Notes on Contributors

Jian Chen is Assistant Professor of Queer Studies in the English Department at Ohio State University, Columbus. He is a Visiting Scholar with the Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Institute of New York University for Spring 2012. Chen’s curatorial projects include “SKIN: a multimedia exhibition” with the 6–8 Months Project, hosted by Kara Walker Studios, New York, “NOISE: Trans-Subversions in Global Media Networks” at the New York MIX24 Queer Experimental Film Festival, and “Transmitting Trans-Asian” with the NYU A/P/A Institute.

Richard Grusin is Director of the Center for 21st-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has published numerous articles and four books. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), which sketches a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media. His most recent book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to premediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.

Christian Hite received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Southern California; his dissertation project was Technologies of Arousal: Masturbation, Aesthetic Education, and the Post-Kantian Auto-. Most recently, he was Visiting Scholar in the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics at California Institute of the Arts.

Jason Read is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany: SUNY, 2003) as well as articles on Althusser, Negri, Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. He is completing a manuscript titled Relations of Production: Transindividuality between Ontology and Political Economy for Brill/Historical Materialism.

Alessia Ricciardi is Associate Professor in French and Italian and the Comparative Literature Program at Northwestern University. Her first book, The Ends of Mourning, won the Modern Language Association’s 2004 Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature. Her second book, After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi’s Italy is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in July 2012.

Darren Tofts is Professor of Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Tofts writes regularly for a range of national and international publications on cyberculture, new media arts, and critical and cultural theory. He is Associate Editor of 21C magazine and is a member of the editorial boards of Postmodern Culture, Hyperrhiz and fibreculture journal. His publications include Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Interface, 1998), Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (MIT Press, 2002), and Interzone: Media Arts in Australia (Thames & Hudson, 2005).

Erin Trapp lives and writes in Minneapolis. Her current book project, Estranging Lyric: Postwar Aggression and the Task of Poetry, articulates a theory of the poetic rearrangement of language and emotions that allows for critical reflection on the processes of reparation in the postwar. She has published articles and reviews on the postwar, psychoanalysis, and poetry.

Birger Vanwesenbeeck is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Fredonia. He is the co-editor of William Gaddis: ‘The Last of Something’ (McFarland, 2009) and has published essays on Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Stefan Zweig.