Organizer Bios:

Tamara Beauchamp

Tamara Beauchamp received her B.A. from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University in 2004. She is currently a second year in the department of Comparative Literature at UC, Irvine. Her interests include Psychoanalysis, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, Francophone and Anglophone decadence and modernism, and masochism.

Nasser Mufti

Nasser Mufti is a second year graduate student in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. He is interested in theories of civil war and the relationship between civil war and colonialism. Broader interests include political theory, post-colonial theory, psycho-analysis, 20th century South Asian political literature.

Jonathan Tanner

Jonathan Tanner is a third year student in the PhD program of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he received his MA in the Fall of 2006. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2003 with a BA in English and a BA in French. He is pursuing emphases in Critical Theory and French. His research interests include (but, he fervently hopes, will not forever be limited to) Epic Poetry; German, French, and English Romanticism; Scientific Romance; Japanese Theater; and Film.

Kyle Wanberg

Kyle Wanberg is a graduate student in the department of comparative literature at UC Irvine. His research interests include the study of Pima orature, historiographies of contact and conquest, and genealogies of the trope of the primitive in historical and literary accounts. His study of these materials is informed by psychoanalysis, linguistics, and theories of translation.

Jason Willwerscheid

Jason Willwerscheid is a third year in Comparative Literature at UC, Irvine. His interests include Psychoanalysis, French modernism and critical theory.

Robert Wood

Robert Wood has a B.A. in History (minor in Comparative Literature) from the University of Minnesota in 2003. His interests include Marxism, modernism, science fiction, crisis, the body and production, critical theory, the avant-garde, and the fantastic.

Participant Bios:

Ryvka Bar Zohar

Ryvka Bar Zohar is a first year MA student at New York Uuniversity in Near Eastern Studies. She obtained her BA from Hampshire College with a thesis entitled ³Disciplining Citizens: Palestinian Subjects of the Jewish State.²Her research interests include formations of citizenship, post-structuralist theories of subject formation, Middle Eastern/Levantine literature, and discourse analysis of Zionism. She is also a Jewish educator, and active in NYU Students for Justice in Palestine and the International Jewish Solidarity Network.

Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw

Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw is a master¹s degree student in English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. She has research interests in American, British and French literature. In May 2007, Ms. Barksdale-Shaw will present a paper on Geoffrey Chaucer¹s Canterbury Tales at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She received her bachelor¹s degree and juris doctorate from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She eventually hopes to pursue a doctorate degree in English Language and Literature.

Brechtje Beuker

Brechtje Beuker received her MA and teaching license from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). She is now a PhD candidate in German Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she teaches courses in the Dutch and German program. In her dissertation with the tentative title "Stage of Destruction: Performing Violence in Postdramatic Theater", she combines her interests in 20th and 21st-century German and Austrian literature, theater and performance studies, and aesthetic theory.

Michelle Cho

Michelle Cho is a student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCI. Primarily interested in the ways that contemporary cultural production, especially visual media, transforms modes of sociality and provides new spaces for affective experience, her current preoccupation is the disavowed reality claims of documentary film and video. She is also interested in the affect and temporality of modernization in East Asian cinema, psychoanalysis, memory, subjectivity, phenomenology, and theories of diaspora.

Jessica Collier

Jessica Collier is a second-year PhD student in the English department at UC Irvine. Her primary research interests include mid-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French, British, and American literature and transatlantic studies. She is particularly interested in the history of education and the transmission of pedagogical theories from France and Britain to America, and in the links between formal education and literature as nation-building practices.

Joshua Coonrod

Joshua Coonrod is currently pursuing his M.A. at the University of Florida's English Department, with a focus on film studies. His current projects focus on horror film, children's lit, the study of children in film, and masculinities in children's literature and film. He received his B.A.'s in English and journalism at the University of Missouri.

Jesse Cross

Jesse Cross is a second-year graduate student in the English department at U.C. Irvine. Focusing upon American literature of the Cold War era, Jesse is interested in the different ways that authors of the postwar period can be read as thinking through the site of intersection between aesthetics and politics. Through his examinations of this site, Jesse attempts to use literary analysis and theories of narratology in tandem with contemporary critical theory in order to better articulate the ways American authors of this period engaged with various ethical concerns, particularly those seen as emerging from World War II and the Holocaust.

Michael Cucher

Michael Cucher is currently at the University of Southern California working on a dissertation about the ways in which the legacy of Emiliano Zapata is mobilized for insurgent and counter-insurgent purposes on both sides of the US/Mexican border. Before entering graduate school, Michael lived in PR China, teaching US literature at Beijing Normal University. More recently, his studies have taken him to México, particularly to the states of Morelos and Chiapas.

Theresa Enright

Theresa Enright is working towards a PhD in Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include identity and subjectivity, modern political theory and critical race studies.

Jordan Hayes

Jordan Hayes is a graduate student at San Francisco State University pursuing a Master of Arts in English. His areas of interest include Marxist cultural theory and the roles played by religious identities in eighteenth-century power and discourse. He is an alumnus of Oberlin College.

Katrin Hakkinen

Katrin Hakkinen is a native of Estonia and is currently enrolled in a PhD program in British literature at the University of Tartu. Her publications include articles on William Blake and contemporary fiction as well as translations. Her dissertation focuses on the theme of sacrifice and homicide in Blake¹s verbal and pictorial art.

