PLAY Participants

Elizabeth Alsop is a third-year student in the PhD program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her interests include 20^th Century Italian and American literature, Modernism, and film studies. She teaches at Queens College.

Michelle Cho is a student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCI. She is especially interested in the ways that contemporary cultural production, especially visual media, transforms modes of sociality and provides new spaces for affective experience. Her current preoccupation is the operation of disavowal and the aesthetics of negativity pertinent to the reality claims of much documentary film and video. She's also interested in the affect and temporality of modernization in East Asian cinema, psychoanalysis, memory, subjectivity, phenomenology, and theories of diaspora.

Amy Collins is a first year MA Student at the University of Victoria specializing in Victorian literature. Her research interests include feminist and performance theory, the emergent celebrity culture of the 19th century, and resulting issues of materiality and commodification of the female body.

Buddy Hoar is a second-year PhD student in the English department at UC Irvine. He is interested in Anglo-American and Irish modernism, contemporary British fiction, the history of the novel, and critical theory. His study of the twentieth century focuses on experimental narrative, particularly in relation to avant-garde aesthetics and new media.

Hannah Godwin received her B.A. in English literature from Wake Forest University in 2004. She expects to complete her M.A. in English from WFU in May 2008 and to continue her studies at the Ph.D. level. She was the recipient of WFU's Richter Grant and spent July 2007 completing research for an independent project on early modern witchcraft at Oxford University, England. Her master's thesis investigates the confluence and interplay between high modernism and early modernism and focuses on Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and John Donne's expressions of the feminine within his corpus. Hannah also has an interest in medieval studies and attended the International Medieval Congress in May 2007.

Michael Graziano is in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Davis.

Brandon Granier is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at UC-Irvine, where he focuses on literature and philosophy that portray the alienation of the subject, in the long trajectory from Villon to Proust. His study of Lynch thus examines this alienation, a topos which also piques his interest in avant-garde films by directors from Godard and Antonioni to Bruno Dumont.

From October 2007, Natasha Grigorian has been a Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge (Department of French), United Kingdom. She has completed a doctoral thesis in European Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2006; the thesis was supervised by Professor Malcolm M. Bowie of Christ's College, Cambridge. Her publications include: 1) 'The Writings of J.-K. Huysmans and Gustave Moreau's Painting: Affinity or Divergence?', Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 32, nos. 3&4, Spring Summer 2004, pp. 282-297; 2) 'Myth in Valery Bryusov's Verse: Restoring the Missing Links with J.-M. de Heredia and Gustave Moreau', Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 3-3 (December 2006), pp. 325-346. Her comparative research on European Symbolism has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and conducted in cooperation with Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), Musée Gustave Moreau (Paris), and Moscow State Lomonosov University. She is currently preparing a monograph on the basis of her doctoral thesis, Myth in European Symbolism. Her postdoctoral research project focuses on Paul Valéry and the aftermath of Symbolism.

Natilee Harren is a doctoral student in Modern and Contemporary Art History and Critical Theory at UCLA. Her Masters thesis narrated the development of a Deleuzian "diagram model" for 20th century avant-garde artistic practices through the work of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and the Fluxus artist George Brecht. Harren's dissertation project will center on Fluxus, continuing to investigate issues of the "diagrammatic," temporality, dematerialization, distribution, and exchange.

Lisa Harris is a Commonwealth Scholar and second-year MA student in English Literature at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is currently writing her thesis on representations of food in literature, with particular attention to how contemporary North American women writers intercept gender and food. She gained her BA in English Literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she also completed a research project on play in the work of bpNichol. As an artist, teacher, writer and circus performer, play continues to be a significant part of Lisa’s academic practise.

Melissa Haynes is a first year MA student in English at the University of Victoria, BC. Her research areas include 20th century Canadian and American poetry, especially in relation to the dynamic between accessibility and formal experimentation; and ecocritical theory. Her current interest is in playing with the connections between these fields.

Elizabeth Losh is currently the Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine and teaches about digital rhetoric. She studies public communication, persuasive videogames, social marketing, public diplomacy, risk communication, and institutional branding. She writes about the discourses of "virtual state," the media literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounded regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices. Her first book, Virtualpolitik, will be coming out from MIT Press in 2009. Her daily online column by the same name won the John Lovas Award for best academic weblog in 2007, and she is a regular contributor to Siva Vaidhyanathan's weblog about free culture and intellectual property Sivacracy and to the international blog about social advertising and non-profit campaigns Osocio. She has published articles about videogames for the military and emergency first-responders, government websites, national digital libraries, political blogging, congressional hearings on the Internet, and state-funded online learning efforts.

