Notes on the Contributors

Rachel Aumiller is a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She received her PhD in philosophy from Villanova University and trained in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis as a Fulbright Scholar in Slovenia. She is the editor of A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism (2021) and the author of The Laughing Matter of Spirit (forthcoming). Her philosophy explores the epistemological, ethical, and political dimensions of affect, sensation, and desire.

Alberica Bazzoni completed her PhD at the University of Oxford, and then was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Writing for Freedom: Body, Identity and Power in Goliarda Sapienza’s Narrative (2018), recently published in Italian translation in a revised edition as Scrivere la libertà. Corpo, identità e potere in Goliarda Sapienza (2022), and co-editor of Gender and Authority across Disciplines, Space and Time (2020) and Goliarda Sapienza in Context (2016). Her research interests lie in the fields of modern Italian literature, literary theory, sociology of culture, and feminist, queer, and decolonial studies.

Federica Buongiorno is assistant professor in Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology of Technology at the University of Florence. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin, TU Dresden, and ICI Berlin. Her research combines interest in classical phenomenology with artificial and algorithmic intelligence and digital theory. She is a translator from German into Italian and the Editor-in-chief of the philosophical book series ‘Umweg’ and the international journal Azimuth.

Christopher Chamberlin holds a PhD in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine and is currently in formation as a Research Analyst at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco. His work articulates the fields of psychoanalysis and black studies through several projects that examine the history and theory of the ‘antiracist clinic’. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Xenia Chiaramonte is a jurist and a socio-legal scholar. Her research centres on a critique of contemporary ecological discourse especially in relation to environmental struggles and the advancement of a new age of rights, those of ‘places’. She published her monograph Governare il conflitto: La criminalizzazione del movimento No TAV [Governing conflict: The Criminalization of the No TAV Movement] (2019), which analyses the criminalization of one of the most longstanding and high-profile environmental movements in Western Europe.

Sam Dolbear holds a PhD in critical theory from Birkbeck College, University of London. He largely works on the figures marginalized in Walter Benjamin’s work, and has just completed two expansive projects: one on the radio producer and composer Ernst Schoen (1894–1960) and another on the hand reader and sexologist Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986). He teaches at Bard College Berlin and continues as a Visiting Fellow at the ICI Berlin with support from the Leverhulme Trust.

Iracema Dulley holds a BA in philosophy and a PhD in social anthropology from the University of São Paulo. She is also a practicing psychoanalyst. Her research considers processes of subject constitution from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has conducted fieldwork in and archival research on colonial and post-colonial Angola and her publications focus on ethnographic theorization, research methodology, translation, witchcraft, naming practices, and processes of differentiation related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

Amina ElHalawani is a Lecturer of English Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University. After finishing an MA degree in English Literature, ElHalawani pursued her PhD in Comparative Literature at l’Université de Perpignan and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen with the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Fellowship. Her research interests include: performance studies, twentieth-century literature, contemporary migrant literature, home writing, post-coloniality, and the Global South.

Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has led since 2007. He received a PhD in theoretical physics (1993) and another one in German literature (2001). He has run several projects at the ICI Berlin and (co-)edited several volumes, including Tension/Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures (2014), De/Constituting Wholes (2017), Re- (2019), Weathering (2020), and ERRANS (2022).

Özgün Eylül İşcen received her PhD in Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures from Duke University. She works on computational media as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism and unpacks its geopolitical aesthetic in the context of the Middle East. Her recent research dwells on the idea of counter-futuring at the intersections of materialist media theory, digital arts, and decolonial politics.

Sarath Jakka received his PhD from the TEEME (Text and Event in Early Modern Europe) doctoral program at the University of Kent, Canterbury in conjunction with the University of Porto, Portugal. His doctoral research centered on early modern utopian traditions and seventeenth-century colonial imaginaries. His current research engages a wide range of fields that includes psychoanalysis, discourses on climate change, non-dualist intellectual traditions, and ecological approaches to thinking.

Ben Nichols is Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Manchester in the UK and has research interests that span feminist, queer, and trans theory and culture. His monograph Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness, which addresses and interrogates how the field of queer studies has been formed around an aversion to sameness, was published in 2020. He has also published work in journals such as GLQ, Textual Practice, and the Henry James Review.

Claudia Peppel is in charge of Academic Coordination and Communication at the ICI Berlin. She studied Italian and French literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and at La Sapienza in Rome and holds a PhD in Philosophy from TU Darmstadt. Her publications focus on literary and cultural studies, as well as aesthetics, art history, and food studies. She has taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and has curated exhibitions of contemporary art. In 2019, she co-edited the volume Die Kunst des Wartens (with Brigitte Kölle) on the topic of waiting in the arts.

Jakob Schillinger is Research Coordinator of the ICI Core Project Reduction. A historian of modern and contemporary art, his research focuses on the media-technological and social conditions of art and visual culture and on their connection to gender. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Painting Machines, which takes a media- and systems-theoretical perspective on post-conceptual painting in 1980s and early 1990s Cologne, inquiring how artistic processes affected and connected the artists’ bodies that functioned as their media, and how these processes constructed social milieus.