Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge
Contributors
Dr. SerenaGaia is the sacred name of Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio. She is a writer, activist, scholar, cultural theorist, and professor of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. Dr. SerenaGaia believes that “a world where it is safe to love is a world where it is safe to live.” As Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, she is the author, editor and co-editor of the books Women and Bisexuality: A Global Perspective (2003), Plural Loves: Designs for Bi and Poly Living (2005), Eros: A Journey of Multiple Loves (2006), a memoir and a 2007 Lambda finalist, Bisexuality and Queer Theory (2010), with Jonathan Alexander, and BiTopia (2011). Her articles have been published in numerous journals, including DisClosure, New Cinemas, Rhizomes, Nebula, WSIF, and VIA. She is also the author of The ‘Weak’ Subject: On Modernity, Eros, and Women’s Playwriting (1998), a study of modern drama and women’s authorship. She has translated and co-translated two books from Italian to English: In Spite of Plato, a book of feminist theory by philosopher Adriana Cavarero (1995) with Aine O’Healy, and Luigi Anderlini’s poetry collection, A Lake for the Heart/Il lago del cuore (2005). Anderlini-D’Onofrio has spoken about polyamory on Italian public television, and she gave the keynote address at the 2007 Loving More and World Polyamory Association conferences. More recently, Anderlini-D’Onofrio has been at the helm of the ecosexual movement, adopting the name of Dr. SerenaGaia. Various keynotes have been followed by and the book Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love (2015), the first collection on this topic co-edited with Lindsay Hagamen. She has learned that “love is the ecology of life.” She is at work on new titles, including a study of Italian cinema from an ecosexual perspective, and a series of dialogs of the ecology of love. She is the convenor of Practices of Ecosexuality: A Symposium. News and project updates are available at www.serenagaia.org and www.ecosexbook.com.
Can Batukan was born in Ankara, 1978. He graduated from Saint-Joseph high school, and studied mathematics and economics with elective courses in literature and philosophy. In 2002, he was admitted to the MA in philosophy at the University of Galatasaray. In 2015, he defended his PhD entitled “The Question of the Animal in Heidegger and Deleuze” at this university. Batukan published his first book entitled Anima-lism in 2016. His second book Essays on the Soviet Perceptive-World I: Soviet Post-punk will be published in March 2017. Batukan’s main areas of interest are Continental Philosophy, 20th c. Philosophy, 19th c. Philosophy, 18th c. Philosophy, 17th c. Philosophy, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Music, Aesthetics, Animal Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Life, Metaphysics, Ontology, Eastern Philosophies, Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze.
Sean Capener is a PhD student in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. His research is in continental philosophy and political theology, exploring the relationship between religion and economics. His dissertation project utilizes the literature surrounding the Christian prohibition on usury in 13th century Europe to open a set of questions around temporality and finance.
Virginia L. Conn is a Comparative Literature graduate student at Rutgers University with research interests in Chinese science fiction, object-oriented ontology, the ethics of progress, and the intersection of labor, technology, and the body.
Nick Davis is an Associate Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, where his research and teaching focus on LGBTQ and feminist approaches to popular narrative film. His book The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (2013) theorizes a new model of queer cinema based more on unique formal principles than pre-set identity politics, drawing heavily on Deleuzian philosophies of film and desire. He has published essays on Julie Dash’s Illusions, Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band, James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, and the politically radicalized actresses Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave. Forthcoming work includes essays on Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, plus a developing book project on ambiguous scenarios of sexual consent in recent global cinema. He regularly teaches coursework on popular film history, queer theory, cinematic adaptations, science fiction and speculative cinema, and the evolving genre of the film review. He is also a Contributing Editor at Film Comment magazine and the author of the film reviews at www.NicksFlickPicks.com.
Rebecca Katherine Hirsch, M.Ed. is an artist, writer & educator. She is the creator of Humble Mumbles, a feminist podcast mostly about Palestine; the associate producer of Never Forget Radio, a post-post 9/11 podcast about the eternal 2001, war, sports and masculinity, and the co-creator of Barbarism, a queer multimedia film empire of the recent past.
Reham Hosny is currently a visiting scholar at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). She is also an assistant lecturer at Department of English, Minia University, Egypt. She is a doctoral candidate in digital criticism and director of the Arabic Electronic Literature (AEL) network. Reham is a creative writer and has a collection of short stories. Her interests are electronic literature, digital pedagogy, critical theory and creative writing.
Michael Kramp is Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, U.S.A. He is the author of Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man (The Ohio State University Press, 2007) and articles on such figures as Deleuze, Foucault, Pater, Dickens, and Lawrence. He has more recently introduced and edited a special issue of Rhizomes focused on Deleuze and Photography, and published a series of articles on nineteenth-century photography, including pieces on the work of Hawarden, Lady Clementina, Henry Fox Talbot, and Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop.
James McAdams’ fiction, creative non-fiction, and academic essays have been published in numerous venues, including Kritikos, Connotations, Readings: A Journal for Scholars and Readers, Wreck Park Journal, Superstition Review, Amazon’s Day One, decomP, Literary Orphans, and BOAAT Press, among others. His research interests include post-postmodernism, creative writing, the digital humanities, and the medical humanities. Before attending college, he worked as a social worker in the mental health industry in Philadelphia. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Lehigh University, where he also teaches and co-edits the university's literary journal, Amaranth. His creative and academic work can be viewed at jamesmcadams.net.
Mathijs Peters studied philosophy at Utrecht University, The New School for Social Research and the Institut Catholique de Paris. He obtained his PhD degree at the University of Essex, and worked as a research fellow at the Kolleg Postwachstumsgesellschaften of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. He has published on Critical Theory, Schopenhauer, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and Camus, as well as on the relationship between philosophy and popular culture. Currently, he is a University Lecturer of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University.
Alison Sperling is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Weird Modernism,” interrogates embodied modes of temporality within literary modernism by theorizing “the weird” across the period. Her research looks to wide-ranging theoretical frames and methodologies to think about the body, including queer theory, disability studies, feminist science studies, and critical animal and plant studies. Other work from her dissertation will appear this year in a special issue of Girlhood Studies.