Notes on the Contributors

Marta Aleksandrowicz is a researcher in the fields of psychoanalysis, comparative literature, and decolonial and feminist theory. She is also in formation as a psychoanalyst. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2022. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Angelaki, Penumbr(a): A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity, The Polish Review, and JCLA. She is also the co-editor of the special issue of Penumbr(a) on beauty (2022).

B Camminga is a lecturer in the sociology of gender at the University of Bristol. They received their PhD from the University of Cape Town. They are the co-editor of East African Queer and Trans Displacements (Bloomsbury, 2025) and Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Asylum, Migration and Diaspora (Zed Books, 2022), and the author of Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). They work on issues relating to gender identity and expression on the African continent.

Mark Anthony Cayanan is an associate professor at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. They have an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a PhD from the University of Adelaide, where they received the 2021 Doctoral Research Medal. They are the author of the poetry books Narcissus, Except You Enthrall Me, and Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous, and they have received writing fellowships from Ventspils House and Art Omi. Poems from Miracle Fever have appeared in Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, and Australian Poetry Journal; the book project, written and completed at ICI Berlin, will be published in 2026 by Curbstone, an imprint of Northwestern University Press.

Alina-Sandra Cucu is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University, Vienna. She is an interdisciplinary scholar in the field of global labour studies and the author of Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania (Berghahn, 2020).

Maria Dębińska received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Warsaw in 2015, for a thesis on trans politics in Poland (Transgender in Poland: Production of a Category, 2020, in Polish). Since 2019 she has been an assistant professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where in 2020–22 she was principal investigator of the research project ‘Slime Mould as Method: Ethnography of Scientific Practice’, funded by the National Science Centre.

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor Emerita of Media Studies and Gender Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research focuses on topics in critical, feminist, and queer theory; media philosophy and epistemology; temporality and media aesthetics; media anthropology and theories of play; and Jewish philosophy. Her most recent monograph is Queer Post-Cinema: Inventing a New Resistance (ICI Berlin Press, 2025).

Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. Her first book, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2015), investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her second book, The Smartness Mandate (with Robert Mitchell, MIT Press, 2023), is a genealogy of the current obsession with smart technologies and artificial intelligence.

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

Marietta Kesting is a media and cultural theorist, currently working as research coordinator at the ICI Berlin and as leader of the FWF-funded project ‘Future Dreaming in the Arts’ in Vienna. From 2016 to 2022 she held a junior professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, and from 2022 to 2024 she taught at the University of Potsdam. She most recently co-edited the volumes Human after Man (with Susanne Witzgall, German in print 2022, English as e-book 2024) and Landschaft, Wetter, Kraut und Kritter (FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, 75, 2025, with Kerstin Brandes).

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 Technische Universität Darmstadt. Her publications focus on literary and cultural studies, as well as aesthetics, art history, and visual culture. She has taught at 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.

Ruth Ramsden-Karelse is the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Ruth received her DPhil in English from the University of Oxford and is currently completing her first monograph, Gays and Girls Make Worlds, showing how queers of colour in apartheid South Africa collaboratively created new realities, with a particular focus on the Kewpie Photographic Collection. Her writing has appeared in publications including GLQ and Gender, Place & Culture.

Julia Sánchez-Dorado is a philosopher and historian of science whose work explores how scientific models contribute to our understanding of complex phenomena in the world. Her research interests also include the problem of representation in science and art, creativity, and the history of analogical modelling in twentieth-century Earth science. She received a PhD from University College London in 2019 and was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Technische Universität Berlin from 2020 to 2022.

Ross Shields is a visiting assistant professor of German studies at Macalester College. He received his PhD in 2019 from Columbia University, for a dissertation on ‘Kant, Goethe, and the Theory of Aesthetic Modernism’. His research is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the history of science, and focuses on the relation between aesthetics and ecology.

Natascia Tosel is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Verona. She received her PhD in philosophy jointly from the University of Padua and the University of Paris 8, and is the author of Gabriel Tarde (DeriveApprodi, 2022) and The Juridification of Politics (Routledge, forthcoming). Her research explores the entanglement between law and politics in contemporary feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements, focusing mainly on the translation of political claims into demands for rights protection.

Ben Woodard is an affiliated fellow at the ICI Berlin. He received his PhD in theory and criticism from Western University in 2016. He regularly lectures at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, the School of Materialist Research, and the New Centre for Research and Practice. He has two forthcoming books: Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial (Zero Books) and F. H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism (Edinburgh University Press).