Jef Van der Aa recently graduated with an MA in African languages and cultures from Ghent University (Belgium) and is currently working as a diversity consultant. Next to this, he is conducting fieldwork in multilingual sites in Belgium and the Caribbean. His research focuses on the global intersections of language, gender and race as inscribed in bodies.

Seifudein Adem received B.A .(with Distinction) in political science from Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) in 1988, his M.A. in International Relations from International University of Japan in 1994, and his Ph. D. in International Political Economy from University of Tsukuba (Japan) in 1999. Dr Adem is currently Research Assistant Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, USA. Dr. Adem’s most recent publication is Hegemony and Discourse: New Perspectives on International Relations (University Press of America, 2005).

Grace Akello is a third year PhD student at Amsterdam School of Social Research (ASSR) and Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) in The Netherlands. Her area of specialty is Medical Anthropology. She is a research fellow of Netherlands University Fellowship programme (NUFFIC) and Netherlands Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO). In Uganda, she teaches Medical students at Gulu University. She is presently writing her PhD thesis on Children’s healthcare needs and priorities in wartime. Her recent research employed an ethnographic approach in northern Uganda over a one-year period (2004-2005) on how children in conflict zones confront illnesses themselves. Although her research respondents were largely displaced children above eight years, adult perspectives were elicited in a multilevel methodology. Key informants were NGO coordinators, healthcare professionals, camp leaders and schoolteachers. She graduated at Universiteit van Amsterdam in 2003 with advanced Masters in Medical Anthropology. She has vast experience in researches focussing of provision healthcare services to people in wartime. Akello is well conversant with gender perspectives in research since she holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies of Makerere University. She also carried out an assessment of gender mainstreaming of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) environmental projects. This was during her 8-months internship period at UNDP headquarters in Kampala in 2000. At her undergraduate, she pursued a Bachelor of Science degree with Education (BSC/ EDUC) where she attained an honours degree of Makerere University.

Özlem Altan received her Ph.D. in May 2006, from the Department of Politics at New York University, where she worked with Timothy Mitchell. The title of her dissertation is “The American Third World: Transnational Elite Networks in the Middle East.” The dissertation explores how global networks of elites, situated in local structures of power, are formed and what roles they play in the daily reinventions of the global and the local. She has published book chapters and articles in journals such as Arab Studies Journal, Birikim, and the ISIM. She is currently teaching in the Department of International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Ovidiu Anemtoaicei has a B.A. in political sciences at the National School of Political Sciences and Public Administration (Bucharest, Romania) and M.A in gender studies at the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). He worked as a counselor on gender equality for the Romanian Government and he is currently a PhD student at the same university in Budapest with research focuses on feminist philosophy and critical studies on men and masculinities. He is presently working on the relations between male bodies, nomadism, epistemology and ethics

Joana Barreto After a dual education in Art History and History in the Sorbonne, Joana Barreto is writing a PhD. Research on the Iconography and Patronage of the Aragonese Kings of Naples in the 15th century. She studied at the University of Rome and was awarded scientific scholarships in the “École Française de Rome”, in the “Casa de Velázquez” of Madrid and in the Dutch Institute for Art in Florence. She co-organised the symposium "Le visible et le lisible. Confrontations et articulations du texte et de l'image", at the “Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art” in Paris. She published on Pisanello, the bronze doors of the Castelnuovo, political manuscripts and contemporary Art. Besides, she is currently assistant teacher at the Sorbonne University.

Kristin Becker received her Magister degree in Theatre, Film and American Studies from the University of Mainz in Germany. Since 2005, she teaches in the university’s Theatre Department and is currently working on her dissertation project which focuses on the popularisation of science and technology between the 19th and the 21st century in Europe and North America.

Carolyn Birdsall graduated with honours in history and media studies from University of NSW (Sydney). She is currently working and teaching as a PhD candidate at ASCA, where she is writing a dissertation about sound and music during Nazi Germany. More specifically, this research project expands the analysis of the Nazi period to consider the “soundscape”, by studying case studies concerning issues of sound, landscape and power, sound technology and modernity, identity formations, voice, hearing and corporeal perception.

Merel Boers (Groningen, Netherlands 1980) is a historian by origin and a philosopher in training. She studied history in Amsterdam and Vienna, with a heavy emphasis on the twentieth century. Her interdisciplinary PhD project (history meets philosophy) tries to pinpoint the reason why historians’ debates of the Holocaust often become vehement controversies.

Maria Boletsi is currently working and teaching as a Ph.D. candidate at Leiden University. She graduated with honours in Cultural Analysis (MA, University of Amsterdam), in Comparative Literature (BA, University of Amsterdam) and in Greek Literature and Philology (BA, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). In her dissertation she looks into the ways the concept of barbarism and the figure of the barbarian (can) function in theory, contemporary literature and art.

