Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Discipline(s): Philosophy/Media Studies
Affiliation: Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Vita: Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky studied philosophy and German literature in Zürich and Berlin. She worked as editor for the Züricher WochenZeitung in 1990-1994 and is co-founder and editor of the journal Die Philosophin: Forum für feministische Theorie und Philosophie. Before becoming professor for media studies at Ruhr University Bochum, she was research associate at the Humboldt University Berlin Cultural Studies Seminar. She has published extensively on topics in feminist theory, representation and mediality, media theory and philosophy as well as religion and modernism. Her publications include: Praktiken der Illusion: Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Benjamin bis Donna J. Haraway (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2007), Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine (Minneapolis, London: U of Minnesota P, 2005), Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen: Jüdische Werte, Kritische Philosophie, Vergängliche Erfahrung (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2000).

Sara Fortuna
Discipline(s): Philosophy
Affiliation: "Guglielmo Marconi", Rome

Vita: Sara Fortuna studied Philosophy, Linguistics, Semiotics and History of linguistic ideas in Rome, Palermo, Cosenza and Berlin. She taught philosophy of language at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” from 2002 to 2006 and is now teaching at the University “Guglielmo Marconi” (Rome). She was research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the FU Berlin in 2007-2008. She has worked on theories of physiognomics, perception, theories of origin and evolution of language in eighteenth century German philosophy, on Dante, Vico, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, as well as on aesthetics, feminist theories, films. Her current projects are about ethics and language in modern philosophical tradition; aspectuality in the philosophical tradition; forgetting, subjectivity and the shaping of identity in literary representations and critical reflections.

Agnese Grieco
Discipline(s): Theatre/Philosophy
Affiliation: -

Vita: Agnese Grieco studied philosophy at the University of Milan and at Freie Universität in Berlin, from which she received a Doctorate in 1995. Since 1996 she has lived in Berlin as an author, essayist, playwright and theatre director. As a director, she works on Greek tragedy and contemporary dramaturgy, staging performances from Euripides, Seneca, Belbel, Vanderbeke, Wittkop and Savinio in Milan, Rome, Berlin and Stuttgart. Her publications include Die ethische Übung (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 1996), Wittgenstein (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1998) and Per amore. Fedra e Alcesti (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2005). She co-edited Girolamo Cardano's Somniorum Synesiorum (Venice: Marsiglio, 1989 and 1993; with Silvia Montiglio), Hans Georg Gadamer's Dove si nasconde la salute (Milan: Cortina, 1994; with Vittorio Lingiardi), Goethe scienziato (Turin: Einaudi, 1998; with Giulio Giorello). She has also translated works by Thomas Bernhard, Ernst Jünger and Thomas Hilbig into Italian.

Liora Lazarus
Discipline(s): Law
Affiliation: Oxford University (St. Anne's College)

Vita: Liora Lazarus is University Lecturer in Law and Member of the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Oxford. She is also associated with the South African Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law (SAIFAC) and the Centre of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. Her primary research interests are in comparative human rights, security and human rights, comparative theory and comparative criminal justice. Born and raised in South Africa, she studied African Economic History at the University of Cape Town and Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 1994 - 1995 she was a Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany, where she conducted research into criminal law reform and human rights in Africa and German prisoners' rights. She went to Oxford in 1995 to write her doctorate and she joined the Law Faculty as a lecturer and then Fellow in 1998. She is the author of the book Contrasting Prisoners' Rights (OUP 2004). Her other projects include a collection, co-edited with Benjamin Goold, entitled Security and Human Rights (Hart Publishing 2007). She has completed two reports for the UK Ministry of Justice with Benjamin Goold (Public Protection, Proportionality and the Search for Balance, Ministry of Justice, 2007; Rights and Responsibilities, Ministry of Justice forthcoming 2009). She is currently developing her work on the right to security and she is engaged in a number of projects concerned with the relationship between security and human rights in fragile states.

Fatima Naqvi
Discipline(s): German, Austrian, and Film Studies
Affiliation: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Vita: Fatima Naqvi is associate professor in the department of Germanic, Russian and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She teaches courses on Vienna 1900, as well as on post-war German and Austrian literature and film. After her B.A. from Dartmouth College, she received her Ph.D. in German literature from Harvard University in 2000. In 2006, she edited an issue of Modern Austrian Literature devoted to Elfriede Jelinek. Her book, The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe 1970-2005 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. Her monograph on Michael Haneke, Der Literaturkünstler, will appear with Synema in 2010.

Hania Siebenpfeiffer
Discipline(s): German Literature
Affiliation: Universität Greifswald

Vita: Hania Siebenpfeiffer studied German literature, political science and psychology in Marburg and Berlin, and received her Ph.D. in German literature from the Freie Universität Berlin. After positions as research associate in Münster and visiting profossor at the University of Illinois / Urbana-Champagne, she is now professor for German literature at the Universität Greifswald. Having published her dissertation as Böse Lust: Gewaltverbrechen in Diskursen der Weimarer Republik (Köln: Böhlau, 2005), she is now working on her second book on literature and science during the ‘crisis of visibility’ in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is co-editor of Krieg und Nachkrieg: Konfigurationen der deutschsprachigen Nachkriegsliteratur (1940-1965) (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2004), Gewalt und Geschlecht: Bilder, Literatur und Diskurse im 20. Jahrhundert (Köln u.a.: Böhlau, 2002), and Zwischen den Zeiten: Junge Literatur in Deutschland von 1933 bis 1945 (Berlin u.a.: BoD 2000). See also: homepage

Ming Tiampo
Discipline(s): Art History
Affiliation: Carleton University

Vita: Ming Tiampo is Associate Professor of Art History in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University. She studied art history in Princeton University and received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her research examines questions of cultural translation and transmission in an international context, concentrating on Japan’s relations with the West. Her teaching considers the problems of transnational cultural analysis along this axis, as well as in the context of multiculturalism in Canada. Her current book project is a transnational analysis of the Japanese avant-garde art movement Gutai that examines the group’s contacts and exchanges with France, the United States, and Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2010). She collaborated with two other scholars on “Moments de Déstruction, Moments de Beauté” (Paris: Blusson, 2002), has published numerous articles on post-war Japanese and French art, and has given public lectures in Europe, Asia, and North America. In 2000 she was a fellow at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Ashiya, Japan, where she conducted research and developed “Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka 1954-1968”. It showed at the Grey Art Gallery in New York and at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2004 and 2005. She is a founding member of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (CTCA) at Carleton.