a broad range of topics, including visual culture, aesthetics, Nineteenth Century art, classicism, postmodernism, contemporary art, abstraction, and landscape. Her research interests focus broadly on how value and legitimacy have been negotiated within particular artworlds and across artword meshworks and how particular paradigms of knowledge emerge and why they are maintained. Her dissertation (“Modern Art and Nationalism in Fin de Siècle Poland”) and the majority of her publications have dealt so far with Central/Eastern Europe and in particular Poland during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. Her work has appeared in Art Criticism, Centropa, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, an anthology Art and National Identity at the Turn of the Century, edited by Michelle Facos and Sharon Hirsh (Cambridge 2003), and an anthology Local Strategies – International Ambitions. Modern Art and Central Europe, 1918-1968, edited by Vojtech Lehoda (Czech Academy of Sciences, forthcoming in 2005). She co-edited with Peter Chametzky a special issue of Centropa (September 2001) entitled “Modernism and Nationalism, Postmodernism and Postnationalism?” and is currently working on two book projects, an anthology Partisan Canons (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Art in the Age of Art History. Modernism, Nationalism and Legitimacy in Nineteenth Century Europe. Prof. Brzyski is also the project director and compiler of the Polish Art Archive, a digital database of primary source materials pertaining to Polish art, a project funded by Southern Illinois University and the US Department of Educations. She is also the designer and the site manager of the HGCEA website (Historians of German & Central European Art & Architecture). She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the ArtWorlds Press.


Valeria Cammarata: vcammarata@unipa.it
Fellow, University of Palermo
Department of Cultural Studies
Viale delle Scienze, ed. 1590128
Palermo, Italy

Valeria Cammarata is fellow of Comparative Literature at the University of Palermo. She received both her MA in Visual Culture and her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at the University of Palermo. Her dissertation was about the “Archaeology of Feminine Gaze”, focusing on women writing about science and literature between the Seventeenth Century and Eighteenth Century. Her main research field his the relationship between image and literature in European Literature (Italo Calvino, George Perec, Laurence Sterne, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood).


Kris Cohen: krcohen@reed.edu
Assistant Professor Art History and Humanities
Reed College

Kris Cohen studies intimacy and belonging in mediated environments such as the Web, publics, and works of art. He has written on web-based photography, conceptual art and copyright law, blogs, and the challenges to theory and criticism posed by writing in medias res. His dissertation sets out to conceptualize the changing politics and aesthetics of encounter by considering scenes of laughter, protest and searching in ordinary life and in the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sharon Hayes, and Thomson & Craighead.


Jennifer Ruddock-Cordileone: cordileone@uchicago.edu

Jennifer Ruddock-Cordileone received her B.A. in Art History from the University of California San Diego in 2010, earning highest honors for her thesis, “Dismantling Dominating Discourses: August Sander and Walker Evans.”  She then completed her M.A. degree in Humanities at the University of Chicago, where her research concentrated on the history and theory of photography.  Jennifer’s M.A. thesis, “Catherine Opie: Fluidity as American Landscape,” acknowledging the limitations of photographic documentation of community, explored Opie’s explicit engagement and confrontations with these very boundaries, thereby providing nuance to commonly accepted interpretations of the artist’s oeuvre. Jennifer was awarded a Graduate Research Grant from the University of Chicago to support her continuing research. In addition to formal scholarship, Jennifer’s art historical training was enhanced by several curatorial internships at diverse institutions. Most recently, she was selected as a Hilla Rebay Graduate Intern at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum where she participated in the installation of “Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective,” the implementation several public programs related to the exhibition, and the research of potential photography committee acquisitions. She also interned at: the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Museum of Photographic Arts, and the San Diego Museum of Art.


Benjamin David: bendavid@lclark.edu
Associate Professor Department of Art History
Lewis & Clark
Portland, Oregon

Benjamin David specializes in Italian art from 1300-1600, with an emphasis on Early Renaissance painting. His scholarship and teaching engage the historical and theoretical implications of the practice of narrative in Renaissance art and theories of narrative more generally. He is especially interested in the relationship between art and literature. Other research projects and courses explore the complex nature of the Renaissance engagement with classical antiquity and visualizations of Dante’s Divine Comedy from the Fourteenth Century to the present day. More recently, David’s work and teaching have been engaged with memory as a form of representation and with the work of Botticelli.  


Rebecca DeRoo: rjdgsh@rit.edu
Assistant Professor Department of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University in St. Louis
 http://artsci.wustl.edu/~artarch/sections/faculty/deroo.html

Rebecca DeRoo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University, St. Louis. Her book, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art (Cambridge, 2006) explains how the protests that shook France in 1968-the largest insurrections in the modern West-triggered a radical reconsideration of artistic practice and exhibition display that has shaped both art and museums up to the present. Her book received the 2008 Laurence Wylie Prize for French cultural studies. Her current book project, Agnes Varda, Feminism, and The New Wave, reveals the influential French filmmaker’s complex visual rhetoric and participation in progressive, trans-Atlantic feminist debates. Rebecca DeRoo’s grants and awards include a residency at the French National Institute of Art History, a Killam postdoctoral fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship for research in France, an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Washington University Graduate Student Senate, and a Rhoades Foundation Fellowship through which she curated the “Beyond the Photographic Frame” exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.