Sofiane Boussahel (born 1978 in Northern France) is a doctorate student of the 'Centre de Recherche en Esthétique et Théorie Musicale' (Université de Paris-Sorbonne) and writes his Ph.D. on Richard Strauss' late style under supervision of Danielle Cohen-Levinas. His research interests cover harmonic theories, musical semiotics and aesthetics. He is a former student of the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieur de Musique and teaches music history and analysis at the Université Pierre Mendès France in Grenoble.

Paul Bowman is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Roehampton University, London. He is the author of Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), editor of the interview book Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice (Pluto Press, 2003) and co-editor of The Truth of Žižek (Continuum, 2007). He has been an editor of the journal Parallax and has also been Marxist and post-Marxist Scholarship Reviewer for The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press). He has written for such journals as Parallax, Culture Machine, Strategies, Contemporary Politics, and contributed chapters to The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh University Press), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi), New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh University Press), and Modern British and Irish Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh University Press). He has also written for the Signs of The Times group and The Times Higher Educational Supplement. He is currently writing a book entitled Deconstructing Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2008) and researching theories and practices of political intervention. He is also working on a book on martial arts and culture.

Jérémie Cerman is a PhD. Candidate in Art History at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, working on Art Nouveau wallpaper under the direction of Eric Darragon. On that subject, he has already talked in various conferences and published articles in France, England and the USA. He was part of the organizing commitee of the colloqium “Le Visible et le Lisible. Confrontations et articulations du texte et de l’image” in June 2006 (INHA, Paris). He’s also teaching in the same university.

Chun-yen Chen received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, U.S.A. and is presently Assistant Professor in the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, 20th-century Anglophone literature, critical theory, ethics, question of “community,” and question of modernity. By far her publications engage issues including the trope of otherness in Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ethics of writing in Charles Baudelaire’s lesbian poems, de-fetishization of difference in Salman Rushdie, and ethos of simultaneity in Taiwan writer Dancing Crane and French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Her current research projects, by looking at the modern serial killer figure, seek to critique various modernity narratives’ assumptions of knowledge formation.

Joyce Chia is currently undertaking a PhD in the Faculty of Laws at University College London, in the field of comparative immigration law. She has previously worked as a research associate at the Federal Court of Australia and at the Victorian Court of Appeal. She has also completed a Bachelor of Arts, with Honours in English (Literature) and with a minor in political studies.

Ed Cohen teaches cultural and gender studies at Rutgers University. He has written extensively on theories and histories of gender and sexuality including Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. Currently he is investigating differential valuations of corporeality, focusing on modern medicine and its material and conceptual mappings of "the body." His new book A Body Worth Defending: 'Immunity' and the Bio-Politics of Modern Medicine will (with any luck) be finished in 2007.

Sara Cohen Shabot (Mexico City, 1972) has a B.A. in Philosophy and Jewish Thought, an M.A. in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, all from the University of Haifa, Israel. She specialized in phenomenology and philosophies of the body. Her Ph.D. dissertation dealt with the concept of the Grotesque and the grotesque body. Her present research addresses philosophical (mainly phenomenological) perspectives on the grotesque body and its connections to postmodernism, gender theories and, in general, to the conceptualization of the subject as embodied.

Joshua Paul Dale is a Lecturer in the English Department of Tokyo Liberal Arts University. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo. His articles can be found in: After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive Looks (Thamyris/Intersecting); the Japanese Journal of American Studies; the Review of American and Pacific Studies; Lesbian and Gay Studies: a Critical Introduction (co-authored with Lynda Hart); and the Michigan Journal of Feminist Studies. Dale’s research interests include theories of sexuality, gender and performance studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and transnational cultural studies. He is currently writing a book on the role of the exotic in cross-cultural encounters.

Sudeep Dasgupta is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at UvA. His research interests include Critical Theory, Postcolonial Studies and Visual Analysis. His publications include “Suspending the Body: Biopower and the Contradictions of Family Values in Les Terres Froides”, in W. Staat and P. Pisters, (eds.), Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (2004) and “Visual Culture and the Place of Modernity” in Ackbar Abbas and John Erni (eds.), Internationalizing Cultural Studies:A Reader. London: Blackwell (2004). For more details please see http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/s.m.dasgupta

Ning Du is a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton. Her research interests include critical discourse studies, communication and social change, transnational communication, and the history of ideas in the field of communication. Currently she is conducting research projects on Chinese ethnic media in Canada and discourse changes in contemporary China. She is also translating a book that investigates relations between human rights issues and the conduct of transnational corporations.

David Faflik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture & Literature at Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey. He received his M.A. in History from the University of Washington, his M.S. in Technical Communications from Utah State University, and his Ph.D. in English and American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in the city in literature, he is currently completing his first book project, titled Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860, which addresses U.S. writers’ response to the problems of metropolitan habitation during the middle decades of the 19th century.