Amalia Herrmann

Amalia Herrmann is a Ph.D. candidate in German Studies at Cornell University and lecturer in the Humanities Core Course Program at UCI, completing a dissertation on Romantic poetry and nationalist philology, with additional research interests in the history of hermeneutics and German political philosophy from 1789 to 1945.

Alexander Keller Hirsch

Alexander Keller Hirsch is a doctoral student in the Politics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the past much of his research has focused on the French reception opf Hannah Arendt, especially in terms of her reading of violence and power. Much of his recent work deals with the relationship between the violence of negativity and the poetics of death in the writings of Fanon and Bataille. He can be reached at akhirsch@ucsc.edu.

Don Kingsbury

Don Kingsbury is a PhD student in the department of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work focuses on questions of class formation and antagonism as read through contemporary European and Latin American Critical Theory. He will be moving to Caracas, Venezuela next week.

Peter Leman

Peter Leman is in his second year of the PhD program in English at the University of California, Irvine. His research areas include 19th and 20th century British and Anglophone literature, literature and law, and literary theory. Most recently, his work has been concerned with the relationship between colonial and post-colonial law and the literary narratives that engage related issues of justice, authority, social order, and ethics.

Jeffrey Marino

Jeffrey Marino is a Candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Mia L. McIver

Mia L. McIver is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at UC Irvine. Her dissertation, which proposes a new theory of narrative sovereignty, examines the ways in which models of absolute power are interarticulated with concepts of craft, making, and aestheticization in 20th-century literature. Her interests also extend into the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries: current projects include an analysis of narrative and masochism in Victorian and Romantic Pygmalion figures, and a critique of the revolutionary underground in V for Vendetta. She maintains an academic website at www.exceptionalstates.net.

Jed Murr

Jed Murr is currently a PhD candidate and fellow in the English Dept. at the University of Washington, where he began after receiveing his M.A. in American Studies in the English Dept. at the University of Massachusetts His work thus far has primarly focused on multi-ethnic American literatures; contemporary cultures of globalization and imperialism; race and racism in the U.S.; and the relationships between literature and theory--all from within the various spaces opened by critical cultural studies, critical race theory, radical and transnational U.S. American studies, and postcolonial and feminist thought.

Kate Olson

Kate Olson is a graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Nimanthi E. R. Rajasingham

Nimanthi E. R. Rajasingham is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Rutgers University.

Erik Rangno

Erik Rangno is a graduate student in the department of English at UC Irvine.

Annette Rubado-Mejia

Annette Rubado-Mejia is a graduate student in the department of comparative literature at UC Irvine. Her main interests are colonial and postcolonial narrative of the Americas, political theory, transnational studies and feminist theory.

Amy Rust

Amy Rust holds a master's degree from the University of Chicago and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Rhetoric and Film Studies at UC Berkeley, where she also serves as co-chair of the Graduate Film Working Group. She is writing her dissertation, "Passionate Detachment: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 - 1974," which explores the visual rhetoric of violent representation in American narrative, documentary, and avant-garde cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Matthew Schilleman

Matthew Schilleman is a Ph.D. Student at UC Irvine in the Department of Comparative Literature. His areas of concentration are media studies, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and philosophy. He is particularly interested in reconsidering all these fields through the lens of cybernetics.

Rebecca Schuman

Rebecca Schuman is a PhD student in German with an Emphasis in Critical Theory here at UCI. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MA from New York University's Draper Interdisciplinary Program in Humanities and Social Thought. She is interested in the roles of sovereignty and language in German modernism, specifically in the work of Franz Kafka and Robert Walser.

Tamara Spira

Tamara Spira is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at UC Santa Cruz. Mari studies the sensual logics and erotic economies of globalization's regimes of violence, as well as the poetics and aesthetics of survival, hope and political transformation. She is writing a dissertation on the affectivities of neoliberalism, and is currently examining literary works produced in the 1980s ³remembering² slavery, colonial and sexual trauma. Mari has published and presented works individually and collectively in the fields of feminism, cultural studies, politics, security studies and has collective pieces coming out in the forthcoming anthology Sustainable Feminisms and the Radical History Review. She has also worked as a labor and community organizer and is currently involved in collective struggles against mass incarceration in California and its surrounding economies of war, transnationally.

Evan Calder Williams

Evan Calder Williams is a Ph.D. student in the Literature Department at Santa Cruz. His work deals with Marxism, film, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. He is currently researching and writing on mechanomorphic thought and the rhetoric of symptoms.

Aaron Winter

Aaron Winter is a Ph.D candidate in UC Irvine's English department. He is also a workshop leader for Humanities Out There, which is a partnership between our university and the Santa Ana Unified School District. Aaron's dissertation is "The Laughing Dove: Satire in 19th Century U.S. Anti-War Rhetoric." His current research has led him to the conviction that the Madison administration is catastrophically mismanaging the War of 1812, which was started under false pretenses and eminently avoidable. Please visit his website: www.laughingdove.net

Tim Wong

Tim Wong is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. He earned his BA and MA in philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, but after a scholastic epiphany, abandoned philosophy in pursuit of a higher truth. After realizing that there was no higher truth, he fell into a state of profound existential crisis and turned to US and French war and postwar literature for corrective therapy. However, haunted by the specters of German Idealism, Phenomenology, and Poststructuralism, his research interests are still firmly rooted in critical theory. He spends his spare time in a sanitorium reading the Critique of Pure Reason for fun.