Tanya Fernando tanya.j.fernando@gmail.com
Assistant Professor Department of English
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Tanya Fernando received both her A.B. in History and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. She is currently teaching in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her teaching and research interests bring together a wide variety of disciplines, including history, anthropology, and the literary, visual, and performing arts. The classes she designs are based on themes or concepts, such as primitivism, modernism, or beauty, and seek to elaborate larger theoretical and political issues by using texts from across the humanities and social sciences. She is currently working on a book, Shock Treatments, that traces a genealogy of “shock,” one of modernism’s significant modes of representation, critique, and cure. She demonstrates how, in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, modernist shock worked as an organizing aesthetic principle that established a discursive link between theories of race and sexuality, and a range of disciplines, particularly medicine, psychology, and anthropology. In addition, drawing on her interest in the arts and cultural policy, she is working on a play. Dance, Salome! Dance! explores questions of commodification, patronage, and desire.


Timothy Erwin: timothy@unlv.edu
Chair and Professor, Cultural Studies
Department of English University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Box 4550114505 Maryland Parkway
Las Vegas, NV 89154-5011

Timothy Erwin is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches courses from the Rise of the Novel to Jane Austen and Visual Culture to the Poetry of Abolition. He has received awards from the American Council of Learned Studies, the Black Mountain Institute of UNLV, the Clark Library at UCLA, the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Yale Center for British Art.

From 1996-2000 and again in 2012-13, Erwin edited a book series published for the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. In 2015 he published Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century Culture, a lengthy illustrated monograph. 

His articles and reviews have appeared in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Actes des congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare, The Age of Johnson, Cercles, Critical Inquiry, Criticism, Eighteenth Century Life, Eighteenth Century Studies, Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Modern Philology, Michigan Quarterly Review, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, and the Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature.

Book chapters may be found in Jane Austen and Comedy, Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, Oxford Handbook of British Poetry 1660-1800, Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Johnson, Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures, and Women, Popular Culture and the Eighteenth Century. Prof. Erwin and his wife Clarissa live in Henderson, NV, and enjoy tennis, swimming, and travel.


Robert Friedman: FRIEDMAN_ROBERT_D@Lilly.com

Rob Friedman is associate professor at the University of Eli Lilly and Company. He lectures on a variety of subjects, any subject, really. He writes speeches for Lilly’s CEO and other top executives aimed at sustaining the pharmaceutical industry and its profits. Rob has also taught workshops on creativity, speechwriting and publications writing to thousands of professional communicators from around the country, written speeches for the CEOs of several Fortune 500 companies, and worked as a speechwriter for Ameritech and the American Medical Association. Some of these organizations are now defunct and Rob is now free on bond. Twelve of Rob’s speeches have appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day and he is a published author of fiction and nonfiction. He studied literature at The Ohio State University and the University of Chicago and says he owes his career in pharmaceuticals to the mentoring on the subject by a professor at those schools.


Maki Fukuoka: M.Fukuoka@leeds.ac.uk
Assistant Professor of Japanese Humanities Asian Languages & Cultures
University of Michigan

Maki Fukuoka is an art historian whose research and teaching interests are coordinated by two broad axes: histories of seeing and modes of knowing. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in 2006. Her first book, The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-century Japan (Stanford University Press 2012), was adapted from her dissertation. It situates histories of seeing in Tokugawa Japan and its relationship to an alternative mode of knowing in the context of medical science.

She has published several articles and chapters on the visual and material culture of nineteenth-century Japan. Her translation of Suzuki Hiroyuki’s book from Japanese to English, Antiquarians of Nineteenth-century Japan: The Archaeology of Things in Late Tokugawa and Early Meiji Periods (Getty Research Institute 2022), details a process by which antiquarians shaped and packaged the knowledge of their collected objects through exhibitions and illustrations at a time of enormous socio-political shiftShe continues to teach undergraduate courses “Seeing Asia” and “Showing Asia,” both of which are inspired by the pedagogical and theoretical approaches of W.J.T Mitchell’s course “Visual Culture,” which she had great luck and joy of taking it twice, once as a student and then as a Teaching Assistant.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan: bernard.geoghegan@kcl.ac.uk

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a READER IN THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF DIGITAL MEDIA at King’s College London​. An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of interactive, multimedia computing.  His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. 

Bernard’s book CODE: FROM INFORMATION THEORY TO FRENCH THEORY examines how liberal technocratic projects, with roots in colonialism, mental health, and industrial capitalism, shaped early conceptions of digital media and cybernetics. It offers a revisionist history of “French Theory” as an effort to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a predecessor to the digital humanities. N. Katherine Hayles wrote of this book that it “upends standard intellectual histories” and Lev Manovich that “after reading this original and fascinating book, you will never look at key thinkers of the twentieth century in the same way.” 

Bernard’s current book project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories, draws on infrastructure studies and format studies to offer a radical account of how digital screens produce global space. It considers the digital interface in terms of articulation, i.e., in its technoscientific formatting of territories, temporalities, and practices as “ecologies of operations.”