Ingrid Fernandez is a film scholar, who focuses on bodily representation and identity construction through the filmic image. In May 2006, she received her M.A. in English Literature from Florida International University, after successfully defending her thesis titled, “Identity and the Seduction of Desire: The Films of David Cronenberg.” Ms. Fernandez attended Cornell University’s School and Criticism and Theory’s Summer 2006 Program, where she completed the seminar “Debates in Translation,” taught by Robert Stam and Ella Shohat. Ms. Fernandez is in the process of applying to doctorate programs in film studies.

Begüm Özden Firat studied International relations and Sociology in Turkey. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at ASCA and working on her dissertation provisionally entitled “Visuality of the Other: Reading the 17th and 18th Century Ottoman Miniature Paintings.” She is a research assistant at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Rania Gaafar (1977) graduated in Media/Film, German and English studies from the University of Marburg (Germany). She is currently research fellow at the graduate programme "Image – Body – Medium. Towards an Anthropological Perspective" at the School for New Media (HfG), Karlsruhe as well as PhD candidate in the International PhD Programme "Literary and Cultural Studies" at the University of Gießen. Her thesis focuses on questions of difference, desire and hybridity in British Film and Video art.

Adam Garcia is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Florida in the U.S. He is currently writing his Master's thesis on the theme of cultural diaspora and Dutchness.

Sjaak van der Geest teaches Medical Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He has done fieldwork in Ghana and Cameroon on a variety of subjects including the use and distribution of medicines, popular songs, meanings of growing old, and concepts of dirt and defecation. Homepage http://www.sjaakvandergeest.nl

Silja Graupe, born 1975 in Hamburg/Germany, studied Economics and Engineering in Berlin and Tokyo (Diploma in 2000), and received a Doctoral Degree in Economics in 2005 from the Technical University of Berlin for her research on the implicit presuppositions of economic thought in the light of Asian, especially modern Japanese Philosophy. She is now a post-doctoral researcher affiliated to the University of Cologne, Germany. Recent publications include: Der Ort ökonomischen Denkens (“The Basho of Economics”), Ontos: Frankfurt/Main (2005) and the “Myth of the Labor Market”, Welttrends, 49 (2005), p. 144-55. Recent research topics include: the ‘site’ of scientific knowledge and its place in Japanese culture as well as alternative sites for economic knowledge in both intercultural and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Kristian Van Haesendonck graduated from the Catholic University of Leuven, before obtaining his PhD from Leiden University. After being a lecturer at Princeton University, he became a Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova University. He has published articles and presented papers on Latin American and Caribbean cultures and literatures. His dissertation ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y Nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Enchantment or Fright? Identity and Nation in the contemporary Puerto Rican novel) is currently under review for publication.

Francis Halsall is lecturer in Art History at University College Cork, Ireland. His doctoral study (Glasgow University) focused on sociological theories of art after modernism (and in particular the systems-theoretical approach such as that of Niklas Luhmann). A revised version of this is forthcoming as Systems of Art (Peter Lang, 2007). In 2004 he organised the international conference Rediscovering Aesthetics (with Dr Julia Jansen and Dr Tony O’Connor, both Philosophy, UCC). Publications emerging from this ongoing project are special issues of The Journal of Visual Arts Practice (2006) and Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Online (Vol. 1, No. 3; Dec. 2004) and the book Rediscovering Aesthetics (Submitted to Columbia University Press). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Art Practice.

Tereza Havelková is currently a PhD. candidate at Charles University in Prague and University of Amsterdam, writing a dissertation on contemporary operatic theatre theorized as a multimedia stage event. After receiving her Master’s degree in musicology from Charles University in Prague in 2001, she worked as a music journalist. Havelková founded a contemporary music magazine called HIS Voice, and served as its editor until 2004. In 2002-2003, she was a Fulbright research student at Columbia University in New York, and in the spring 2005 received a Huygens scholarship to conduct research at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, with which she has have since remained linked.

Dr. Benita Heiskanen received her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. She is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests include multidisciplinary and methodological approaches to the study of U.S. cultures, U.S. Latino/as and popular culture, history and sociology of prizefighting, and theories of the body, space, and place. She has published articles in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Auto/Biography, and Journal of Sport History. She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively entitled Toe-to-Toe: The Bodily Labor of Professional Boxing.

Ricardo Huisman is an Amsterdam-based sound-sculpture artist. For several years he has been making installations with sound sculptures that can be experienced as multi-sensorial and tactile interfaces. The so-called “touch-sound” produced by his “woolen sound blanket objects” includes composed soundscapes that reveal multiple associative dimensions, bodily sensations that could give rise to new spaces for imagination and knowledge. In a playful experimental way, Huisman invites the visitors to interact within his art projects and to become co-creators of their own “multisensory hearing perspectives”. In this way, he aims to rethink the ways we listen and act in our sound habitats, including sound histories, reminiscences and narratives. His art work has included several presentations at art festivals for people with hearing disabilities, workshops for children, and community-art projects, collaborations with musicians, poets, scientists and neighbours.

