Notes on Contributors

Sungyong Ahn is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published research on algorithmic culture, attention economy, and media theory in media studies journals. His research interests include wearable health devices, videogames, self-tracking technologies, and their affective dimensions.

Ian Balfour is Professor Emeritus of English and of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York University. He has published books on Northrop Frye and The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. He edited a special issue of SAQ on Late Derrida. With Atom Egoyan he co-edited Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film; with Eduardo Cadava he edited an issue of SAQ on “The Claims of Human Rights.” In 2014 he curated an exhibition at Tate Britain on William Hazlitt. Recent essays address Baldwin’s film criticism, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hölderlin’s theory of tragedy, and adaptations of Austen’s Emma. He is finishing and not finishing a book on the sublime.

Will Kujala is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His PhD project in political theory examines the intellectual history of antiracist and anticolonial internationalism in the era of decolonization. He has broader interests in the politics of historiography, early modern political thought, and questions of race and empire in international relations.

Robert McRuer is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches critical theory, disability studies, and queer theory. He is the author, most recently, of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU, 2018), and is co-editor, with Anna Mollow, of Sex and Disability (Duke, 2012).

Tamas Nagypal is a lecturer at Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts. He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from York University, and he is currently working on turning his dissertation into a book with the title The Dark Passage to Human Capital: Film Noir and Neoliberalism. His publications include articles in the journals Film International, The Journal of Religion and Film, and Mediations, as well as book chapters in the edited volumes Zizek and Media Studies: A Reader and Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors.

Janet Neary is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (University Press, 2017), as well as essays in J19, ESQ, African American Literature, and MELUS. She is the editor of Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays by Lindon Barrett (Duke University Press, 2018). Her current research focuses on African American literature of Western migration in the wake of the California Gold Rush and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In pursuit of research for the book, she was a 2018 visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches African American and African-diasporic literatures, LGBTQ literatures, and literary theory. His most recent books include The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018) and The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014), co-edited with E. L. McCallum. He has published essays in diacritics, differences, American Literature, Cultural Critique, James Baldwin Review, and elsewhere.

Parisa Vaziri received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine in 2018. She is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Her current book project explores representations of blackness in Iranian cinema through the historical lens of Indian Ocean slavery.