David Grubbs: DGrubbs@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Assistant Professor of Radio and Sound Art Conservatory of Music
Brooklyn College, CUNY
2900 Bedford Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11210 

David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City). Records Ruin the Landscape has appeared in French, Italian, and Japanese translations.

Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his “The Spectrum Between” (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times.  He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, and many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a member of the advisory board of the journal Sound American, a member of the board of directors of Blank Forms, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.


Ming Dong Gu: mdgu@utdallas.edu
Director, Confucius Institute and Professor
LIT/LANGUT Dallas 

Ming Dong Gu (Ph.D., Chicago 1999) is Katherine R. Cecil Professor in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology and Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of five English monographs: (1) Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); (2) Sinologism: An Alternative to Orientalism and Post-colonialism (Routledge, 2013); (3) Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing: A Route to Hermeneutics and Open Poetics (SUNY Press 2005), (4) Chinese Theories of Fiction (SUNY Press 2006), (5) The Nature and Rationale of Zen/Chan and Enlightenment: The Mind of a Pre-natal Baby (Routledge 2023), and one book in Chinese: (5) Anxiety of Originality (Nanjing University Press, 2009); editor of three English books: Translating China for Western Readers (SUNY Press, 2014), Why Traditional Chinese Philosophy Still Matters (Routledge 2018), and Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature (2019); and a co-editor of three volumes: Nobel Prize Winners on Literary Creation (Peking University Press, 1987), Collected Essays on the Critical Inquiry of Sinologism, and Sinologism (China Social Science Press, 2017), and New Sinology: Discussions and Debates on China-West Studies (Special Issue for Contemporary Chinese Thought 2018).

In addition, he has published more than 160 articles in English and Chinese. His 72 English articles appear in journals including New Literary History, Poetics Today, Journal of Aesthetics and Art  Criticism, Diacritics, Postcolonial Studies, Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, Journal of Aesthetic Education (2 articles), D. H. Lawrence Review (two articles), Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory; Literature and Psychology, Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies (two articles), Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (two articles), Yearbook of Comparative Literature,  Philosophy East & West (7 articles), Journal of Chinese Philosophy (4 articles), Asian Philosophy, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy (2 articles), Philosophy and Literature, Journal of Oriental Studies, Monumenta Serica, International Communications of Chinese Culture (2 articles), Journal of Asian Studies, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Translation Review, Tamkang Review (2 articles), Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and Contemporary Chinese Thought. His 95 Chinese articles appear in China’s major journals of humanities and social sciences.


Hannah Higgins: higgins@uic.edu
Associate Professor Department of Art History
The University of Illinois, Chicago
935 West Harrison Chicago, IL 60607

Since receiving a doctorate in Art History from the University of Chicago (1994), Hannah Higgins has pursued a career of university teaching, lecturing and writing on Fluxus, Happenings, the avant-garde, aesthetics, Marcel Duchamp and grids. Her first book, Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) was an adaptation of her thesis. In this book Higgins argued for the primary sensations typical of Fluxus objects and performances. The limitations of this cognitive framework for understanding Fluxus culturally stimulated a new research direction that brings together concrete experience, cognition and communication theory. Her second book, The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) traces a history of grids in western culture from the most ancient (the brick)to the most recent (the web) and is dedicated to Tom Mitchell. The relationships between technological innovation and formal innovation reflects a close collaboration with Douglas Kahn (UC Davis) on the close relationship between experimentalism across the arts in the 1960s and the emergence of mainframe computer technologies. The resulting edited anthology, Mainframe Experimentalism, will appear in 2010 with the University of California Press. She is working on a book provisionally titled The Legacy of Black Mountain College: Long Shadow of the Supine Dome, which explores the production of cross-sensory cognitive material in the interdisciplinary and experimental classrooms of American artists during the postwar period.


James Hodge: james.hodge@northwestern.edu
Associate Professor of English
Northwestern University

Jim Hodge is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 2013. He is the author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (Minnesota, 2019). His essays on digital art and aesthetics have appeared in Critical InquiryPostmodern CultureFilm Criticism, and elsewhere. His video essay Touch was published by Triquarterly. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2011. During his graduate studies he TA-ed for Prof. Mitchell’s “Theories of Media” course, and he now regularly teaches media theory courses at Northwestern.


Matthew Hofer: mrh@unm.edu
Associate Professor Department of English
University of New Mexico

Matthew Hofer is Professor of English and Director of Literature at the University of New Mexico. He is affiliated with both American literary studies and British and Irish literary studies. His research areas include poetry and poetics, experimental aesthetics, political theories, science fiction, and humor studies. He writes about and teaches courses at UNM on English-language poetry and poetics, especially formally active work in the tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, from modernism to the present.

Hofer’s monograph, Omnicompetent Modernists: Poetry, Politics, and the Public Sphere, was published in the University of Alabama Press series Modern and Contemporary Poetics in October 2022. He is currently at work on a book on postwar epistolary poetry and thinking. He has edited or co-edited seven book-length projects: the language-centered trio LEGEND (2020), L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E newsletter (2020), and The Language Letters (2019); volumes on the politics and aesthetics of Ed Dorn (2013), Sinclair Lewis (2012), and Oscar Wilde (2009); and a special issue of The Langston Hughes Review, “Langston Hughes’s Audiences after the 1930s” (2009). 