Ils Huygens has a master's degree in Art Science and worked for two years as a researcher in the theory department of the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Here she started developing her current research on affect and emotion in film studies, which culminated in the organisation of a two-day symposium Thinking Through Affect. She has written articles and gave lectures on cinema (Deleuze, Lynch, Kiarostami, Japanese horrorfilm…) Apart from her theoretical research she also works as an editor and writer for a Belgian online film magazine.

Nadia Jackinsky-Horrell is working on her Masters degree in Native American visual culture at the University of Washington in the division of art history. Her thesis research examines how mask making acts as a form of identity construction among Alutiiq peoples on the Kodiak archipelago in Alaska. Nadia's research looks at the importance of cultural sensitivity in Native American scholarship, the use of community participation as an educational tool, and the power of material culture as a form of cultural survival. As an Alutiiq descendant, Nadia’s research is both a personal and academic undertaking.

Mark James is a PhD candidate from the University of Chicago currently on the Exchange Scholar Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities with an emphasis on English from the University of Southern California, and a Master’s degree in American Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is working on a dissertation that explores the representations of black intellectuals in the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois.

Sandra Janssen. Born in 1973, Sandra Janssen has studied Comparative Literature, Slavistics and Art History at Freie Universität Berlin as well as at the universities of Konstanz and Paris 8 Saint-Denis. She recently finished her Franco-German PhD, which is a study of the concepts of imagination in the history of psychology as well as in literary history, combining the two disciplines in a perspective of the history of knowledge. Since 2004 she is co-editor of the diaries of Einar Schleef, an editorial project that is located at Freie Universität Berlin and financed by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

Dr. Hanna Järvinen is a Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, where she researches the ontology and epistemology of dance. Her Ph.D. thesis in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland, dealt with the image of the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950). She also holds an MA in Performance Studies, New York University, USA.

Janet Kaufman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah, and co-editor of “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?”: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser and The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. With scholarship in the teaching of English/Language Arts as well as poetry, she founded and directs the Family Literacy Center, a service-learning project partnering with schools and community organizations to serve children and families.

Lynn Kaufman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has worked with severely behavior disordered children and adolescents and their families in a residential treatment center in Kansas City, KS for eighteen years; she is currently engaged in research to study the effects of specific clinical interventions with suicidal teenagers. She is also Clinical Professor of Social Welfare in the graduate school at the University of Kansas, where she teaches cultural diversity and family systems.

Saskia Kersenboom is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is Founder /Director of Paramparai Foundation for the performing arts of South India. The exposure to the performative aspect of oral traditions has prompted her to resist established notions of 'text', 'hermeneutics' and the 'representation' of such expertise. Her monograph Word, Sound, Image, the Life of the Tamil Text (1995 Berg Publishers) was one of the first scholarly publications to be supplemented by a multimedia interactive CD. Saskia combines an academic career with that of a performing artist, teacher of dance, choreographer and media designer.

Richard Klein is Professor of French at Cornell University, and a former Editor of Diacritics. He is the author of Cigarettes are Sublime (Duke), and Eat Fat (Pantheon), books of cultural criticism, designed to bring the insights of critical theory to bear on contemporary social issues. They have been widely translated. He has also written Jewelry Talks, a “novel thesis”--a fictional theory of personal ornamentation. He has published articles on so-called pragmatic paradoxes in connection with the future of nuclear criticism. He currently lives in New York.

Jeroen de Kloet is Assistant Professor Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and affiliated to the International Institute for Asian Studies. His research focuses on the globalization of popular culture, particularly music, art and cinema in a "Chinese" context, and the proliferation of digital subcultures. See also http://home.tiscali.nl/jeroendekloet

Andreas Kofler (Dott. Arch.) was born 1978 in Meran (South Tyrol/Italy). After absolving a business school for computer science in economics he studied architecture in Madrid and Vienna, where he graduated in 2005. He is currently working as an architect for the Rotterdam based office STAR.Lectures, at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the Technical University of Munich and Vienna University of Technology. Realized projects with STAR: The Image of Europe (Exhibition with AMO/Reinier de Graaf for the Austrian presidency of the European Union). Urban studies for Dubai, Rotterdam, Zaragoza. Publications in Pasajes de arquitectura y crítica (Spain), Vrij Nederland (The Netherlands), Der Standard (Austria), De Morgen (Belgium), 032c (Germany).

Eneken Laanes is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu and Assistant Director of the Under and Tuglas Literary Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. She is currently writing her thesis on narrative, subjectivity and the past in contemporary Estonian novel.

