Rachit Anand
University at Buffalo

Rachit grew up and received his education in Delhi, India. He holds an MA and an MPhil in English literature from the University of Delhi. His MPhil dissertation was titled “Enclosures of Guilt: The Predicament of Law and Ethics in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Self ’s Punishment.” In this project he explored zones of incompatibility between law and ethics—as sites for guilt and shame—in the backdrop of the Holocaust, in the works of the German novelist Bernhard Schlink. He shifted to Buffalo, USA in 2017 to pursue a PhD in comparative literature from the University at Buffalo. He is currently invested in the works of the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee and the status of allegory in twentieth century fiction. He holds a sustained interest in the theoretical questions around biopolitics, law, ethics and shame and he is exploring the works of Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Spivak and Agamben.

Steve Bailey
York and Ryerson Universities

Dr. Steve Bailey is Director of the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities and Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities.  He is at the author of Media Audiences and Identity: Self-Construction in the Fan Experience (2006, Palgrave) and Performance Identity: The Trauma of Appearance and the Drama of Disappearance (2016, Palgrave), as well as a number of articles and book chapters on topics related to critical theory and media culture.  His research interests include psychoanalysis, symbolic interactionism, comparative media studies, and contemporary philosophy.

Margo Beckmann
University of Guelph

Margo Beckann is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph in the School of English and Theatre Studies. His research explores how late Victorian authors drew on seemingly antithetical elements of biblical narrative and Darwinian science to argue for ethics within a New Imperialist context. He is currently writing my dissertation, focusing on how H. Rider Haggard’s, H.G Wells’s, Grant Allen’s, and Olive Schreiner’s use of biblical apocalyptic motifs critique imperialism, capitalism, and organized religion. His investigation interrogates ways fin de siècle fiction demythologizes and contextualizes biblical motifs to propose an “evolution of ethics” not evident in Darwinian theory.

Ken Ip
The University of British Columbia

Ken Ip is an MA student in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. His current research interests are Indigenous Oral History, Digital Humanities, Technology and Literature, and Multimodality. He has an ongoing interest in digital humanities and archival practices, especially when it comes to the ethics and documentation work surrounding oral history.

Won Jeon
Western University

Won Jeon is a second-year MA student at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. She completed a BA honours in Visual and Critical Studies at OCAD University as the recipient of the Governor General Academic Medal. She is currently interested in aesthetics, theories of language and knowledge within material and biological sciences, and psychotherapeutic patient narratives and research.

Fanny Leveau
Western University

Fanny Leveau is in her second year of PhD studies in French literature at Western University. Her research focuses on posthuman representations in novels writen by contemporary French female writers. She is interested in the theme of metamorphosis as a way to question binaries, including frontiers between the human and the non-human. She enjoys sharing her research and recently represented Western at the national 3-MINUTE thesis competition (French version. In addition to her research, she greatly enjoys her position as a Teaching Assistant. She is the current co-editor of the journal Mouvances Francophones and the President of the Association of Graduate Students at the French Department.

Timothy Lem-Smith
University of Toronto

Timothy Lem-Smith is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. His research areas include critical theory, contemporary American literature, postcritique, narratology, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory and genre. He is currently working on a dissertation entitled “Symmetries: Paranoid Reading in Contemporary American Fiction.”

Matthieu Marin
Concordia University

Matthieu Marin is a chronically ill, monocular scholar based in Montreal, carrying out a research and creation practice exploring the lived experiences of illness and disability. Through photography and electroacoustics, they seek to re-appropriate their bodily subjectivity and respond to the alienating nature of medicalization, long-term illness, and disability.

Eleni Marino
York University

Eleni Marino is a doctoral student in York University’s Gender, Feminist and Women’s studies program. Her research focuses on the production of girlhood through digital media. She hopes to complicate the notion of girlhood and what it means to be a girl through a variety of interdisciplinary and critical frameworks. She is committed to anti-oppressive restorative justice and at the time of this writing is co-leading a research project focused on the socio-political barriers experienced by vulnerable menstruators.