Scott Patrick Murphy is a third year graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation will be an ethnography explaining how improvisation in everyday life is an ongoing accomplishment for a small friendship group of retired white men in a corner donut shop. Other research includes a stream of papers (with Steven Brint, Robert Hanneman, Lori Turk-Bicacki, and Kristopher Proctor) outlining changes in general education requirements, interdisciplinary programs, and departments in American colleges and universities from 1975-2000.

Josef Nguyen is a first year master's student in the Arts Computation Engineering program at UC Irvine. As an undergraduate, he studied both literature and computer science. His main interests include performativity of video games, interface and platform studies, ecocriticism, and the fantastic and supernatural. Among other things, he enjoys croquet, geology, and JAVA, the programming language not the beverage.

Jake Peters hails from the middle of nowhere (northern Minnesota) and his fascination with cities eventually brought him to Los Angeles. He made up his own degree (BA) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and called it "Theories of Space, Gender and Politics." While working as a "computer resource specialist" for an academic library he got interested in Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), which has, much to his surprise, become the subject of his dissertation research in Geography at the University of Southern California. Coding Commons: making room for fun in Free and Open-Source Software brings together interests in labor theories of value, thinking about the social production of difference and a tenancy to see the utopic and dystopic in just about everything. A human need for fun and the politics of fun are critical themes (and problems) in this work and Jake hopes to have a little bit of fun in researching places of face-to-face interaction in the FOSS labor process. Other scholarly-ish interests include the politics of consumption, science fiction, infrastructure (sewers to fiber optic cable) and sound.

Born in Brasilia, Brazil, Cristina Rosa is a scholar and an artist whose research focuses on Afro-Brazilian aesthetics within performance practices. Rosa has a Master degree in Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently engaged in her doctoral research in culture and performance studies at the World Arts and Cultures department, at UCLA.

Jared Russell is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, and an advanced clinical candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). He is also currently adjunct professor of Philosophy and Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College.

Robin Stewart is a third-year English PhD at UCI.

Natalie Strobach is currently a doctoral student in the Comparative Literature program at the University of California Davis, where the focus of her studies is 20th century French, German, and U.S. literature and theory. Specifically, her work centers around the Frankfurt School, Animal Studies--the literary animal, alternative modes of composition, and the writer's relationship to writing.

Scott Tinley has been a freelance and editorial writer for nearly twenty years, much of it in the sport genre. He competed as a professional triathlete from many years, twice winning the World Ironman Championship. He has published five volumes of non-fiction, a collection of short fiction and numerous texts in literary journals such as Fiction International, Experimental Fiction, and War, Literature and the Arts. He is a regular essayist and columnist for several sport-related magazines and journals. Tinley holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies and an MFA in Fiction, both from San Diego State University. He teaches Sport Humanities courses at SDSU and California State University Fullerton while finishing his doctoral work in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His most recent research interests are in evolving sport subcultures and re-appropriation of modern space. He surfs everyday.

Erin Trapp is a PhD candidate in the department of Comparative Literature at UCI; she is currently working on her dissertation, A Strange Silence: post-war poetics of non-expression. Her areas of interest are 20^th C poetry, particularly German and contemporary American, as well as psychoanalysis and prosopopoeia (or, the agency of objects).

Annie Tucker is a therapist working with special needs children and a dance performer. She is a founding member of Evolve Dance based in New York, and recently completed her masters thesis, "Choreographing the New Supercrip: Contemporary Performances of Gender, Embodiment, and Disability," at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures.

Robert Wood received his BA in History with a minor in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota, and has received his MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California-Irvine. His work focuses on the intersection of radical political movements and literature. His interest in literature focuses on literature of the city, of everyday life, and the fantastic. This comes together with the term estrangement. Estrangement in literature constantly gestures towards the tension that exists within capitalist sovereignty between its modes of domination and the lines of flight, which both are its engine of productivity and its potential downfall. In previous lives before graduate school, Robert has been a janitor, an activist, a union organizer, and a member of a number of collectives including Anti-Racist Action, Arise! Bookstore, and the Progressive Student Organization. He was involved in a protest that shut down a speech by Governor Bill Richardson while calling for the bombing of Iraq in the late 90's. He also breathed in so much tear gas at the FTAA protests in Quebec City that he began foaming at the mouth. Currently, his activities have been limited to playing the role of a union steward and he is currently shamelessly skipping an important state meeting to attend this conference.

Rachel A. Wortman is a PhD student in Comparative Cultural Studies at Ohio State University. Her work examines questions surrounding the performance, authentication, and legitimation of identity within public space - focusing on related questions of surveillance and visual culture. Rachel will be completing her MA work this summer at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English.