Contributors

Tariq Ali

Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He was educated at Oxford University, where he became involved in student politics, in particular with the movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. His fiction includes a series of historical novels about Islam: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (2000) and A Sultan in Palermo (2005). His non-fiction includes 1968:Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s. A book of essays, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, was published in 2002.

John Armitage

Dr John Armitage is Principal Lecturer in the Division of Media & Communication, School of Arts & Social Sciences, Northumbria University, United Kingdom (UK). Dr Armitage’s main research and teaching interests are in the areas of critical and cultural theories of new media and information communications technologies, cultural studies, modernity, and postmodernity. He is the founder and co-editor, with Dr Ryan Bishop (National University of Singapore) and Prof. Douglas Kellner (UCLA), of Cultural Politics. Dr Armitage is also an Associate Editor of Theory, Culture & Society and a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Visual Culture, Critical Discourse Studies, Culture & Organisation and Critical Perspectives on International Business. He is also the editor of Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond (Sage, 2000), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (Sage, 2001) and the co-editor, with Dr Joanne Roberts, of Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century (Continuum, 202). His writings have appeared in journals such as New Left Review, Body & Society, Radical Philosophy, Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Organizational Change Management, International Studies Review, Left Curve, Cultural Politics, CTHEORY, Parallax, Critical Perspectives on International Business, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, The Review of Pedagogy, Education, & Cultural Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and have been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.
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Ariella Azoulay

Ariella Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Culture and Interpretation, Bar Ilan University. She is the author of The Civil Contract of Photography (forthcoming Zone Books), Once Upon A Time: Photography following Walter Benjamin (Bar Ilan University Press, 2006, in Hebrew), Death’s Showcase (MIT Press, 2001 – Winner of The Affinity Award, ICP) and Training for Art (Hakibutz Hameuchad and The Porter Institut Publishers, 2000, in Hebrew) and the director of documentary films, At Nightfall (2005), I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004), The Chain Food (2004), The Angel of History (2000) and A Sign from Heaven (1999).


Ryan Bishop

Ryan Bishop is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. He has published on critical theory, military technology, modernist aesthetics, the history of disciplines within the university, the Cold War, and international sex tourism. Along with John Armitage and Doug Kellner, he is the editor of Cultural Politics. He also serves on the editorial board of Theory Culture and Society, and edits the New Encyclopaedia Project with Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, and John Phillips.


James Der Derian

James Der Derian is a Watson Institute Research Professor of International Studies and Director of the Institute's Global Security Program. Der Derian also founded and directs the Global Media Project and the Information Technology, War, and Peace Project at the Watson Institute. He has produced two documentaries with Amedia Productions, VY2K and After 911, and is working on a third Project Z. His most recent book is Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, coming out in paperback this year.


Ian Douglas

Ian Douglas is visiting professor in politics at An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine, and member of The Brussells Tribunal Committee (http://www.brusselstribunal.org/).


Keller Easterling

Keller Easterling is an architect, author and Associate Professor at Yale. Her book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999), applies intelligence from information technologies to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. She is also author of Call it Home, a laserdisc history of American suburbia from 1934-1960. Two recent web sites explore alternative methods and documents for adjusting urban commercial space: Wildcards: A Game of Orgman and The High Line: No Plans for NYC [www.thehighline.com]. Her most recent book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) looks at the misadventures of spatial products in pivotal political situations around the world.


Paul N. Edwards

Paul N. Edwards is an Associate Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan. Prof. Edwards studies the history, politics and culture of information infrastructures. In The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) he explored computers in the Cold War era, including mutual shaping relationships with US military strategy, cognitive science, and American culture. Since 1992 Edwards has been researching relationships between computerized climate models, global meteorological data networks, and the politics of global climate change (C. Miller and P. Edwards, eds., Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, 2001). He is about to submit a monograph on this topic, The World in a Machine: Computer Models, Data Networks, and Global Atmospheric Politics (MIT Press). In 2002-03 Edwards spent a year in South Africa researching the technopolitics of information infrastructure during and after apartheid. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholars award to carry out this work.

Okwui Enwezor
Okwui Enwezor is the Artistic Director of the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville. Enwezor is also the current Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute. He has held positions as Visiting Professor in Art History at University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, New York, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Umea, Sweden. Enwezor served as Artistic Director of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany (1998-2002) and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial (1996-1997). As a writer, critic, and editor Enwezor has been a regular contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and journals. Amongst his books are Reading the Contemporary: African Art, from Theory to the Marketplace (MIT press and INIVA, 1999) and Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Wihelm Fink Verlag, 2004). He is currently completing the exhibition project On Governmentality: Techniques and Technologies of Critique, Dissent, Resistance and Solidarity in Contemporary Art.

