Participants

Ayhan Aytes is a PhD candidate in Communication and Cognitive Science at UC San Diego.

Renee Baernstein is Associate Professor of History at Miami University. She teaches the history of Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation Europe. Her current book project, Gender and Marriage in Baroque Rome: The Colonna Family, argues that the unique characteristics of the Papal political system, particularly clerical celibacy, created in the ruling class a family environment conducive to women holding powerful but hidden and mistrusted positions of influence.

Brooke Belisle is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in Rhetoric, Film, and New Media and holds a master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. Her dissertation, “The Bigger Picture: Panoramic and Stereoscopic Views of the Global” explores contemporary media artists whose work reactivates nineteenth century visual formats. Her new work focuses on the history of visualizing astronomical space. She has published in Film Quarterly and Photography and Culture and will chair upcoming conference panels on media temporalities and on satellite aesthetics.

Jen Boyle is (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine) teaches and writes about Early Modern literature, theory and criticism, and media change. Trained as a scholar of Early Modern literature and science, she became interested in questions of media transformation and theories of mediation. Her courses explore “new” media objects and performance; bodies and technology; and the virtual and material flows of objects and information through networks, from the seventeenth century to the digital age. A recipient of grants and fellowships from Brown University, the Folger Institute, and the Dibner Library for History of Science and Technology, Prof. Boyle is a member of the editorial board of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and Punctum Books. Boyle has written a book, Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect, that looks at how the technologies of perspective in the Early Modern period offer us a different way of thinking about our own digital technologies, webs, and interfaces. She is also a collaborator-author of new media installations, including “The Hollins Community Project” (in collaboration with Virginia Tech). Currently, she is co-editing a special journal issue of *postmedieval* (“Becoming Media”) that is experimenting with open and crowd-sourced peer review.

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, performer, poet, novelist, new media writer and researcher based in South Devon, England. She has been using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of non-linear narratives since 1993. Her digital work has been performed, published and presented in journals, festivals, and museums around the world. She a two-time winner of the Quebec Short Story competition, and recipient of the Carte Blanche Quebec Award as well as numerous research and production grants in literature and in new media from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and Canada Council for the Arts. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, won the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book. Her second book, GENERATION[S], a collection of code narratives, was published by Traumawien in Vienna in 2010. She is currently a practice-led PhD Researcher at University College Falmouth, Cornwall, working in the emerging and converging fields of performance writing, digital literature, locative narrative, media archaeology and networked art practices.http://luckysoap.com.

John Cayley writes digital media, particularly in the domain of poetry and poetics. Recent and ongoing projects include The Readers Project with Daniel C. Howe, imposition with Giles Perring, riverIsland, and what we will … Information on these and other works may be consulted at http://programmatology.shadoof.net. Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, where he teaches writing in and for digital media, including electronic writing, and writing for immersive artificial audiovisual environments. Presently Cayley is obsessed, agonistically, by Writing to be Found with=against Google and other similar ‘services.’

Briankle G. Chang is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject,and Economies of Exchange (Minnesota, 1996) and co-editor of Philosophy of Communication (MIT Press, 2012).

Chris Cuellar (artist, LA) likes to work with writing, sound, performance & digital media. Topics include but are not limited to the politics of presence, the distribution of information, skeuomorphs, and acceleration. Chris has also published numerous volumes on Lulu, including an early collection of spam poetry and the entire Facebook public directory, circa Summer 2010 (ongoing). He has worked and performed for the Austin New Music Co-op in Austin, TX; the Sullivan & Betty Rymer Galleries; the Hyde Park Art Center & the Red Rover Reading Series in Chicago; Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn. Writings can be found at at DINCA & at Art:21 blog. He has also provided technical assistance for Project Cabrini Green and served as associate editor for the online literary journal, Dear Navigator. You can visit his website (occupied), follow him on Twitter and/or Key Party with him on Facebook.

Erin E. Edwards is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University.  She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Corpse and Character: Modernism’s Posthuman Bodies.