Dr Tarja Laine (Tampere, Finland, 1971) is Assistant Professor at the Media and Culture department of the University of Amsterdam since 2004, giving classes on film theory and aesthetics, among other things. She studied Film and Television Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, including a minor in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. In April 2004 she defended her PhD thesis Shame and Desire: Intersubjectivity in Finnish Visual Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where she argued that shame can reveal the inner consistency, social dynamics and affective bonds within the work of art and its spectator. Her current research interests include cinema and the philosophy of mind and body, and she is currently preparing a manuscript on emotions and intersubjectivity in contemporary European cinema, to be published in the beginning of 2007. Her essays on the emotional and sensual experience of the film spectator have been published in various film magazines and edited collections, such as Studies of European Cinema, New Review of Film and Television Studies, PostScript, Film and Philosophy and CineAction. Her website, which contains a full list of her publications in English, can be found at http://www.talain.dds.nl

Kimberly J. Lau is Associate Professor of American Studies and affiliated faculty in Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden (University of Pennsylvania Press 2000) and is currently completing a discursive ethnography of Sisters in Shape, a black women’s health and fitness organization based in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Jannah Loontjens is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She graduated with honours in Philosophy of Art and Culture (University of Amsterdam, 1999). Currently she is in her second year of her PhD research project entitled Poetics of Writing. The central concern of her dissertation are literary writers for whom language, and the process of writing, constitutes the very theme of writing. She brings their literary works in dialogue with poststructuralist theories and popular self-help writing theories. She is also a writer herself. She published two volumes of poetry and a novel, titled Veel Geluk (2007).

Birgitte Martens studied Early Modern History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2003). From 2004 onwards, she is working as a teaching assistant at the History Department and the Department of Communication Studies at the same university. The research for her Phd-project focuses on early modern religious media cultures. Comparing 17th-century religious media cultures of both the Northern and Southern Netherlands and setting out the underlying epistemological assumptions which shape these cultures is the aim of her current researching activity. Martens is affiliated to the Centre for studies on Media and Culture (Cemeso).

Sophie Moiroux is currently working on a PhD thesis in Social Anthropology at EHESS Paris, under the supervision of Mr Carlo Severi, studying the works of contemporary indigenous Amerindian artists, in the perspective of an anthropology of art. She focuses her research on the work of Jimmie Durham, and is also undertaking a fieldwork about contemporary indigenous art in Brazil. She did her MA in Anthropology at University College London.

Pawel Moscicki is a PhD student in literary theory at Jagiellonski University in Crocow. He graduated from cultural studies and philosophy at University of Warsaw. He is the author of many articles and translations in contemporary theory and philosophy. He translated The Literary Space by Maurice Blanchot (in print from Universitas Press) and is the editor of the forthcoming book Maurice Blanchot – literature, philosophy, criticism (Ha! Art Press). He was granted two times with research scholarship at EHESS in Paris and participated in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University this summer. His main interests are literary theory and contemporary philosophy but he writes and translates texts on contemporary music, art and political theory.

Niels Niessen has studied Econometrics (MA) and Arts and Culture (BA), both at the University of Maastricht. At this moment he is a student of the Cultural Analysis research Master at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests are on the conceptual crossroads of literature and theory, and his thesis entails a dialogue between the religious poetry of the Dutch author Gerard Reve and Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of otherness.

Ginger Nolan is a practicing architect in New York City.

Gözde Onaran studied Psychology between the years 1991-1996 at Bogazici University in Istanbul. Shortly after her graduation she went to New York for graduate study (MA) in Media Ecology and Film Production at New York University. After finishing the program, in 1999, she worked for one year on several independent film productions in New York. She moved back to Istanbul in 2000 and became a research/teaching assistant in the Film and TV department at Istanbul Bilgi University. In 2005 she started her PhD - exploring the possibilities that cinema offers for “a different way of knowing” - at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Currently, she lives in Istanbul writing as a film critique for Altyazi Monthly Cinema Magazine and teaching seminars on Film Culture at Bogazici University’s Film Center.

Paul (Pablo) Pemeja comes from Almeria (Spain). After obtaining a degree in Agronomy at the University of Almeria (Spain), he went on to study Translation at the University of Salamanca, graduating in 2000. Since then, he has been living in Canada doing graduate work. In 2003, he completed a MA in French Literature at McGill University (Montréal) with a thesis on Rabelais and Renaissance popular culture. After the MA, he began a PhD at University of Toronto. Presently in the 4th year of PhD, his interests have progressively shifted to representations of knowledge in modern literature, particularly in Gustave Flaubert, Elias Canetti and Jorge Luis Borges.

Todd Penner is Gould H. and Marie Cloud Associate Professor in Religious Studies and Director of the Gender Studies Program at Austin College (Sherman, TX). He has published on a variety of topics related to early Christianity, including, most recently, the book of Acts. With Caroline Vander Stichele he has co-edited four collections of essays and co-authored several articles related to gender in early Christianity. Together they are currently co-writing a volume on gender-critical perspectives on the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature.