Bracha L. Ettinger

Bracha L. Ettinger is an internationally renowned artist, painter, photographer and groundbreaking theoretician in the intersection of feminine sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. Ettinger is also senior clinical psychologist and practicing psychoanalyst. Her artistic practice and her articulation, since 1985, of what has become known as the matrixial theory have transformed the contemporary debates in contemporary art and aesthetic theory, feminism, cultural studies and psychoanalysis. Ettinger's paintings, photos, drawings and notebooks have been exhibited extensively in major museums of contemporary art, among them: Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp (Gorge(l), 2006), KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (ARS 06 Biennale, 2006), Villa Medici, Rome, (Memory, 1999), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Kabinet, 1997), Pompidou Center (Face à l'Histoire, 1997), with solo exhibitions in The Drawing Center, NY, 2001; the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels (2000); Museum of Art, Pori (1996); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1995); the Museum Of Modern Art (MOMA), Oxford; The Russian Museum, St. Petersbourg (1993); Le Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne; (1992) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Calais (1988). Born in Tel Aviv and based mainly in Paris since 1981 (and of Israeli and British nationality), Bracha L. Ettinger was Research Professor of Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics of Art at AHRB Centre CATH for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History, School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds (1999-2005) and visiting lecturer at BEZALEL Academy of Art in Jerusalem (2003-2006). She is currently the Marcel Duchamp Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at the Media & Communications Division, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee. Professor Ettinger is author of several books and more than seventy psychoanalytical essays on what she has named the matrixial psychic sphere. She is co-author of few volumes of conversation, with Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, Craigie Horsfield and Christian Boltanski. Her book Regard et Espace-de-Bord Matrixiels (essays 1994-1999) appeared in French in 1999 (La letter volée), and recently in English as: The Matrixial Borderspace (2006, University of Minnesota Press, edited by Brian Massumi). The journal Theory Culture & Society dedicated an issue to her work (TC&S, 21(1)) in 2004.

Rula Halawani was born in 1964 in Jerusalem. Studied photography in Saskatchewan, Canada and in London and was a freelance photojournalist from 1990-1998. Her work has appeared in publications in Europe, the USA and the Middle East. Rula has received numerous awards for her work, including, in 1996, an award from the Palestinian Journalists Union. Her work has been shown in many collective and solo exhibitions in Europe, the US, Japan and the Middle East; the most recent being The Wall in the Khalid Shuman Foundation, Jordan in 2006. She now teaches in Birzeit University’s Department of Photography, which she founded in 2001.
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Brian Holmes

Brian Holmes, is an art critic, cultural theorist and activist, particularly involved with the mapping of contemporary capitalism. Since the Carnival against Capital in the City of London in 1999, he has taken part in and written about many of the large demonstrations against corporate globalization around the world. He is the author of a collection of essays, titled Hieroglyphs of the Future Art and Politics in a Networked Era (Zagreb: Arkzin, 2003). Now living in France for many years, he collaborates with the French cartographers Bureau d'Etudes and is a member of the activist association Ne pas plier (Do not bend).

Alain Joxe

Alain Joxe studied history and geography with a Master’s Degree in History and received a Doctorate in Political Sociology, 1960-66, Study Committee for Franco-German Relations at the French Institute of International Relations. He was a reseacher at the French Institute for the Study of Strategies (directed by General Beaufre). He was appointed Head of Ecole pratique des Hautes Études (now named EHESS). His concentrations include: the study of politics, strategy and peace. From 1966 to 1970, he was Associate Professor at the Institute of International Studies at the University of Chile, Santiago. From 1971 to 2001, he was Assistant Professor, then Senior Lecturer, then Director of Studies at École des Hautes Études in Social Sciences. He created and managed the Groupe de Sociologie de la Défense of EHESS in association with Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Since 2001, he has been the Center’s Director of Honorary Studies, and continues his research seminar at EHESS and leads CIRPES, which publishes the collection Cahiers d’Études Stratégiques and a bi-monthly newsletter on the debate over strategy. His most recent book is Empire of Disorder (Foreign Agents, 2002).