In 2012, Hofer founded the University of New Mexico Press series Recencies: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics. Standing at the intersection of critical investigation, historical documentation, and the preservation of cultural heritage, this series exists to illuminate the innovative poetics achievements of the recent past that remain relevant to the present. In addition to publishing monographs and coherent edited volumes, it is also a venue for previously unpublished manuscripts, expanded reprints, and collections of major essays, letters, and interviews. 


Zachary R. Hooker: zrh2101@columbia.edu
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
NY, NY 10027

Zachary Hooker worked with Prof Mitchell on a MA thesis entitled “Photography in the Mode of the Allegorical: Notes on After September 11th: Images from Ground Zero,” which examined photographer’s Joel Meyerowitz’s post-9/11 archival efforts and an exhibit he produced in collaboration with the US Department of State. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in New York. His dissertation and fieldwork will address issues of politics, aesthetics, auteurism, and film-making pedagogy in contemporary South Korean cinema. He also continues to work on photographic representations of 9/11, recently exploring the amateur photography of Mikey Flowers and his collaboration with artist Kevin Clarke.


Adam Jolles: ajolles@fsu.edu
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Art History Florida State University
220-D Fine Arts Building
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1151

Adam Jolles works on early Twentieth Century European visual culture. His current research concerns the avant-garde’s experimental forays into curating in France during the interwar period and the concurrent development of a professional curatorial class in Stalinist Russia. He is concurrently examining the production of printed propaganda in the Soviet Union during World War II.


Elizabeth A. Kessler ekessler@stanford.edu
Assistant Professor
Art & Art History Department
Ursinus College

Elizabeth A. Kessler’s research and teaching focuses on the visual culture of science and its relationship to art. She also teaches Ursinus College’s freshman seminar, the Common Intellectual Experience, and an occasional course on fashion. She earned an M.A. in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Ph.D. from the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. Professor Kessler has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum and Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science; Hubble: Imagining Space and Time, a popular book on the Hubble Space Telescope published by National Geographic; and Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, a forthcoming edited volume on the sublime in art and science. She is now finishing the manuscript of her first book, Astronomy’s Landscapes: Romantic Aesthetics and the Hubble Space Telescope Images.


Julia Langbein

Julia Langbein is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History specializing in Nineteenth Century France.  Her interests include parody and pastiche, comic art and caricature, historical practices of copy, citation and imitation, and the relations between the arts, especially graphic art and painting.  Her dissertation explores the caricature of painting in the French illustrated press during the second half of the Nineteenth Century.  She regularly contributes contemporary art reviews to artforum.com.

Jacob Henry Leveton: jleveton@u.northwestern.edu
Andrew W. Mellon Chicago Objects Study Initiative Curatorial Research Fellow
The Art Institute of Chicago
 
Jacob Henry Leveton studies visual culture, critical theory, and ecology from the late-18th century through the present. Across his work, Leveton is committed to a resolutely interdisciplinary critical practice that brings together the visual arts, literature, and music to explore how diverse creative practitioners have engaged the politics of rupture between human society and the natural environment. Leveton’s first book project, “William Blake’s Radical Ecology: Circuits of Resistance in the Global Eighteenth Century,” locates how the English printmaker, draughtsman, painter, and poet produced a vital mode of artistic production that grappled with the emergence of fossil-fuel driven industry in the globally-networked urban space of romantic-period London. He is also currently writing two articles. The first is titled “Art into Science: Wright’s Experiment, Spinoza’s רות, & Priestley’s Discovery of Oxygen.” The piece studies the journeyman engraver Valentine Green’s mezzotint reproduction held at the Art Institute of Chicago after Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Green’s print, in tandem with pirated editions of Spinoza’s censored Theological-Political Treatise, impacted the English political theorist and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley critical work that instantiated the modern field of pneumatic chemistry. The second, “Alisa Andrasek’s biothing: Ecological Architecture and the Materiality of the Digital between Thrice and Radiohead,” investigates the experimental designs of Alisa Andrasek, a London-based contemporary architect, alongside resonant sound-based experiments undertaken by the English alternative rock pioneers Radiohead and the American post-hardcore band Thrice. Deeply energized by collaborative work, Leveton is Principle Co-Investigator for CoVid-19: Critical/Creative Studies in Music, Image, and Text, a remote Spring/Summer 2020 seminar series that will interrogate what creative forms might emerge as vehicles of social solidarity for our shared moment of global health precarity posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. He also serves, with Theresa M. Kelley, as co-editor of the Romantic Circles Gallery.


