Editorial Board

Bonnie Yonbom Chung is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, where she also holds the Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities. Her dissertation, “The Asian Diaspora’s Polyphonic Archive: Articulating the Islands of East Asia,” theorizes the archipelagic, polyphonic, and transpacific turns in contemporary Asian American literature.

Cary Howie is Associate Professor of Romance Studies. Raised in Danville, Illinois, and Brunswick, Georgia, Cary received his B.A. in Literature from Bard College (1997) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University (1999, 2003). He is the author of Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (Palgrave 2007) and, with Bill Burgwinkle, Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (Manchester 2010 / Palgrave 2011). He has also edited a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur on sanctity (Spring 2010).

Cary is fascinated by bodies, by questions of style, and by the ways in which sexuality and the sacred are porous to one another. His interests tend to gravitate toward French and Italian medieval literature, contemporary American lyric poetry, Christian theology, and queer studies.

Gavin Walker is Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He specializes in literary, social, and cultural theory in its intersections with global intellectual history, continental philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

Walker is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux, 2022), and The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject (Verso, forthcoming), and the editor of many volumes, including The End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, no. 121-4 (Duke, 2022); editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020), alongside nearly 70 articles and chapters in the theoretical humanities, critical theory, intellectual history, literary studies, and political thought.

Working across texts in languages including English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, he is interested in the social structures, cultural forms, politics, and discursive regimes produced by the nexus of capital, the nation, and global modernity at the juncture of philosophy, philology, criticism and historical analysis. A member of the editorial boards of the Historical Materialism Book Series (Brill/Haymarket), diacritics, and positions: asia critique (Duke), his work has been supported by institutions such as the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Japan Foundation (Canada, US, and UK), the Fonds québécois de recherche—société et culture, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, including an Insight Grant (2016-2024).

Grant Farred: PhD (Princeton University, 1997), MA (Columbia University, 1990), BA Honours, Cum laude, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, 1988). He has previously taught in the Program in Literature, Duke University, Williams College and Michigan University.  He served as General Editor of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) from 2002 to 2010.

He has published in a range of areas, including theory, postcolonial studies, race, the formation of intellectuals, sport’s theory, Cultural Studies and literary studies.

His books: Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa(Westview Press, 1999), What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),  Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and, most recently, The Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport & Philosophy (Temple University Press, May 2018).

Imane Terhmina is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance Studies. She holds a PhD in French Literature from Yale University. Her research lies at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Areas of specialization include: Francophone African literature and culture, postcolonial theory, affect theory, political philosophy, petrofictions / eco-topias, Afropolitanism.

Jessie Taieun Yoon (they) is a PhD candidate in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. They specialize in Performance Studies, queer/trans of color critique, postcolonial and global Asian studies, and contemporary art theory. Yoon’s dissertation “Pretense: Performing Asia as Queerly Feminine in Transnational Artworlds” investigates transnational queer East Asian contemporary art and its racial politics.

Judith Tauber is a Ph.D. candidate concentrating in Italian and French Cultural History. Before commencing her doctoral studies, she received a B.A. from the College of William & Mary. Grounded in cultural studies and media studies, her research focuses on social change, cultural representations, the functioning of power, as well as the meanings of violence and consensus. In her dissertation, she traces the development of narratives retelling Italy and France’s social protests in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mari Jarris is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies and affiliated faculty in the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Trained as a comparatist, they work across German- and Russian-language literature and theory, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their research areas include feminist and queer theory, transnational socialism, utopianism, psychoanalysis, and Critical Theory.

Jarris’s current book manuscript, Utopia as Revolution: Marxism’s Queer Pasts and Futures, offers a counternarrative to the dominance of scientific socialism by recovering queer utopias within transnational German, Russian, and French socialist movements since the nineteenth century. They have previously published on topics including Marxist feminism, sexology, utopian literature, and precarity. Their research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, American Councils, German Academic Exchange Service, and Women in German Coalition.

A scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, Naminata’s research primarily explores African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literatures, cultures, cinema, and new media.

Her current teaching and research interests focus on forms of gendered, sexual, and racialized agency in a variety of cultural products (oral tradition, literary fiction, filmic and social media). These explorations in Malinke, French, English, and Spanish take the trans African context as their points of departure to make broader contributions to transnational reflections on questions of agency and resistance.