Sandra Gabriele is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is co-editor (with Will Straw and Ira Wagman) and co-author of Intersections of Media and Communications: Concepts and Critical Frameworks. (Emond Montgomery Publications 2011). She is the author of numerous journal articles, including her most recent, “Cross-border transgressions: The American Sunday newspaper, the Lord’s Day Alliance and the reading public, 1890-1916” Topia: A Journal of Cultural Studies (Spring 2011). She is currently finishing a SSHRC-funded research project on the intermedial history of the rise of the weekend newspaper, 1880-1923.

Sebastian Gießmann, Internet Policy Advisor to the Greens in the German Bundestag. Formerly research fellow at the Excellence cluster TOPOI and research assistant at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Monographs: Netze und Netzwerke. Archäologie einer Kulturtechnik 1740 – 1840, Bielefeld 2006. Forthcoming: Die Verbundenheit der Dinge. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Netze und Netzwerke, 2012. Editing: “Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften”, “ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft”.

Lisa Gitelman is Associate Professor of Media and English at New York University, and author of Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (2000), New Media, 1740-1915 (2004), and Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2008).

Ian Hatcher: And and and at body, brown, code, hatcher he his ian in internet, involving lives music, nyc. Now on other people. Projects saic sound, studied text, the works www.clearblock.net.

Alex M. Ingersoll is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He researches media technology and space, and is particularly interested in the technologies of spatial representation, orientation, and navigation. He is currently writing a dissertation on a historical constellation of orientation and navigation technologies as a way to analyze their contributions to the social imaginations of space.

Brian R. Jacobson is Assistant Professor of Screen Studies in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University. He specializes in film and architecture, early cinema, the history and philosophy of technology, and visual studies. During 2009-2010 he was a Fulbright Advanced Student Fellow to France and a Social Science Research Council fellow. His current project – Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and Early Cinema – examines film studio architecture and urban infrastructure before 1915 in France and the US.

Richard R. John is Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, and author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).

Adrian Johns is the Allan Grant Maclear Professor in the Department of History, and the Chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is author of Death of a Pirate: British and the Making of the Information Age (W.W. Norton, 2010), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Eileen A. Joy teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and has published various articles and book chapters on Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, violence, ethics, and the post/human. She is the founder and co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group, and co-director of punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion. She is also the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press, 2007) and Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007).

Keir Keightley is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, where he teaches in the M.A. in Popular Music and Culture. His most recent publications are “Un voyage via barquinho…: Global Circulation, Musical Hybridization, and Adult Modernity, 1961-69” in Migrating Music (eds. Jason Toynbee and Byron Dueck, Routledge 2011), “The Historical Consciousness of Sunshine Pop” in Journal of Popular Music Studies (Fall 2011), and a reprint of his Media Culture & Society article, “Long Play” (2004), in the collection Popular Music: Copyright and Technology, edited by Chris Rojek (Sage 2011). The proposed paper is part of a new book project, to be entitled Tin Pan Allegory: Music, Media, Modernity.

Cindy Klestinec (Assistant Professor of English, Miami University) is currently working on two projects. The first is a study of Lucrezia Marinella’s On the Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men(1600, 1601) and her use of prudence, the practical intellect, and Aristotle’s Ethics(book 6) to imagine a new, public woman in the Renaissance. The second is a project on the culture of reprint for sixteenth-century surgery texts that examines the intersection of surgery texts, print circulation, and the history of the book.

John Laprise is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. His work examines the convergence of computers, national security, and communication technologies within the federal government, focusing specifically on information policy and technology adoption.

Alan Liu is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author ofThe Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004) and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008).

Shannon Mattern is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School. Her research and teaching focus on relationships among media, architectural, and urban space. Her book, The New Downtown Library, was supported by the Graham and Mellon foundations and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. She has been awarded a Visiting Scholarship at the Canadian Centre of Architecture and an Innovations in Education Grant from The New School to support her current work on “urban media archaeology.”

Heidi A. McKee is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University and affiliate faculty with Interactive Media Studies. She is co-editor of Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues (2007) and Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (2009). With James Porter, she co-authored The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process (2009).