James Petterson (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1993) is Associate Professor of French at Wellesley College. He is a specialist of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry with a focus on its intellectual and ideological contexts and the law of form. His first book is titled Postwar Figures of L'Ephémère: Yves Bonnefoy, Louis-René des Forêts, Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,2000). His next book-length project, provisionally titled Poetry Proscribed: Twentieth-Century (Re)Visions of the Trials of Poetry in France, is under review for publication. Recent papers include “The Resistance of Poetry,” Critical Legal Conference (Kent Law School, 2005); and “Commitment, Automatic Writing, and the Law of Form,” 20th/21st-Century French and Francophone Studies (2005).

Vanda Playford is an artist and medical doctor. She uses video and photography in her arts practice. She has been practicing medicine since 1989 and commenced studies in Fine art in 1993. She completed a PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art in 2005. The title of the thesis was Reconfiguring the Consultation: Ritual and Storytelling in General Practice.

Linda Raphael, M.A., Ph.D., is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Director of Medical Humanities at the George Washington University School of Medicine (Washington, DC). Her publications include:
Narrative Skepticism: Moral Agency and Representations of Consciousness in Fiction. Associated University Presses, 2001.
When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories, ed. with Marc Lee Raphael. Rutgers University Press, 1999
Articles and essays:
“There’s No Space Like Home: The Representation of Jewish-American Life in Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick,” forthcoming in The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, 2006.

Matt Ratto is a researcher with the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS), a research fellow in the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam, and a research affiliate with the Metamedia Collaboratory at Stanford University. He is currently studying the use of simulation in archaeology, and the development of cyberinfrastructure and e-science infrastructures for the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Daniel Raveh received his PhD in Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University, where he now teaches Indian Philosophy. He has published a number of articles in Indian and Comparative philosophy offering a new reading of Advaita Vedanta and Yoga texts. He is currently working on a monograph titled Knowledge as a way of living: Sankara's philosophy as a case-study, as well as on a new translation of Patañjali's Yoga-sutra from the original Sanskrit into Hebrew. For a decade now, Raveh divides his life between Tel-Aviv and Jaipur, where he studies under and works with the renowned philosopher Prof. Daya Krishna.

Alessandra Renzi studied literature and linguistics at the J. F. Kennedy Institute of the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany, where she researched language and identity in minority groups, cultivated her interests in new media, and worked on social justice issues within migrant communities. She is committed to developing links between academia and activist communities to create more effective networks of resistance. At present, she is writing her PhD dissertation on Telestreet, an Italian network of pirate television producers, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She is a member of a SHRRC-funded research project on Democracy and Digital Dissent on the Internet. She is involved with CAMERA (The Committee on Alternative Media Experimentation, Research and Analysis), a collective of academics, video artists and activists who produce documentaries on media democracy and organise workshops in Canadian universities and other institutions. She is also a member of the committee for the Cultural Policy Forum of the Centre for Media, Culture and Education at University of Toronto and of the Canadian Association for Media Literacy.

Aino Rinhaug is writing a PhD thesis on the work of Fernando Pessoa. Other areas of interest include Heinrich von Kleist, Modernism, and Franz Kafka, particularly his diaries, letters and short stories. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages [ILOS].

Dylan Robinson’s practice-based research bridges the fields of theatre, musicology, music performance and installation. Since 2003 he has collaborated with the intermission interarts collective, and with them has presented Mnemosyne Space in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2004 and Ligeti in Victoria, Canada in 2006. In 2005 he directed the premiere of the opera What Time is it Now? by composer Anna Höstman and poet PK Page. Since 2005 Dylan has been Artistic Director for the international Collision Symposium of Inter-arts Research and Practice at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. Dylan currently holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for a Practice as Research project at the University of Sussex’s Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre. He is also co-editing a forthcoming book on Inter-arts research and practice.

Noa Roei is a PhD candidate at ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis), University of Amsterdam. She received a BA in Art History and Psychology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and an MA in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD project investigates representations of the military subject in contemporary Israeli art.

Adair Rounthwaite holds a BA in Art History and French from the University of Guelph in Canada, and is now in her second year of the Research MA in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She has given presentations at conferences in Oslo, Amsterdam, Leeds, Toronto and elsewhere in a range of subjects that lie at the intersection between visual culture, gender studies, and postcolonial and poststructuralist theory. Her MA thesis under the supervision of Mireille Rosello will look at issues of queer kinship and the ethics implied by relational aesthetics as a practice of translation in the art of Felix Gonzales-Torres.