Darby Lewes: lewes@lycoming.edu
Professor of English and Gender Studies
Lycoming College
700 College Place
Williamsport, PA 17701
srv2.lycoming.edu/~lewes/

Darby Lewes is Professor of English and Gender Studies at Lycoming College. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1991 and has since published Dream Revisionaries: Women’s Utopian Literature 1870-1920 (1995), Nudes From Nowhere: Utopian Sexual Landscapes (2000), and three editions of A Portrait of the Student as a Young Wolf: Motivating Undergraduates (2002, 2003, 2007) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. She has also edited three collections of essays, A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle’s Utopian Project (2002), Autopoetica: Representations of the Creative Process in Nineteenth Century British & American Fiction (2006), and Double Vision: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Palimpsests (2008). She has won a number of awards for her scholarship and teaching, and she speaks on student motivation at conferences and university workshops across the United States.


Riccardo Marchi: rmarchi@usf.edu
Associate Professor
Art History
University of South Florida

Riccardo Marchi’s research and teaching interests include: modern art (in particular Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century France, Expressionism, abstraction in painting); critical theory, in particular the problems of representation, of vision and of the relationship between words and images; the methodology and historiography of art history; the history of art criticism.  His Italian translation of Max Dvořák’s Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Skulptur und Malerei (1918), together with an essay on Dvořák’s project of Geistesgeschichte, was published by Franco Angeli, Milan, in 2003. He is now writing a book on the artistic practice, theory and reception of Umberto Boccioni, Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky in Berlin between 1912 and 1913. Recent publications related to this project include peer reviewed articles on Kandinsky and on the role of W.J.T. Mitchell’s theoretical work for art history.


Stephen Paul Miller: millers@stjohns.edu
Professor of English
St. John’s University
300 Howard Avenue
Staten Island, NY 10301

Stephen Paul Miller is Professor of English at St, John’s University in New York City. He is the author of The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Duke University Press, 1999). This book “micro-periodizes” the seventies by utilizing the discourses of politics, poetry, and painting around the phenomena of Watergate, John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and Jasper John’s mid-seventies crosshatch paintings so as to note the “rippling epistemes” through which the upheavals of the sixties yield to the Reagan eighties by way of the Watergate era. He co-edited, with Terence Diggory, The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (2001), and he co-edited, with Daniel Morris, Secular Jewish Culture, Radical Poetic Practice (2009). Miller is also the author of a lot of poetry books: The Bee Flies in May (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (Domestic Press, 1992), That Man Who Ground Moths into Film (New Observations, 1982), Skinny Eighth Avenue(2005), Being with a Bullet (2007), and Fort Dad(2009). He also, with Terence Diggory, co-edited The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (the University of Maine in Orono’s National Poetry Foundation, 2001), the first collection of essays concerning more than one of the poets of the New York School of Poetry. His plays have been performed at The Kitchen, P.S. 122, the Bowery Poetry Club, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, the Pyramid Club, the Mudd Club, and 8BC in New York; Intersection and La Mamelle in San Francisco; the University of Vermont in Burlington; and many other venues. His artwork has been exhibited at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, ABC No Rio, the Ben Shawn Gallery of Paterson University, and other galleries. Among the artists with whom he has collaborated are Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Beth Anderson, Jackson MacLow, Robert Ashley, Billy Bergman, Taylor Mead, Linda Francis, Lucio Pozzi, David Shapiro, Kenward Elmslie, Jim Hayes, Kenneth Deifik, Michael Cooper, Naomi Goldberg, Yvonne Jacquette, Marcia Resnick, Pooh Kaye, Bruce Brand, Tom Fink, Noah Miller, Marjorie Welish, and Sandy MacIntosh. In the seventies, Miller edited the Poetry Mailing List, which used mail art to distribute single authors such as John Cage, Kathy Acker, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Schjeldahl, Rudy Burkhardt, David Shapiro, and many others. Likening poetry readings in Soho on Saturday afternoons to art exhibitions, Miller started the Ear Inn poetry series in 1978. In 1985, Miller conceived and edited The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side, the first “instant” magazine that authors produced on the spot. It has inspired similar magazines throughout the nation. Miller’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 1994, boundary 2, Talisman, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, Another Chicago Magazine, Open City, Shofar, New Observations, American Letters & Commentary, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Boog City, Poetry New York, The Columbia Review, Poetry New York, Mudfish, Le Petite Zine, the Bowery Poetry Club website, Scripsi, Proteus, Tamarind, Appearances, The New Journal, Poetry in Performance, The Paterson Review, Controlled Burn, and elsewhere. Miller has received research grants from the NEH, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library Foundation, and the Columbia University Seminars Office. In 1996 and 1997, he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Krakow, Poland, where he was a professor at Jagiellonian University. In addition to teaching at St. John’s University and Jagiellonian University, he has taught American literature, cultural studies, and creative writing at Columbia University, New York University. W.J.T. Mitchell has commented about Stephen Paul Miller’s poetry: “Somebody once said poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis with the net down. But Stephen Miller’s poetry plays a different game in which the relevant phrase is ‘nothing but net,’ a series of subtle daggers, long bombs, and slam dunks: sly, funny, artful, and unforgettable. Highly recommended for sports fans and deracinated intellectuals who like being reeled into the net of critically smart poetry.”