Patty Keller specializes in Spanish literature and visual culture. She is the author of Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture, which examines the relationship between image production, ideology, and spectrality. Weaving together close readings of three distinct media from Spain’s fascist and post-fascist periods—documentary newsreels, art films, and conceptual photography—this study explores the interpretive possibilities of visual constructions of loss in contemporary culture. She is currently working on a new project titled, Photography’s Wound: Exposing Belief in Times of Uncertainty, a study of contemporary photography, ethics, and structures of belief. Her research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of literature, photography, critical theory, political philosophy, cultural studies, cinema and media studies.

Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies as well as the Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities, Paul Fleming has published monographs on Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2009) and The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (2006) along with edited volumes on Hans Blumenberg, Siegfried Kracauer, the scholars around Stefan George, and Ulrich Peltzer. His translation of Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic appeared in 2002 and of Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River in 2010. He is currently co-translating Blumenberg’s The Saint Matthew Passion for Cornell Press as well as completing a book-length project that examines the use of the anecdote in and as theory with respect to questions of exemplarity, evidence, history, and rhetoric.

Fleming’s teaching and research interests include eighteenth and nineteenth century German and European literature, especially the novel; aesthetics and hermeneutics from 1750 to the present; Critical Theory; the relation between narration and knowledge. He is co-editor of the book series Paradigms: Literature & the Human Sciences in de Gruyter Press as well as of the series Manhattan Manuscripts in Wallstein Press. He serves on the boards of Cornell’s Signale book series, diacritics, and New German Critique.

Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of Graduate Studies. Eighteenth- twentieth-century literature and philosophy; aesthetics; systems theory; literary and media theory; lyric poetry and poetics.

Philip Lorenz received his PhD from New York University. His teaching and research focus on English and Spanish literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in relation to problems of sovereignty and political theology. Related areas of interest include International Law, Religion, Psychoanalysis, Translation and Poetics and Theory. His book, The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama (Fordham University Press 2013) examines the metaphor-logics created by the great playwrights of the early modern period – William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca – in relation to contemporary theorists on the problem of sovereignty. His current book project, “Baroque Files,” pursues the after-lives of early modern sovereignty, as its representation moves from the symbolic body of sacred kings into increasingly abstract and disembodied forms, including public administration.

Simone Pinet received her PhD from Harvard University. Her teaching and research focus on medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, especially in relation to spatiality, economics, poetics, and translation, with an eye, especially in her teaching, to the long-term connections between the medieval and the modern, both in contemporary Spain and Latin America. Related areas of interest include visual studies, cartography, and political economy. Her book, Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction from Romance to the Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examines literature and cartography in Spain in the transition from the medieval to the early modern through the figure of the island. A second book, The Task of the Cleric (University of Toronto Press, 2016), takes the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre as a focal point for the discussion of cartography, translation, and political economy in different archives and texts. She is currently at work on a book on economic metaphors and rhetorical strategies traced through canonical works of the Iberian Peninsula from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.

Prof. Pinet was a fellow of the Society of the Humanities in 2008-2009, and a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow for 2010-2011.

Tracy McNulty, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, received her BA in French and English from U.C. Berkeley and her PhD in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine. Her research interests include 20th-century French literature and comparative modernism, psychoanalytic theory (especially Freud and Lacan), contemporary French philosophy, and political theory. In addition to these fields, she regularly teaches interdisciplinary courses on such questions as the origins of language, myth and symbolic thought, eroticism and perversion, and philosophical, scientific, and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and human agency. Her first book, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. Her second, Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life (a defense of the liberating function of formal and written constraints in psychoanalysis, political theory, and aesthetics), came out with  Columbia University Press in 2014. Currently she is working on two new books. Libertine Mathematics: Perversions of the Linguistic Turn juxtaposes masterpieces of the libertine tradition by the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Comte de Lautréamont, and Pauline Réage–each of which can be read as promoting a “language of the real” that would allow for an integral transmission of the drive—alongside contemporary theoretical works that have embraced the language of mathematical formalization—or of other non-signifying languages—either as an ultimate extension of, or as a rejection or overturning of, the so-called “linguistic turn” in twentieth century thought: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and the “speculative realists,” and in a different way Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. A fourth book project, currently in progress, explores the intersubjectivity of political acts through the lens of psychoanalysis.

Xinyu H. Zhang is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. His interests range across modern Icelandic, Faroese, and Greenlandic literatures in the longue durée of peripheral negotiations with scarcity and planetarity, object-relations psychoanalysis, deconstruction and dialectics terminable and interminable. He is a translator of Icelandic literature