Contributors
Bill Albertini is an assistant professor of English at Bowling Green State University, where he also serves as affiliated faculty with the programs in American Culture Studies and Women's Studies. His research explores the construction of bodies by medical, legal, and other cultural forces, especially in the realms of illness, disability, and sexuality. His work on the trope of global contagion has been published in the journal VERB and is forthcoming in the journal Discourse. He is currently at work on two articles, one re-examining the AIDS memoir and another on the utopian politics of the film Shortbus.
Zafer Aracagök is an academic/musician who teaches art theory and continental philosophy at Bilgi University, Istanbul TR. He is the author of three books (in Turkish) and a number of articles addressing various issues in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in journals such as Pli-The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Parallax, Third Text, PMC and Symploke. His first book, I Don't Want to Go Back Home, will be published in English, Italian and French in Switzerland in December 2009. ZA will be organising "Resonances: A Deleuze and Guattari Conference on Philosophy, Arts and Politics" at Bilgi University, Santral Istanbul in 2010; and he will be editing a special D&G issue for Parallax (Routledge) in early 2011. «www.resonative.net»
Eric Beck is an unaffiliated researcher living near Austin, Texas. His areas of interest include labor, migration and movement, techniques of control, and modernist fiction and film.
Rochelle Becker-Bernstein is currently working on her PhD in Texts and Technology at the University of Central Florida. She earned her MA in English at the University of North Florida and her BA in English at the University of Florida.
Rusty Carpenter is a doctoral student in the Texts & Technology program at the University of Central Florida. Carpenter is currently Visiting Instructor of English and Coordinator of the University Writing Center.
Sheana Director is a doctoral student in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research focuses on critical fat studies, including fat women in popular culture and the rhetoric of contemporary fat feminist activism.
Rachel Douglas-Jones is a PhD student at the University of Durham, working with the International Science and Bioethics Collaboration on ethics and forms of governance over biomedical research in Sri Lanka. She received her BA in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University in 2006, and was subsequently a Herchel Smith scholar at Harvard University. Her research interests are always growing, but are currently centered around Bioethics and the State, Research governance and regulation, Mechanisms of capacity building, transnational knowledge flows, Science and Technology Studies, Legal Anthropology and the adventure of exploring possibilities for a Deleuzian Anthropology.
Anita Girvan is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Victoria on Coast Salish territory in British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests are the language and tropes of climate change, and the political and cultural aspects of ecology. She is also a parent to two fun young children and a partner to a supportive spouse who help 'keep it real' for her in the school-life balancing act (an on-going quest that has yet to be perfected). Another on-going passion is urban agriculture; she is working collaboratively on a project to help create sustainable food systems on campus, and she enjoys growing food in her own backyard. Anita welcomes the opportunity to dialogue with readers and contributors of Rhizomes.
Davin Heckman is an Associate Professor of English Communications at Siena Heights University, where he teaches courses in Literature, Media Studies, and Popular Culture. His book, A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke University Press) addresses the intersection of technology, the home, and popular culture in everyday life. His home on the web is «www.retrotechnics.com».
Matthew A. Holtmeier is interested in issues of pluralism and agency in increasingly mediated environments. His current project involves researching minor or accented communities established around film viewing and film making practices. He holds an MA in English from Western Washington University.
Cassandra Jones is a doctoral student in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research examines racial and gendered digital embodiment and videogame-based digital production practices such as machinima and modding.
John Lennon is an assistant professor of English at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. He is completing his first book Boxcar Politics, a cultural and theoretical examination of the radical hobo and the politics of trainhopping.
Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2006) and is currently writing a book on mourning and mysticism entitled The Sorrow of Being in the Cloud of Unknowing. He has a blog called The Whim, is a member of the BABEL Working Group, and is founder and editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary.
Don Merritt is Coordinator for Interactive TV and Videoconferencing at the University of Central Florida and is involved in the Texts and Technology PhD program. His work has involved international distance teleproduction of live convergent performance events and he and/or his work has been presented personally or by colleagues on several continents. He is currently researching identity in virtual environments. His most recent work in the spring of 2008 was as Director of Principle Photography on Alice Experiments in Wonderland, a convergent theatre project that combined three stages across the US and Canada using computer broadband networking and audio/digital technologies.
Wendy Olson is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Composition at Washington State University Vancouver, where she teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and American Studies. Her research interests include rhetorical and political economy readings of popular culture, media, and literacy. She is currently working on a monograph that explores the rhetorical, historical, and institutional constructions of basic writing in higher education, tentatively titled Political Economies of Basic Writing.
Allan Parsons lives and works in London, where he studied design and philosophy. He is a visiting lecturer on the Creative Practice for Narrative Environments course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. As well as tutoring postgraduate research students, he has worked in recent years on the delivery of information skills, information literacy and research skills programmes at such institutions as Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Westminster. Prior to that, he spent many years working as a consultant for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on its International Futures Programme, researching and writing about long-term socio-economic and environmental futures. He has also worked on government-funded, technology-related research projects with universities, such as Imperial College, Brunel University and University of the Arts, and large corporations, such as Arup and British Telecom.
Amit S. Rai is an associate professor in the History of Media Ecologies program in the department of English at Florida State University. His work has appeared in Screen, Third Text, Camera Obscura, Interventions, Cultural Studies, and South Asian Popular Culture, among other journals. He is the author of Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power (Palgrave, 2002), and i(Duke University Press, forthcoming). His blog on Media Assemblages can be found at «mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com».
David Rogers is a doctoral student at the University of Central Florida and works as a research associate at the Institute for Simulation & Training. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, he spent several years managing aid and development programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. His current research focuses on technology enabled educational strategies for the developing world.
Salla Sariola is a research fellow at University of Durham, Department of Antrhopology. She is currently working on clinical trials, international science collaboration and bioethics in Sri Lanka.
Antonella Schintu is currently a PhD student in political theory at the University of Sheffield, working on the biopolitics and constituent activities of contemporary forms of activism, and drawing on the work of Negri, Lazzarato, Virno and other "post-operaist" thinkers. Schintu has previously collaborated as video-activist with The Vacuum Cleaner and The Laboratory of Insurrection Imagination in London. Schintu earned an MA in Digital Media at Goldsmiths College and is originally from Italy, where she graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna.
H. Cecilia Suhr is a Ph.D. candidate in media studies at Rutgers University. She is currently working on her dissertation titled "The Mutation of Cultural Values, Popularity, and Aesthetic Tastes in the Age of Convergence Culture: Social Networking Practices of Musicians."
Christina Van Houten is an Emerson Alumni Fellow in the English Department at the University of Florida. On the Twentieth Century Studies track, her research interests include American literature, modernism, critical regionalism, and feminist theory. Her Master's thesis, also awarded at UF, focuses on Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, arguing that Stein's notion of "Americanizaton" manipulated epic and novelistic generic conventions to trace a distinctively American genealogy.
Yuejiao Zhang is a doctoral candidate in Texts and Technology at the University of Central Florida. She is also an instructional writer for the Walt Disney Company. Her academic research focuses on technical communication pedagogy, videogame theory, and teaching with new media. She lives in Orlando, Florida.