Kristine Nielsen: knielse1@iwu.edu 
Assistant Professor of Art History
Illinois Wesleyan University
Bloomington, IL
Personal Homepage

Kristine Nielsen is Assistant Professor of Art History and editorial board member of the journal Ekfrase: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture. Her teaching and research interests are modern and contemporary art, the historiography of art history and visual studies, the history and theory of iconoclasm, cold war visual and media cultures, and theories of memory. She is currently working on a book project on the visual confrontations in East and West German monument production during the Cold War.


Alison Pearlman: apearlman@cpp.edu
Associate Professor, Art History
Art Department
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
3801 W. Temple Ave.
Pomona, CA 91768
http://www.alisonpearlman.com

To read more about Alison, visit her blog at theeyeindining.blogspot.com.


Anthony Raynsford: awraynsf@yahoo.com
Historian:
http://www.anthonyraynsford.net/

Anthony Raynsford is an architectural and urban design historian, whose interdisciplinary research interests bridge across cultural, intellectual and art history, particularly of the Twentieth Century. His current book project is entitled, Modernism and the Archaic City: The Pre-Industrial Past in the Imagination of Twentieth Century Urban Design. Revising standard accounts of modernism’s break with the past, he contends that preindustrial urban forms have always been central to the ideals and images of modernist urbanism. The modernist ‘discovery’ of the archaic city did not, as some authors have suggested, first emerge as a means of softening the edges of earlier functionalism. Rather, his book argues, this figure of the archaic city was instrumental in defining the essence of modernist urbanism from the beginning. Related to this project are a number of works in progress, including a monograph on the writings of urban planner, Kevin Lynch. He has taught previously in the art history departments of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. Publications include, “Swarm of the Metropolis: Passenger Circulation at Grand Central Terminal and the Ideology of the Crowd Aesthetic,” (JAE).


Rebecca Reynolds: rebreynolds@valdosta.edu
Assistant Professor
Fine Arts Department
University of New Orleans
2000 Lakeshore Drive
New Orleans, LA 70148
http://finearts.uno.edu/artpage.html

Rebecca Lee Reynolds works on post-World War II American sculpture, landscape design, and exhibition practices. She completed her dissertation, “From Green Cube to Site: Site-Specific Practices at American Sculpture Parks and Gardens, 1965-1987.” In 2006-2007 she was a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in the Garden and Landscape Studies program, followed by a summer residency at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France. She was an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at the University of West Georgia from 2008-2012, and currently is an Assistant Professor in the Fine Arts Department at the University of New Orleans.


John Paul Ricco: john.ricco@utoronto.ca
Associate Professor
Contemporary Art History, Media Theory, and Criticism
Coordinator of the Visual Culture and Communication Program
University of Toronto at Mississauga
CCT Building, Room 3057
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
Canada
utm.utoronto.ca/~w3cvmc/faculty/ricco.html

John Paul Ricco is a critical theorist, art historian and curator who currently teaches at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Guest Editor of the journal Parallax (vol. 11, no. 2, April-June 2005). He served as Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal (2004-2006), and is also affiliated with the critical theory and science studies journal ISSUES, and the research centre and curatorial/art space LITMUS(Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand). He has also taught at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Cornell University and, at Texas Tech University where he received an Outstanding Teacher Award from the honor societies Omicron Delta Kappa and Mortar Board. His current work concerns the question of community, specifically those modes of sociality that operate as the resistance and refusal of identitarian logics, categorical imperatives, and structural unification and totalization. Recently, this work has begun to include live performance art practice, in which Ricco sets out to explore masochistic touch and masochistic trust, and the non-contractual, non-negotiable limits of these acts.


Christa Noel Robbins: cnr4b@virginia.edu
Associate Professor
Department of Art History
University of Virginia

Christa Noel Robbins is an associate professor of art history at the University of Virginia. She is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first-century art and art criticism, with a focus on the history of abstract painting. Her book Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting (University of Chicago, 2021) offers the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th century abstract painting in the US. Her research on twentieth-century art criticism includes the essays “The Sensibility of Michael Fried” (Criticism 2018) and “Harold Rosenberg on the Character of Action” (Oxford Art Journal 2012). Her exhibition and book reviews can be found in several journals including Art in AmericaArt History, Art Journal, and  Critical Inquiry. She was the advisory editor of North American modernism for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and is currently an exhibitions editor for caareiews.org. At present, Robbins is writing a book on the abstract painter William T. Williams, which will be the first monographic survey of his career.


Michael Robbins: robbinsm@montclair.edu
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English
The University of Southern Mississippi

Michael Robbins’s first book of poems, Alien vs. Predator, will be published by Penguin in spring 2012. His poems and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper’s, London Review of Books, Village Voice, and several other journals. He has completed a dissertation called “Quarrels with Ourselves: Just Realism and Contemporary Poetry.”