Anahid Kassabian

Anahid Kassabian's research and teaching interests are currently concentrated in two broad areas: Middle-East diasporan cultures, particularly Armenian and particularly North American, and music in contemporary everyday life and its part in the formation of subjectivity.


Mary Keller

Mary Keller is an Adjunct, Online Professor, African American Studies Program and Religious Studies Program Research Associate, Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Mary Keller writes on the intersection of postcolonial, feminist, and religious studies theory regarding struggles for power and meaning, including spirit possession, sacred lands, whiteness and race theory, and comparative philosophy. Her book, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Johns Hopkins University, 2002) examines the representation of women's bodies that are spoken through rather than speaking. Other articles include "The Skin, the Subject, and the Territory of Religious Studies" Religiao (umbero 8, 2002 - In English and Brazilian Portuguese).


Thomas Keenan

Thomas Keenan teaches media theory, literature, and human rights at Bard College, where he is associate professor of comparative literature and directs the Human Rights Project. He is author of Fables of Responsibility (Stanford University Press, 1997), and is finishing a book called Live Feed: Crisis, Intervention, Media, about new media and contemporary conflicts. With Andras Riedlmayer, he started International Justice Watch (JUSTWATCH-L), an Internet discussion list on war crimes and transitional justice. He has served on the boards of WITNESS and the Soros Documentary Fund.

Friedrich Kittler

Friedrich A. Kittler is a literary scientist and a media theorist. His works relate to media , technology, and the military. He is Professor of Media History and Aesthetics at Humboldt University-Berlin's Institute for Aesthetics. In 1993, he received the media arts prize for theory from the ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrums für Kunst und Medientechnologie); from 1995 to 1997, he headed a Federal Research Group on Theory and History of Media. His recent books include Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (2000), Vom Griechenland (With Cornelia Vismann - 2001), and Optische Medien (2002). Earlier books include Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1987); Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter (1986); Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997).


Arthur Kroker

Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory and Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Co-editor of CTheory and Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (www.pactac.net), he is the author of numerous books on technology and culture, including The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (with M. Weinstein), and The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx

Melani McAlister

Melani McAlister is Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University. She received her PhD from Brown University (1996) and her BA from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Prof. McAlister writes and teaches about U.S. cultural history, cultural theory, religion, and international affairs. She is the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (University of California Press, rev. ed. 2005, orig. 2001). In recent years she has analyzed U.S. perceptions of the Middle East in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation, among others, as well as in interviews with CNN, BBC, Voice of America, and NPR. She has published scholarly articles in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and the South Atlantic Quarterly. She is on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Diplomatic History. She is co-editor, with R. Marie Griffith, of the American Quarterly special issue on “Religion and Politics in Contemporary America,” forthcoming in 2007. Dr. McAlister has lectured widely in the United States and has served as a consultant and lecturer for American Studies programs and institutes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. She has been a Fellow at the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion and a non-resident Fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Center. She is currently working on a study of Christian evangelicals, popular culture, and foreign relations, tentatively titled: Our God in the World: The Global Visions of American Evangelicals.


Saba Mahmood

Saba Mahmood is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of secular modernity in postcolonial societies, with particular attention to issues of subject formation, religiosity, embodiment, and gender. In her book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005), she addressed some of these issues through an ethnography of a women’s piety movement that is part of the larger Islamist movement in Egypt .

Gema Martín - Muñoz

Gema Martín Muñoz is Director of Casa Arabe and the International Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in Madrid. She has a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies and carried out the posgraduate studies in Cairo University (Egypt) for three years and numerous research stays in Algeria, Morocco, Tunis, Jordan, Iran, Israel and Palestinian Territories. She has been visiting Professor in Harvard University, Roma Tre University, Colegio de Mejico, La Habana University, Institut for Political and International Studies (IPIS) of Teherán (Irán). Her research interests include the sociopolitical situations in Middle East countries; Islamist movements and Muslims in Europe. She is editor of Islam, Modernism and the West: Cultural and Political Relations at the End of the Millennium (1999) and author of Arab State: Crisis of Legitimacy and Islamist Reactions (2000) and Iraq, a Failure of the West (2003). She is also the author of various publications, including: Aprender a conocerse, Percepciones sociales y culturales entre España y Marruecos (Madrid: Fundación Repsol-Fondation Hassan II pour les Marocains Résidant à l'Étranger, 2001); El Estado Árabe: Crisis de legitimidad y contestación islamista (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2000); El Islam y el Mundo Árabe: Guía didáctica para profesores y formadores (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, ICMA, 1996, 2nd edition 1998); Mujeres, desarrollo y democracia en el Magreb (Madrid: Ediciones Pablo Iglesias, 1995).