Itay Sapir is a Ph.D. candidate at ASCA and in the Ecole des hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. His dissertation, entitled "Early Baroque Tenebrist Painting: an Epistemological Interpretation" is supervised by Mieke Bal and Danièle Cohn, and was begun under the supervision of the late Daniel Arasse. He holds an MA in history from Tel Aviv University. Itay Sapir is a founding member of the French online journal “Images re-vues” (www.imagesre-vues.org) where he has published an article on visual knowledge in Caravaggio’s works, and coordinated an issue of homage to Daniel Arasse. He has also published an article on Adam Elsheimer, Giordano Bruno and narrative in the online journal “collegium” (http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/index.htm) and an essay on tenebristic painting and early Baroque music in the visual studies journal « Octopus » (available also on http://www.octopusjournal.org). Forthcoming are contributions to the volume « Working with Concepts”, edited by Griselda Pollock and Mieke Bal, and to essay collections on “The Making of National Art” and on “Le visible and le lisible”, among others. Itay Sapir organised the conference “Re-reading Rembrandt” that took place in Amsterdam in December 2006.

Michal Sapir is an independent scholar, writer and musician based in London. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature and Visual Culture from New York University in 2004 for the doctoral thesis “In Praise of Falling: Writing and the Experience of the Body in Modernity”. While writing regularly about visual art and contemporary dance, she is currently also working on a book about her late grandfather Pinchas Sapir, Israeli Finance Minister and Labour Party leader in the 1960’s-70’s. She has written songs and performed in the bands Afor Gashum, Baby Tooth, Zero Balancer and Moon Pilot.

Gretchen Schiller is a choreographer who creates kinaesthetic and visual artworks in the forms of videodance, performance and interactive participatory installations. She has produced projects in residency at the Banff Centre of the Arts (Camara’96, Shifting Ground ’99, trajets ‘2000-2007 and the Raumspielpuzzle workshops ’2002.) Gretchen is currently working on the choreographic system passus to be embedded in a new generation of trajets and a movement mapping project entitled pas. She has recently joined the School of Arts at Brunel University where she is convening the new MA in Digital performance. She received her BA from the University of Calgary Canada, MA from the UCLA University of Los Angeles, California and PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK. She is the artistic director of mô-vi-dä, a non-profit organization supporting the creative research in the areas of mediadance and interactive arts, http://www.mo-vi-da.org.

Axel Schubert was born in Stuttgart (Germany) in 1973 and studied Industrial Design at Hochschule Pforzheim (Germany). During his first degree he increasingly became interested in the philosophical dimensions of the creative process and wrote his final thesis on existentialism and aesthetics. Schubert went on studying philosophy and cultural sciences at Humboldt-Universität Berlin and Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, with an M.A. thesis on Heidegger and the Is-Ought Problem. Currently he is working on a Ph.D. at Freie Universität Berlin under direction of Prof. Peter Bieri, and has also been working as an assistant professor at the Akademie Mode & Design in Hamburg.

Jan Söffner was born in Bonn in 1971 and despite his desire to finally get a bit more around, is still living in Cologne, where he studied German and Italian Literature and has been working since 1999 as a chair of Romance Philology. In 2002, he finished a PhD with a thesis on Boccaccio (published in 2005 in Heidelberg with the title Das Decameron und seine Rahmen des Unlesbaren). Since that time he has been working on his habilitation (a history of presence in literature and theory) - a project that ultimately, with great pleasure, makes him travel a lot.

Eliza Steinbock is an ASCA PhD candidate writing a dissertation entitled "Shimmering: Towards a Trans-Erotic Film Aesthetic," which focuses on innovating concepts to better address the aesthetics of transgender sexuality and corporeality represented in independent film and video. In the analysis of the flickering in-between captured and framed filmically, the project calls upon Deleuze, Benjamin, Foucault, trans theorists and insights from queer theory to help identify and appreciate the trans pornographic articulations of secrecy, sex, shimmering, somatechnics, curiosity, among other concepts. Eliza also volunteers for the Dutch Transgender Film Festival (23-27 May 2007) and collaborates on genderqueer sexually explicit video projects that have screened internationally at film festivals such as, the First Porn Film Festival Berlin (2006), MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival NYC (2006 and 2005), and The Flaming Film Festival Minneapolis (2005).

Julia Sushytska is currently completing her Ph. D. in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her dissertation explores of the question What Is Philosophy Today? by focusing on three very specific moments of philosophy’s past: Parmenides’ Poem, Plato’s dialogue The Sophist, and Descartes’ intuition of the cogito. Via these pivotal texts she begins developing a definition of philosophy for our own times. Her areas of specialization include 20th Century Continental Philosophy, and Ancient Greek Philosophy. Julia Sushytska is a citizen of Ukraine, and is fluent in five European languages.

Asja (Joanna D.) Szafraniec (PhD in Philosophy cum laude, University of Amsterdam 2004) is the author of Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature forthcoming by Stanford University Press (March 2007). Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature is an exploration of Beckett’s work in the light of Jacques Derrida’s professed inability to give this work its due by commenting on it, and in the light of three successful contemporary philosophical approaches to Beckett (Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell and Alain Badiou) with particular attention to their conceptualization of literature and the presuppositions behind their philosophy’s relation to literature. At present she is post-doctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam, working on a book on the relation between religion, philosophy and literature in the work of Stanley Cavell.

