Symposium Participants:

Matthew A. Axtell is an environmental attorney and legal historian. He has received degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (B.A., History) and the University of Virginia School of Law (J.D.), and is currently a Ph.D. student in Princeton University's History Department, where he studies the ecological footprint of U.S. legal regimes, with a focus upon American water resources. Prior to this, he practiced environmental law in Washington, D.C. for six years, first for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and then for a Houston-based energy law firm. In 2004, his essay on an unfinished canal in pre-Civil War Virginia was awarded the Levinson Prize by the Society for the History of Technology as best unpublished work by a new entrant into the history of technology field.

Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies in the department of the History of Art, and she is also the director of the program in Cinema Studies. Her book, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke UP, 2003), examines the relationship between the elusive female body and the medium of film. She is currently completing a book about car crashes and film (forthcoming, Duke UP). She is co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and Picture This! Photography and Literature with Liliane Weissberg (forthcoming). She is also one of the editors of the journal Grey Room.

Charles Butcosk

Nachiket Chanchani is a Ph.D. student specializing in the study of South Asian art at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research interests include Hindu temple architecture and the relationship between art and yoga. In addition to an M.A. in Art History from the University of Minnesota, Nachiket holds an M.Phil from the Center for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta.

Nijah Cunningham is a student in the English and Comparative Literature doctoral program at Columbia University. Within the field of African Diasporic literatures, much of his research revolves around black radicalism, poetics, and the avant-garde. Currently, he is especially interested in cinema and experimental art, and how these creative forms function within the realms of politics and ethics. He is from New York City, born in Jamaica, Queens; his family is from the Caribbean island of the same name.

Stassa Edwards is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Florida State University. She received her undergraduate degree from Hollins University. Edwards’s dissertation, The Arts of Seeming: Performing Photography in Nineteenth-Century Britain focuses on the relationship between Victorian photography, science, and theatricality. She has received numerous awards from Florida State University and a grant from the Yale Center for British Art. Her articles have appeared the Chicago Art Journal and The Athanor. She previously interned at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL and is currently the Collections Fellow at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Anna Eyre is a poet and Ph.D. candidate in English/Poetics at SUNY-Albany. Her paper, "Marriane Moore and Elizabeth Bishop: Poetics of Animality" argues naturalist scientist’s technique of objective poetic observation in exploration of the animal Other opens humans to a non-scientific relation to the world—an existence in-humanity. Moore's birth of an animalistic poetic lineage as further transformed in the work of Bishop reveals the potentiality of poetry to work through scientific means to allow reciprocal response to one as an Other and inspire an in-humanity that does not assert presumed technological mastery of the unknown nor violent subjection.

Joel Kropf received a B.A. in history from Trinity Western University and an M.A. in history from Carleton University. His M.A. thesis examined the public debate in Canada over capital punishment in the 1960s and 1970s. Now a doctoral student at Carleton, he plans to use his dissertation research to investigate the ethical perspectives that shaped public discourse on crime and penal reform in interwar and postwar Canada. As he has read twentieth-century Canadians’ arguments about both the death penalty and crime and punishment more generally, he has been intrigued to find recurrent references to the animality of offenders or other citizens. He hopes to publish on this rhetorical theme in the future.

Akira Mizuta Lippit, Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Lippit's teaching and research focus on four primary areas: the history and theory of cinema, world literature and critical theory, Japanese film and culture, and visual cultural studies. Professor Lippit is the author of two books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), and is also the Editor of Discourses. In addition to his two completed books, Lippit is presently finishing a book-length study on contemporary experimental film and video, and has begun research for a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese culture to the concept of the world. Lippit’s work on animals reaches across the disciplines of contemporary theory to recast the human/animal relation, offering a new understanding of the animal as spectral and increasingly vanishing.

Darragh Martin is a 3rd year Theatre Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. His main research interests are Shakespeare in performance in the 19th and 20th centuries, drama and pedagogy and animals in performance. He received his B.A. in English and Drama from Trinity College, Dublin. He is also an active playwright and theatre practitioner and has had his work performed in Australia, Scotland, Ireland and the U.S.A. Darragh was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 2006

Taylor Nelms is a Ph.D. student in Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He holds degrees from Ohio State University and the University of Cambridge. His work currently focuses on the constitution of economic crisis, specifically in Ecuador, with an emphasis on household budgeting, indebtedness, and the affective impact of crisis. He also maintains broad interests in kinship and family, money and exchange, the space of the home, ethnographic methodology and the form of ethnographic writing, and the deep histories of human and nonhuman animals in the Andes.

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, a 2008 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature. He has authored or edited more than thirty books on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Bernhard, Modernism, psychoanalysis and literary theory. Among these, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (2001), Jacques Lacan and the subject of Literature (2001), The Future of Theory (2002), Given: 1) Art, 2) Crime (2006) and 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (2007). He also edited The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan (2002), The Palgrave Advances to James Joyce Studies (2004), and Architecture Against Death: On Arakawa and Gins (2005).

Sheila Rodriguez is a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers-Camden School of Law, where she teaches Legal Analysis, Writing and Research and Animal Law. She has taught basic and upper-level legal writing at Pacific McGeorge School of Law and Golden Gate University School of Law. As Counsel for the Animal Protection Institute, she testified before Congress on critical habitat issues affecting wild horses and burros throughout the Western United States. She also co-authored a law review article on legal strategies for restricting animal traps in the United States.

Kathryn Tabb is a Ph.D. student in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh, and holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. Her interests include Darwiniana and the theory and practice of psychiatric medicine, particularly nosology.

Rahel Villinger has received an M.A. (Magister) in Comparative Literature from Freie and Humboldt Universities of Berlin, where she also studied Philosophy. She is currently a PhD Student in Philosophy at Princeton University. Her
research focuses on Kant and Postkantian German Aesthetics, in particular the Aesthetic Imagination, as well as on contemporary theories of the image. In her work she explores ways of articulating visions of literary and other
artistic forms of imagination.

Daniel Benjamin Williams is currently teaching English and academic writing in Germany, at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He studied English and French literature at Harvard and then Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar and member of Magdalene College. His recent work has focused on questions regarding ethics, moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and law in relation to literature, with particular reference to the novels of J. M. Coetzee and the literature of Southern Africa more broadly. A former Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Review of Philosophy, he was a lead organizer in the Facing Animals lecture series at Harvard University in 2007.

Jason Zuzga