Paul D. Miller

While prolific and highly regarded as a writer and conceptual artist, Paul D. Miller is probably most well known under the moniker of his "constructed persona" as "DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid". Miller has remixed and recorded with a panoply of artists ranging from Metallica to Steve Reich to Killah Priest, and has performed in a uniquely wide variety of situations throughout the world. His two latest CDs are a compilation of classic reggage tracks called In Fine Style, DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records!!!! and the mixed version of the same on Trojan UK called Riddim Come Forward. Other recent releases are Drums of Death, with Dave Lombardo of Slayer and Chuck D. of Public Enemy; the groundbreaking Optometry (Thirsty Ear Records); remixes of people as diverse as Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and Bob Marley, and Miller's award-winning book Rhythm Science (MIT Press). He is currently touring the world with his multimedia/film/performance piece DJ Spooky's Rebirth of A Nation.
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Negar Mottahedeh

Negar Mottahedeh is a Professor of Film and Literature and the co-curator of the Reel Evil: Films from the Axis of Evil and Aftershocks: 9/11 film series at Duke University. Her work has been published in Camera Obscura, Signs, Iranian Studies, Radical History Review, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her monograph on national variations in cinematic language and the new Iranian cinema is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her second book on Iranian cinema and its relation to 19th Century visual history is forthcoming from Syracuse Press, Fall 2007.
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Loretta Napoleoni

Loretta Napoleoni is the best selling author of Terror Incorporated and Insurgent Iraq. She is an expert on financing of terrorism and advises several governments on counter-terrorism. She is senior partner of G Risk, a London based risk agency. As Chairman of the countering terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, Napoleoni brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combating the financing of terror networks. Napoleoni is also a journalist and has worked as a foreign correspondent for several Italian financial papers. Her work appears regularly in many journals and publications, including several European newspapers. She lectures regularly on the financing of terrorism. She has written novels, guide books in Italian and translated and edited books on terrorism; her most recent novel, Dossier Baghdad, is a financial thriller set during the Gulf War.
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Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His most recent projects take up secret military bases, the California prison system, and the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.” Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. He recently co-authored Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Melville House, 2006) with AC Thompson.

Amir Parsa

Amir Parsa is the author of Kobolierrot, Tractatuus Philosophikà-Poeticuus, the multilingual L’Opéra Minora , and Feu L’encre, among other works. He was recently included in Les Nouveaux poètes français et francophones (Saint Julien Molin Molette: Ed. Huguet, 2004).

Marko Peljhan

Marko Peljhan studied theatre and radio directing at the University of Ljubljana and in 1992 founded the arts organisation Projekt Atol in the frame of which he works in the performance, visual arts, situation and communications fields. In 1995 he founded the technological branch of Projekt Atol PACT SYSTEMS and in 1999 the Projekt Atol Flight Operations. In 1995 he co-founded LJUDMILA (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab)and from 1996 on worked at LJUDMILA as a programs coordinator on many different fields. He is coordinator of the international Insular Technologies high frequency global radio network initative and the Makrolab (1997-2007) project as well as flight director of the parabolic art and science flights with the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscow and the MIR – Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research consortium. From 2001 to 2004 he was member of the strategic council for information society established by the government of the Republic of Slovenia. He also invented and coordinated the production of a mobile media lab-media literacy project, Transhub-01, which was first realized as Mobilatorij in 2002. His work was presented at major international exhibitions such as documenta X in Kassel, the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Ars Electronica, Media City Seoul, Gwangju Biennalle, Manifesta and Venice Biennale. In 2000 he received the special Medienkunst prize at the ZKM, in 2001 the Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica together with Carsten Nicolai for their work Polar and in 2004 the second prize of the Unesco Digital Media Art Award for Makrolab. He is currently associate professor in interdisciplinary studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and director of Projekt Atol, where he also intiated the music production label rx:tx. From 2005 on he is coordinating the design and utilisation projections for the final Arctic and Antarctic Makrolab projects in the framework of the Interpolar Transnational Art and Science Consortium I-TASC.