Christine S. Taylor is a Lecturer at the Amsterdam School of Business in intercultural topics and English. She previously earned a BA in German and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina and recently an MA in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, where she worked on immigration politics, Dutch popular culture, and post-colonial theory.

Ernst Thoutenhoofd is a senior researcher with the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS). His academic work to date has focused on topics in education, lexicography, and sociology. He received my PhD in sociology and social policy at the University of Durham (England) in 1996. Aside from my academic work, he has also been active as a typographer and illustrator.

Mara Traumane is a researcher, art critic and curator currently working in Berlin, Germany and Riga, Latvia. Working as a freelancer she is collaborating with creative projects ranging from recollections of 1980s samizdat novels and manifestos to the development of net-based script tools. Her PHD research theme at the Humboldt University Berlin is “Notions of art borders and interdisciplinary art practices in Riga (Latvia) and Moscow (Russia) in the period from 1980s to 2000”. Since 2000 she curated and co-curated several international exhibitions, sound and new media projects. Currently she is also engaged as an editor of the anthology of the Latvian avant-garde artists group “Workshop of Restoration of Unfelt Sensations (NSRD)”. Her publications on art, new media and culture have appeared in a number of magazines, catalogues and online publications.

Dr. Anton Trinidad is a psychiatrist who teaches at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Public Health in Washington, DC. His main academic interests include cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, the teaching of humanities in Medicine and psychoanalytic literary criticism. He is a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and in addition to his M.D., holds a Master of Arts from Georgetown University where he conducted research on gender, psychoanalytic and postmodern literary criticism. His present research includes the use of narratology in the analysis of patient and patient-doctor narratives in the hospital setting.

Caroline Vander Stichele is Lecturer at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the cultural reception of biblical characters and images, the rhetoric of gender in early Christian literature and more recently also on Bible and film. With Todd Penner she has co-edited four collections of essays and co-authored several articles related to gender in early Christianity. Together they are currently co-writing a volume on gender-critical perspectives on the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature.

Pieter Verstraete is currently working and teaching as a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Theatre Department of the University of Amsterdam. His research covers an interdisciplinary and narrative approach towards a subject-oriented theory for sound and aurality in theatre, embracing audio and music theatre, installation art and other genres of sonic art in performative contexts. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/p.m.g.verstraete/

Jatin Wagle is conducting doctoral research in American Studies and Sociology at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, on the American reception of the purportedly untranslatable writings of Theodor W. Adorno. He is also the fellow of the HeinrichBöllStiftung, Germany. His publications, in India and Germany, range from Cultural Studies to Historiography and Critical Hermeneutics. In Mumbai, India, he has taught Literary and Cultural Studies at the undergraduate, and the postgraduate level, for more than a decade, and in the past, has also acted as the assistant editor of New Quest, an interdisciplinary journal of society and culture.

Olivier Wathelet is a Belgian anthropologist, PhD student funded by the French Ministry of Research and part-time teacher assistant at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis. Currently, he is a member of both the LAMIC (laboratory of anthropology) and an interdisciplinary platform dedicated to the study of human olfaction, the MOD. As an undergraduate scholar, he had the opportunity to study at the Free University of Brussels and at the Montreal University. Today, his work under the direction of Prof. Joël Candau is specifically concerned with the cultural transmission of olfactory knowledge inside French families and the description of sensory abilities developed and shared during daily activities by relatives.

Pia Wiegmink received an MA in Performance Studies and Anglistik from the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz in 2004. Since January 2005 she is research assistant (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the University of Siegen (American Studies) and associate member of the International PhD Program “Performance and Media Studies” at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. Pia Wiegmink is working on her dissertation on The Aesthetics of Protest: Performance, Activism and Media in Contemporary US America, which explores the intersection of contemporary forms of popular protest, performance and the use of ‘tactical media’.
Recent Publications
Theatralität und öffentlicher Raum: Die Situationistische International am Schnittpunkt von Kunst und Politik. Marburg: Tectum, 2005.
“Performing Resistance Contemporary American Performance Activism” COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies 7:2006.
“Electronic Disturbances: Creative Resistance on the Net.” Tagungsband: American Studies as Media Studies? Heidelberg: Winter Verlag (forthcoming).

Doro Wiese is currently working at Utrecht University, where she participates as a Ph.D. student in the Marie-Curie-Programme of the European Union. She has been working as a journalist and translator – among others of Judith Butler und Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – and is author of several performances, with debutes at the Volksbühne, Berlin; Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg; and during the 'City of Science'-Event in Bremen. Among her numerous publications on Deleuze|Guattari is forthcoming: "He looked for truth in facts and not in stories." Powers of the false, crimes of historiography, and forces of fabulation in Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. Publication of the International Deleuze-Conference on Deleuzian Events. Writing|History, Cologne 2005, FRG (details yet to be announced).