Speakers

Richard Grusin is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has authored numerous chapters and articles and five books, including (with Jay David Bolter) Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999); Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010); and Radical Mediation: Cinema, Estetica, e Tecnologie Digitali (2017). Grusin has edited three books: The Nonhuman Turn (2015), Anthropocene Feminism (2017), and After Extinction (2018). He is currently working on a small book on Donald Trump and total mediation. 

Michele Cometa is Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo. Beinecke Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown) and Fellowship at the Italian Academy at Columbia. His research focuses on German cultural history and aesthetics (especially in the age of Goethe), literary theory, and visual culture. His most recent book Why Stories Help us Living: Necessary Literature explores how anxieties fuel literary narratives. 

Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University and the leading expert on the history of amateur blackface minstrelsy. She is a historian, public speaker, writer, editor, documentarian, and onscreen commenter specializing in the globalization of American popular culture. Her research and teaching focus on the histories of racism, racial formation, gender, sexuality, book history, and cultural representation, especially in the American West. 

Ari Heinrich is an associate professor of Modern Chinese Literature, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies at UCSD. They received a Master's degree in Chinese Literature from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Their research interests include the visual cultures of science and medicine in postcolonial contexts; biopolitics and the invention of "race"; cultural notions of authenticity, copyright, replication, and reproduction; transgender and transgenre speculative fiction; literary translation; experimental art; and global queer cultures. They are the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke, 2018) and The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Duke, 2008). 

Joanna Warsza (born Warsaw, based in Berlin) is a (in)dependent curator, educator and editor. She is passionate about such topics as postcoloniality in Eastern Europe, performativity, politics and public art measured in minutes not square meters. Since 2014 she is a Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack, University in Stockholm. Joanna was an Artistic Director of Public Art Munich 2018, head of Public Program of Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, curated the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, and served as associate curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale at the invitation of Artur Żmijewski. She also co-run the seminar Conflict.Trauma.Art with Krzysztof Wodiczko. She works in the fields of visual and performing arts, architecture and theory. She is an editor of several publications and occasionally a writer. She lives in Berlin but also in Warsaw and Stockholm.

Aanchal Malhotra is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and oral historian living in New Delhi, India. Her award-winning first book, Remnants of a Separation is an account of Partition based on material memories of the objects that refugees carried with them across the border. She works in multiple media and considers the long histories of trauma and mourning.

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and the Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology and the Co-Editor of the University of Chicago Book Series, “Studies in Practices of Meaning.” Her publications include two books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015) and Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (2008). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. Her third book, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria is forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press.

Bringing the history of musical forms and notation into dialogue with medieval literature, iconography, and the history of ideas, Anna Zayaruznaya’s recent publications have focused on French and northern Italian music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her first book, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet, explores the role of monstrous and hybrid exempla in the musical aesthetics of fourteenth-century French motets. A second book currently in progress will focus on poet, composer, and public intellectual Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361). In 2011, Zayaruznaya was awarded the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America for her article “She has a Wheel that Turns…’: Crossed and Contradictory Voices in Machaut’s Motets” (Early Music History, 2009). Zayaruznaya has also received awards and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University, and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University, where she spent the academic year 2013–14 as a fellow.