Dan Mellamphy Ph.D  (http://uwo.academia.edu/mellamphy), Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Theory & Criticism, UWO London. Co-founder of the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western, co-translator of Gilbert Simondon’s treatise On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (forthcoming from Semiotexte/MIT Press), and author of works that have appeared in journals such as Modern Drama; Foucault Studies; Deleuze Studies; Dalhousie French Studies; Contra-Attaques; The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature; Symposium; International Journal of Continental Philosophy; Paideusis: International Journal in the Philosophy of Education; Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development; Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts; and in anthologies such as Manabrata Guha’s Concept War (forthcoming), Aaron Cheak’s Alchemical Traditions (forthcoming), and The Cylconopiedia Anthology edited by Eugene Thacker, Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro (in publication right now).

Ben Mendelsohn is a media scholar and documentary filmmaker from New York City. He earned his MA in Media Studies from The New School, where his thesis project, “Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors,” examined the economic geography and material history of Internet infrastructure.

Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery are a collaboration merging live performance and digital literary practices. The work, which is visual, textual and choreographic, evolves through context-specific research and practice and always considers the constraints of a given venue or occasion. Site-responsive concerns extend beyond the exhibition space to include local communities and online textual activity happening in proximity to an event. A given piece is a body of material that may have no singular fixed form but is alternately or simultaneously presented as large-scale public projection, internet art, durational live installation, or a performance of fixed length. Morrissey and Jeffery have presented throughout the US, UK, and Europe with recent venues including the Cathedral Quarter in the city of Lincoln, UK (commissioned performance distributed throughout multiple outdoor sites), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Museum of ContemporaryArt Chicago, Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Bergen ArtMuseum, House of World Cultures (Berlin), Chicago Cultural Center, andthe Ontological-Hysteric Theater in NYC. Both artists teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and were members of the seminal international performance collective Goat Island.

Veronica Paredes is a doctoral candidate in the interdivisional graduate program Media Arts + Practice (iMAP), at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is a digital media scholar/ practitioner interested in marquees, race, dissociation, multiplicity, mediated temporality, and repurposed movie theaters. Veronica has worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy for several years. She is currently working on a digital dissertation project called Marquee Survivals: Racialized Urbanism in Cinema’s Recycled Spaces.

Jussi Parikka is a Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), and author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), and Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications (2011).

Kris Paulsen is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Film, Video, and New Media in the Department of the History of Art and Program in Film Studies at The Ohio State University. Her current research addresses artistic engagements with television and experiments with telepresence. She is currently finishing a book manuscript, “Real Time over Real Space: Telepresence and Contemporary Art,” and has recently begun a new project, “Mass Medium: Artists’ Television 1965 to the Present.”

Marina Peterson (PhD, University of Chicago, Anthropology) is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University.  Her book Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles examines the nature of contemporary urban public life through an ethnography of free public concerts in downtown Los Angeles. She is co-editor of Global Downtowns, a collection of ethnographic studies that provide critical perspectives on ideals, implementation, and outcomes of city center planning and development in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the U.S. and Latin America.

James E. Porter is a Professor of English and Interactive Media Studies at Miami University, where he also directs the first-year composition program. His books include Audience and Rhetoric (1992), Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices (1997, with P. Sullivan), and Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing (1998). His latest book, co-authored with Heidi McKee, is titled The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process. 

James Purdon is completing a doctorate on the relationship between early twentieth-century British literature and the rise of the information state. In October 2012 he will take up a three-year Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, in order to pursue a further project about infrastructure and the British imagination. He recently spoke about Fritz Lang and identification technologies at the ‘Cultures of Surveillance’ conference (University College London) and in February 2011 organised an international two-day conference in Cambridge on the subject of ‘Covert Culture: Art and the Secret State’. He has published on early modern biography, on spy fiction, and on neglected writers of the 1930s, and writes regularly for The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review.

