Notes on Contributors

Omid Bagherli is a graduate student in English and 2024–25 Dissertation Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His work focuses on representations of thwarted historical recovery and redress in contemporary literature and film.

Bobby Benedicto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University.

Tim Dean is the James M. Benson Professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and, most recently, Hatred of Sex (coauthored with Oliver Davis). He is completing a book titled After Pandemics: COVID-19, AIDS, and the Literature of PrEP.

Sandip K. Luis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History & Art Appreciation at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He teaches critical theory and historiography, focusing on modernism and global contemporary art. Luis received a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has taught at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, and the University of Kerala. His areas of research and publication include the theories of the avant-garde, biennials, and historiography of contemporary art.

Josephine Taylor is Postdoctoral Fellow in Energy Narratives and Coastal Communities at University College Dublin. Her research is in environmental humanities and she is currently working on her first monograph on Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, contracted with Palgrave Animal and Literature Series. She has published in the areas of science fiction, petroculture, gender and affect theory. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender, which carries out joint projects focused on queer and feminist science fiction.

Federico Pous is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University, and works on the politics of memory, human rights, and contemporary social movements in Latin America and Spain. He published Eventos carcelarios (UNC Press 2022), about the experience of political prisoners during the 1970s in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil; and co-edited the volume, Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), about Paraguayan cultural history and the status of democracy in this country.

Tom Roach is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Coordinator of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of History, Literature, and the Arts at Bryant University. He is the author of Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (SUNY Press, 2012) and Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era (SUNY Press, 2021). Recent publications include an essay in differences on Leo Bersani’s concept of fascination and a chapter in Political Philosophies of Aging, Dying, and Death (Taylor and Francis, 2021) on the political function of death in the work of Michel Foucault.

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Comparative Literature, Visual Studies, and Art History at the University of Toronto, where he is Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. He is a theorist working at the juncture of contemporary art, queer theory, and philosophy, noted for his work on aesthetics and ethics; sexuality and intimacy; and eco-deconstruction. Ricco has coedited special issues of Parallax and Journal of Visual Culture on Jean-Luc Nancy, and most recently, a special issue of differences on Leo Bersani. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (both University of Chicago Press) and has just completed the third volume in his trilogy on “the intimacy of the outside,” titled Queer Finitude.

Austin Svedjan is a doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Their dissertation project traces the concept of “bad sex” across popular literary objects like the sex manual, the prizewinning novel, and the feminist manifesto in the long twentieth-century as it intersects with adjacent discourses of eugenics, aesthetic education, and sexual liberation. Austin’s writing appears or is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, ASAP/J, among others.

Mikko Tuhkanen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches African American and African-diasporic literatures, LGBTQ+ literatures, and literary theory. He is the author of, among other books, The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2008) and The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018). He is the editor of Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond (2014) and Fascination and Cinema, a special issue of Postmodern Culture (2020); as well as the coeditor, with E. L. McCallum, of The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) and Queer Times, Queer Becomings (2011). His other publications include essays in PMLA, diacritics, differences, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, James Baldwin Review, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing two book-length studies: “Time’s Witness: On James Baldwin” and “Some Speculation: Thinking with Pet Shop Boys.”

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of Object Lessons (2012), American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), and numerous anthologies that focus on the institutional and political formation of identity knowledges. Her editorial work includes special issues on “Autotheory,” “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity” and “Sexual Politics, Sexual Panics,” which won the best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2019. She is the former director of Women’s Studies at both Duke and UC Irvine.