John William Phillips

John Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at The National University of Singapore. He is the author of Contested Knowledge: A Guide To Critical Theory (London: Zed, 2000) and editor, with Lyndsey Stonebridge, of Reading Melanie Klein (London: Routledge, 1998). He has published articles on linguistics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, philosophy, literature, urbanism, postmodernism, critical theory, military technology and aesthetics. He is editor, with Ryan Bishop and Wei-Wei Yeo, of two books on cities: Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore (London: Routledge, 2004). He has recently completed a manuscript with Ryan Bishop on modernist aesthetics and military technology, to be titled Unhinging the Senses (forthcoming). He is currently working with Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn and Ryan Bishop, on clusters for the New Encyclopaedia Project.

Amit Rai

Amit Rai received his PhD in 1996 from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. He has previously taught at the New School for Social Research, and since January 2004 has taught courses in Victorian literature, Human Rights, and Global literatures and film studies in the English department at Florida State University. His research interests include postcolonial perspectives on Victorian studies, the history of sentiment and affect, globalization studies, new media and popular Hindi and Hong Kong cinema,, and the anthropology of monstrosity. Dr. Rai has published on a wide array of cultural phenomenon, from sexuality and the body in Gandhi, to the idea of mimicry as resistance in images of Elvis in Hindi films. His first book, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power, 1760-1860 (St.Martins-Palgrave, 2002), is a political history of sentiment and humanitarianism in different forms of colonial power (West Indian slavery, and missionizing evangelicalism in India). His most recent articles include a new narratology of gender, sexuality and power in contemporary diasporic Asian film narratives which appears in South Asian Popular Culture; a questioning of the figure of the Muslim in Hindi films which appears in Harvard Asia Quarterly; analyses of monstrosity and terrorism which appears in Cultural Studies, and, with Dr. Jasbir K. Puar [Dept. of Women's Studies and Geography, Rutgers University], in Social Text; and occasional reviews and essays for Art India, Humanscape (Mumbai, India) and SAMAR (New York).

Retort is a gathering of some thirty or forty writers, artists, teachers and artisans - antagonists of capital and empire - based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Retort's broadsheet Neither Their War Nor Their Peace was produced for distribution at the worldwide demonstrations in the spring of 2003, and then expanded into the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2nd edn with Afterword, 2006). Four of the group - Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts - did the main work of writing Afflicted Powers. A new broadsheet, All Quiet On The Eastern Front, forms part of Retort's installation at the second Seville Biennial. Involved in the making of the broadside and the installation for Seville were Iain Boal, James Brook, T.J.Clark, Joseph Matthews, Franco Moretti, Anne Wagner, Michael Watts and Gail Wight.

Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. She is the author most recently of Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006). She has completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [http://www.eolss.net ]. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, the Financial Times, among others.

Harel Shapira

Harel Shapira is a doctoral student in the Sociology Department at Columbia University.

Radhika Subramaniam

Radhika Subramaniam is the Director of Cultural Programs at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council where she oversees LMCC's curatorial projects. Her most recent project was a two-year international initiative, Cities, Art and Recovery focused on the work of art and culture in the wake of catastrophe. She was formerly the Executive Editor of an interdisciplinary art and culture journal, Connect: art.politics.theory.practice published by Arts International. In that position, she spearheaded the effort to establish its independent voice and led its editorial, management and publishing operations. She is an independent scholar and writer with a special interest in urban modernity in South Asia. She holds a PhD. in Performance Studies and a Masters in Anthropology.


Nigel Thrift

Nigel Thrift is the Vice-Chancellor of The University of Warwick. He joined Warwick from the University of Oxford where he was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. He was made Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences at Oxford in 2003, prior to which he chaired the Research Committee at the University of Bristol. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003 and is author, co-author, or co-editor of over 35 books and more than 200 refereed journal papers. His academic interests include: money and finance; new forms of capitalism, especially the engineering of new forms of management body, new forms of commodity and new forms of address; the cultural impacts of information technologies, especially insofar as these can be framed as a reworking of the meaning of what counts as life; the history of time and time consciousness; non-representational theories; affective politics; performance in all its forms; cities as foci of spatial and temporal experiment.

Jalal Toufic

Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and artist. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), and ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented internationally, in such venues as Artists Space, in New York; Witte de With, in Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, in Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, in Kassel; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in Athens; and the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He co-edited the special Discourse issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World, and edited the special Discourse issues Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee and Mortals to Death as well as the Review of Photographic Memory (Arab Image Foundation, 2004). He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, and, in Amsterdam, DasArts and the Rijksakademie.
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Ananya Vajpeyi

Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2005-2008). She is currently living in New York City and teaching at Columbia University. She participated in underfire 2, in late 2004, when she was the Scholar in Residence at the Waag Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam, NL. She works on violence, displacement and biopolitics in South Asia. Her short monograph on the problems and possibilities of translating Giorgio Agamben's categories of 'camp' and 'refugee' for a South Asian context, titled Prolegomena to the Study of People and Places in Violent India, will appear from WISCOMP, New Delhi in December 2006.