Harmeet Sawhney is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests focus on how telecommunications networks are envisioned and created.  His research articles appear in Telecommunications Policy; Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media; Media, Culture, & Society; Info; Prometheus; Entrepreneurship & Regional Development; Communication Monographs; Annual Review of Information Science & Technology; Science Technology & Society; European Journal of Legal Studies, The Information Society and book chapters in edited volumes. He has been visiting faculty at University of Michigan, London School of Economics, and Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, London.  He is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of The Information Society.

Peter Schaefer is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Marymount Manhattan College.  His work has appeared in the journals Critical Studies in Media Communication and New Media & Society as well as in the anthologies The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Newness in Context and iPod and Philosophy.

Jeff Scheible earned his PhD in UC Santa Barbara’s Film and Media Studies program this past summer and is spending this school year teaching as a lecturer in UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Film and Digital Media. His work is interdisciplinary, forming at the intersections of philosophy, media, and cultural studies. He has published articles in Diane Negra’s Old and New Media After Katrina, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Laura McGrath’sCollaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies, and Media Fields Journal (as a founding co-editor).

John Shiga is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, working under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Sterne. His current research focuses on sound and subjectivity in interspecies communication research.

Braxton Soderman is an Assistant Professor at Miami University in Interactive Media Studies and Comparative Media Studies. He received his PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2010. His dissertation was entitled Interpreting Video Games through the Lens of Modernity. Within the dissertation he used particular video games to investigate problems associated with the rise of modernity and its current transformation into postmodernity or second modernity.

Rory Solomon is an artist and software engineer. He is Adjunct Faculty at Parsons and is currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School, where his thesis is a media archaeology / genealogy of computer programming. His artwork has been featured in the National Art Museum of China, the Conflux Festival and Aronson Gallery. His other research interests include databases and urban geography, and he is currently tech lead on the Urban Research Tool: a project with Shannon Mattern that is developing an open source, web-based mapping platform for urban media archaeology research.

Florian Sprenger, PhD, is currently Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He studied Philosophy and Media Studies at Bochum, Weimar and Vienna. He was Fellow at the Graduate School Senses – Technique – Mise en Scene and at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, both in Vienna. In 2011, he finished his PhD. on Media of Immediacy – Electricity, Telegraphy, McLuhan. For more information, see www.floriansprenger.com.

Pepper Stetler is Assistant Professor of Art History at Miami University. Her research focuses on the art and visual culture of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918-1933). She is currently working on a book manuscript that addresses how the display and sequencing of photographs in books relates to contemporary debates on modern visual experiences. Photographic books by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Karl Blossfeldt, Helmar Lerski, and August Sander figure prominently in her research. Other projects focus on intersections between avant-garde photography and methodologies of art history in early twentieth-century Germany and the notion of Sachlichkeit in modern German culture.

Venkata Ratnadeep Suri is a doctoral student in the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. His academic background includes: MA in Mass Communications and Development, University of Hyderabad, India; M.A., Communication, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. His research interests include new communication technologies (ICTs), and the role and use of ICTs in development.

Lindsay Thomas is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include contemporary literature, media studies, and science and technology studies, and her dissertation is on the relationship between security and speculation in speculative fiction and in governmental media and media technologies. She is also currently working as a project coordinator for UCSB’s Research-oriented Social Network (RoSE) project and as a research assistant for 4Humanities, an international humanities advocacy collective.

Darren Wershler (aka Darren Wershler-Henry) is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature (Tier 2). He works with the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) group, and is also part of the faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program. Darren is the author or co-author of 12 books, most recently, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (U of Toronto Press), and Update (Snare), with Bill Kennedy.

Liam Young is a 2nd year PhD student in Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. His presentation shares aspects of a larger research project, which seeks to make sense of contemporary ‘list culture’ by un-black boxing the various functions of lists throughout history, in a variety of material contexts–political, cultural, aesthetic, technological, etc. He has presented this and other work at numerous conferences over the last several years. He holds an MA in Popular Culture from Brock University, Canada, and two BAs from the University of Calgary (International Relations, and History).