Notes on Contributors

Riccardo Baldissone is Fellow at the University of Westminster, London. He is committed to a genealogical construction of Western texts that links the process of production of the logic of identity in classical ontology with the medieval emergence of conceptual discourse and the transformations of modern naturalism, in a project to overcome the double straitjacket of entities and representations. His most recent publication is Farewell to Freedom: A Western Genealogy of Liberty (University of Westminster Press, 2018). He is completing a genealogical account of Western processes of individuation, Autós, which will be in print in 2019 from Rowman & Littlefield.

Jonathan Basile is a Ph.D. student in Emory University’s Comparative Literature program and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info. His first book, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, has been published by punctum books. His academic writing has been published in the Oxford Literary Review and Critical Inquiry and is forthcoming in Derrida Today and Variaciones Borges. His para-academic writing has been published in The Paris Review Daily, Public Books, Berfrois, Guernica, and minor literature[s].

Raoul Frauenfelder is Honorary Fellow of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno (Italy). He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Palermo (Italy), where he worked on Derrida’s relation to phenomenology. His main publication Tra le mani la carne (Mimesis, 2017) focuses on a critical reading of the metaphorical touch that sustains Merleau-Ponty’s ontology.

Catherine Malabou is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Kingston (UK) and is teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Irvine in spring 2019. Her most recent book is Morphing Intelligence, From IQ Measurements to Artificial Brains (Columbia University Press, 2019). She is working on a new project called Philosophy and Anarchism.

Arthur Holland Michel is the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone, a research institute at Bard College in New York. He is the author of Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How it will Watch Us All (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). His work has appeared in Wired, Slate, Vice, The Verge, Fast Company, Motherboard, Al Jazeera America, U.S. News, Bookforum, Mashable Spotlight, and an Oxford Research Encyclopedia, among other outlets.

Erin Obodiac received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine and has held teaching and research appointments at UC Irvine, the University of Leeds, SUNY Albany, and Cornell University. Her writings address the conceptual antecedents of machinic subjectivity as well as the nascent technosphere that ushered in our geologic era, the anthropocene. As a Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, she began the research project “Robots at Risk: Transgenic Art and Corporate Personhood,” which explored the role of automata in the genesis of cinematic animation and contemporary biomedia. As a Mellon Fellow, Obodiac developed this project as the book manuscript The Transhuman Interface, proposing that we use a lenticular lens to view cinema and the anthropocene as one emergence.

Michael Peterson is a Ph.D. candidate at DePaul University. His work lies at the intersection of questions of inheritance, intergenerational responsibility, environmental philosophy, and twentieth century continental thought. He is the author of “Responsibility and the Non(bio)degradable” in Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (2018). His forthcoming dissertation reads contemporary nuclear waste disposal policy alongside figures such as Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida to discover the sense in which such policy both is and isn’t responsive to the demands of a responsibility worthy of the name.

Carolyn Shread is Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA and also teaches translation at Smith College. She has translated ten books, including five by French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Most of her published articles address two principal areas of research: the implications of Malabou’s concept of plasticity for translation studies and the process of translating Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces from French into English. She has a longstanding interest in feminist translation, and recently wrote an entry on “Translating Feminist Philosophers” for the Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Philosophy (2019). In addition to being Assistant Editor for the journal translation: A journal of transdisciplinary studies, for the past six years Shread has worked closely with the Haitian based journal Legs et littérature and the publishing house LEGS EDITION.

Elina Staikou teaches Modern Liberal Arts at the University of Winchester. She is the author of Deconstruction at Home: Metaphors of Travel and Writing and of numerous articles in the field of deconstruction and medical humanities.

David Wills is Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His publications include books on film theory, and on Thomas Pynchon, as well as Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford, 2005) and a three-volume analysis of the originary prostheticity of the human: Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995), Dorsality (Minnesota, 2008), and Inanimation (Minnesota, 2016). His latest book is titled Killing Times: the Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (Fordham U. Press, 2019). He has translated works by Derrida (Right of Inspection, Counterpath, The Gift of Death, and The Animal That Therefore I Am), and is a founding member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project.