Jeffrey Saletnik: saletnik@indiana.edu
Visiting Assistant Professor and ACLS Fellow
Department of Art History and the History of Art
Amherst College
107 Fayerweather Hall
Amherst, MA 01002

Jeffrey Saletnik is visiting assistant professor and ACLS Fellow in the Department of Art and the History of Art. He completed his dissertation “Pedagogy, Modernism, and Medium Specificity: The Bauhaus and John Cage” in the Department of Art History at The University of Chicago. He is also formally trained as a musician. His research explores how Bauhaus-indebted pedagogic methods and practices were expressed in America and how artists working in non-visual media were drawn to Bauhaus ideas; significantly in relationships between the work and teaching of Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and John Cage. He has presented papers at the College Art Association Annual Conference, The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, and Tate Modern; published on Eva Hesse and Josef Albers; and co-edited Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism (Routledge, 2009). Recently he was a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.


Raél Jero Salley: rsalley01@mica.edu
Lecturer
Columbia College
Chicago, IL

Raél Jero Salley, Ph.D. is an artist, cultural theorist and art historian. He holds degrees in Fine Art from The Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (M.F.A.), and exhibits his visual work internationally. In 2009, Salley took a Ph.D. from The Committee on the History of Culture at The University of Chicago. His dissertation Unfinished Visuality: Contemporary Art and Black Diaspora 1964-2008 is focused on contemporary art and visual production, and thinks through visual products and practices of Black Diaspora. Salley now publishes essays on contemporary art and visual culture, and is a Lecturer in Art History at Columbia College in Chicago. At present, he is working on a book manuscript about contemporary visual practices in a world of wanderers. Salley works in Chicago, Illinois and Paris, France.


Edward Shanken: giftwrap@duke.edu
Executive Director
Information Science + Information Studies
Duke University, Box 94002204
Erwin Road
Durham, NC 27708-0400

Edward Shanken is Executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) program at Duke University, which supports interdisciplinary collaborations involving creative uses of technology.  He is editor of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press, 2003) and author of Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon Press, 2004). He has lectured internationally on art and technology, including Einstein Meets Magritte (Brussels), ISEA (Rotterdam), Consciousness Reframed (Wales), and SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles). He was Director of Visual Research for Reactive Search, Inc., a software company based in Durham.  Dr. Shanken earned his Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University, his M.B.A. from Yale, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Duke’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Danielle Shi: shid@uchicago.edu

Danielle Shi is currently working on a bildungsroman about mental illness set in Berkeley, California, where she received her B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She received her M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago and wrote her creative thesis on “Technicolor Tensions: Deracination in the Model Minority Narrative.” She is looking to expand her thesis into a broader discussion of mental illness and its relationship to trauma, language, and memory. Through the process of writing her novel, she hopes to closely examine the means by which madness is embodied in literature. While at Chicago, she also served as a writing instructor for Media Aesthetics in the Humanities Core. Her research interests include Twentieth Century British and American literature, narrative theory, and Asian American literature. As a photographer and creative writer, she is especially interested in the convergence of literary form and image, and seeks to unite the two in her own practice. Her journalism pieces have been published in UChicago News, In Practice, The Daily Californian, and The Orange County Register.


Harmon Siegel: harmonsiegel@gmail.com
Ph.D. Student
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA

Harmon is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Harvard. He received his BA in Fundamentals from University of Chicago in 2013, where he studied the intellectual history of embodiment. Thanks mainly to Tom Mitchell, he is now obsessed with questions of realism, verisimilitude, and medium specificity, especially as they pertain to 19th century European painting. Current research interests include the works of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Gustave Klimt’s early allegories, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.


Levi Smith
Instructor
Department of Visual and Critical Studies
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
37 South Wabash, 10th Floor
Chicago, IL 60603-3103

Levi Smith, (b.1952) studied studio art at Phillips Academy, Andover and at the University of Vermont. An art historian by profession (M.A. and Ph.D., The University of Chicago) he has continued to pursue his painting, beginning to exhibit frequently in 1999. His works range from compositions done in front of the subject, to more abstract compositions created in the studio from remembered experience. He works in a variety of media including paintings in oil, watercolor or acrylic, and drawings in charcoal, graphite or ink.


Margaret Soltan: msoltan@gwu.edu
Associate Professor
Department of English
George Washington University
Washington DC 20052

Margaret Soltan’s journal articles, journalism pieces, and contributions to books have included work on Don DeLillo, Malcolm Lowry, James Merrill, postmodern architecture and interior design, film, intellectuals, responses to September 11, and, most recently, poetry (her essay, “Hoax Poetry in America,” in the journal Angelaki, produced a lengthy response and exchange).  She is the author of Teaching Beauty and University Diaries (one of the highest-profile academic blogs on the web.) She also blogs at Inside Higher Education. And click here to see her interview on the News Hour and BBC.


Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis: high@wisc.edu
Professor Emerita
Former Evjue-Bascom Professor
Department of Afro-American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Art
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4121 White Hall, 600 N Park St
Madison, WI 53706

Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis is a painter, printmaker, art historian, curator, Emerita Professor of African and African American Art History and Visual Culture, Departments of Afro-American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds degrees from Graceland College (AA), Northern Illinois University (BS), University of Wisconsin–Madison (MA, MFA), and the University of Chicago (PhD). She co-built undergraduate and graduate curriculum, degrees, and certificates in African American Studies and Visual Culture Studies (1972-2012) that also contribute to the Departments of Art, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Art History, and the African Studies Program, UW-Madison. She has curated African American and African art exhibitions, written on subjects that expand to feminist art history and criticism, including coining the influential term, Afrofemcentrism (1984)—expounded in Theorizing Black Feminism/s, eds. Stanlie James and Abena Busia (1993). She consulted for USIA in Germany, the Ford Foundation of West Africa, National Gallery and National Museum in Lagos, Nigeria; lectured throughout the USA, in West Africa and Britain; exhibited throughout the USA, in Senegal, and Amerika Haus (art seminar), Berlin; served on numerous professional committees and boards. Her art is discussed in The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century, Robert Henkes (1993), Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists, Lisa Farrington (2005), Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching, Julie Bucknor Armstrong (2011), A Creative Place: History of Art in Wisconsin, Annemarie Sawkins and Tom Lidtke (2022), etc. Among her awards are the UW-Madison Vilas Award, Chancellor’s Award in the Creative Arts, Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, Evjue-Bascom Professorship, Emerita Professorship; Wisconsin Governor’s Art Award, William S. Noland Award (Black Alumni Award), University of Chicago Fellowship, the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award as Artist and Scholar, Porter Colloquium, Howard University, and a 2022 Wisconsin Visual Art Legacy/Lifetime Achievement Award, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Wisconsin Visual Artists, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Her art is in institutional and private collections: the South Side Community Art Center, the Institute of Positive Education (Chicago), the Chazen Museum of Art, etc. She continues to create art, exhibit, and publish.


Daniel Tiffany: tiffany@usc.edu
Professor
Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Daniel Tiffany is the author of Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard 1995) and Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (California 2000), named by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of “the Best Books of 2000.”  Professor Tiffany is also a poet and translator of works from French, Greek, and Italian, and his writings have been published in numerous journals and magazines.


Orrin Wang: owang@umd.edu
Professor
Department of English
Comparative Literature Program
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

Orrin Wang teaches English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland.  He specializes in the study of both Romanticism and theory and is especially interested in how the two discourses converge. How that convergence speaks to the question of modernity is the focus of his first book, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). How that convergence is further expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic narratives of sensation and sobriety is the subject of his next work, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), winner of the 2011 Barricelli Prize. Most recently, he is the author of Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism (Fordham UP, 2021) and the editor of Frankenstein in Theory (Bloomsbury, 2021).  He received from the Keats Shelley Association of American their Distinguished Scholar Award for 2020.  He is also the General Editor of Romantic Circles and Series Editor of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Visit the site at https://romantic-circles.org/. For a Romantic Circles Praxis Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, visit https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/mitchell/index.html.

Amanda Wong: wongamanda@uchicago.edu

Amanda Wong holds a BA in Art History and Statistics from the University of Chicago. Amanda’s research interests include conceptual photography, archives, and affect theory, with a special interest in the role of the imagination in looking at photographs in times of social crisis. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon-Mays Fellowship, Amanda wrote an honors thesis entitled “Surveying the Obsolescent: Analogical Portraiture in Zoe Leonard’s Analogue.”

Panpan Yang: panpanyangpanpan@gmail.com

Panpan Yang is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology and the Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies at SOAS University of London. She received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Chicago. She is currently completing her first book on the history of Chinese animation from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on animation’s encounters with other artforms, including photography, painting, and calligraphy. Concurrently, she is working on a second book project on the calligraphic imagination in contemporary Chinese art and emergent media.


Tina Yarborough: tyarborough@gcsu.edu
Professor, Department of Art History, Interdisciplinary Studies
Georgia College and State University
Milledgeville, GA 31061
Homepage: http://fdsa.gcsu.edu:6060/tyarborough/


Paul Young: paul.d.young@vanderbilt.edu
Associate Professor, Director of Film Studies
Department of English
Vanderbilt University

Paul Paul Young first saw H. R. Pufnstuf: The Movie in an unairconditioned theater in March of 1975, and realized a few moments after being seated that the film merely anthologized old episodes of the TV series. This is probably when he decided to make his living either producing films or complaining about them. Forgetting this lesson and finding reason to believe he would require training in a remunerative profession, Young discovered, to his chagrin, that architecture students were expected to design buildings that refuse to collapse. Young consequently received his BA in English at the University of Iowa in 1990. At Iowa, Dudley Andrew’s tutelage in European film history made clear to him that, had Francois Truffaut had to sit through H. R. Pufnstuf: The Movie as a child, he would likely have figured that the French cinéma de qualité was just dandy by comparison and might never have launched the French New Wave. While today Young produces no films, nor does he find nearly so much to complain about as one might expect considering the success of the Transformers series, he believes that critical analysis and historical research provide a pleasing middle ground.


Rebecca Zorach: rezorach@uchicago.edu
Associate ProfessorDepartment of Art History
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL 60637
Homepage: http://home.uchicago.edu/~rezorach

Rebecca Zorach works on Sixteenth Century French and Italian art and contemporary art and theory, especially theory of gender and sexuality.  She has published articles in Art History, Res, and Wired; she recently completed a book manuscript on abundance in the visual culture of Sixteenth Century France, and has projects in the works on Renaissance prints and contemporary collaborative art.

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