Ana Valdes

Ana Valdés is a writer, an activist and a social anthropologist, working in the space between texts, images and social networks. She has been active in the fields of art, literature and activism for many years, driving together with the visual artist Cecilia Parsberg the artist run network Equator, http://this.is/Equator. Her latest project is called Crusading, the investigation of the meeting between Islam and Christianity, and she is the author of several books.



Barbara Victor

Barbara Victor, a journalist who has covered the Middle East for most of her career, has interviewed many of the major heads of state in that area of the world, including Yasser Arafat; King Hassan; Yitzak Rabin; Ariel Sharon and King Hussein. Her articles, editorials and book reviews have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Life Magazine, Washington Post, Newark Star Ledger, Newsday, New York Times, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Journal de Dimanche, Elle, Femme, Madame Figaro, Vanity Fair and Politique Internationale. She is the author of four novels, Absence of Pain; Misplaced Lives; Friends, Lovers, Enemies and Coriander. Her non-fiction books are Terrorism, an Account of the Lebanon War from 1975-1982; A Voice of Reason: Hanan Ashrawi and Peace in the Middle East, a biography of Hanan Ashrawi, which was nominated for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize; Getting Away With Murder, a study of domestic violence in the United States; The Lady, a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize Laureate; Le Matignon de Jospin, an inside look at the workings of the French government; and Army of Roses, a study of Palestinian women suicide bombers. A documentary film on that same subject written and directed by Victor has aired first on TF-1 and subsequently on television stations throughout Europe. Ms. Victor's current book, The Last Crusade, concerning the alliance between American Evangelical Christians and the Jewish community in the United States and Israel, was published in France in September 2004 by Editions Plon, in England by Constable Robinson in May 2005, and throughout Europe in the Fall 2005.
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Caleb Waldorf

Caleb Waldorf is an artist currently pursuing his MFA in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. Caleb graduated in 2001 from the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied the History of Art and Religious Studies. From 2002 to 2004 he worked at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies where he was an Events Coordinator and a Researcher for the Information, Technology, War and Peace project. Caleb’s artwork and research focuses on representation, the aesthetics of information technology, and violence. He explores how the politics of vision shape and are shaped by cultural, technological, and discursive forces as well as how the body/spectator/observer is a continuing confluence of these multitudes. His current research looks at the intersection of terrorism, personal media and subject formation in the United States post-9/11.
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Eyal Weizman

Eyal Weizman is an architect, writer and curator. Prior to being the founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, he was Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium, Birkbeck College. His architectural projects include the rebuilding of the Ashdod Museum of Art, stage sets for the theatre, and several prizes in architectural competitions. Weizman has worked with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. The exhibition and the publication A Civilian Occupation, The Politics of Israeli Architecture he co-edited/curated was based on his human-rights research. These projects were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects, but later shown in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. Weizman has taught, lectured and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include The Politics of Verticality [forthcoming with Verso Press], A Civilian Occupation, Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and books. Weizman is now a Contributing Editor for Domus Magazine (Milan) and for Cabinet Magazine (New York).

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Slavoj Zizek

Zizek completed his PhD at Ljubljana in 1981 on German Idealism, and between 1981 and 1985 studied in Paris under Jacques Alain Miller. In this period, Zizek wrote a second dissertation, a Lacanian reading of Hegel, Marx and Kripke. In the late 1980s, Zizek returned to Slovenia where he wrote newspaper columns for the Slovenian weekly Mladina, and cofounded the Slovenian Liberal Democratic Party. In 1990, he ran for a seat on the four member collective Slovenian presidency, narrowly missing office. Zizek’s first published book in English The Sublime Object of Ideology appeared in 1989. Since then, Zizek has published over a dozen books, edited several collections, published numerous philosophical and political articles. As well as being visiting professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis, Universite Paris VIII in 1982-3 and 1985-6, Zizek has lectured at the Cardozo Law School, Columbia, Princeton, the New School for Social Research, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Georgetown. He is currently a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Zizek's most recent book is the The Parallax View (Short Circuits, 2006).