Capitalist Realism's Worlds

Alden Sajor Marte-Wood (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. He is a cultural studies scholar whose work focuses on Global Asias and transnational political economy. His current book project, Reproductive Fictions: Overseas Filipina Writers and Capitalism’s Crisis of Care, establishes a longue durée continuity between martial law-era crises of social reproduction, the state-sponsored export of care work, and Philippine literary forms.

John graduated from UC Irvine with a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literatures with a subspecialty in U.S. Latinx Studies. He works on Latin American culture with an emphasis on the Caribbean, Mexico and their respective Diasporas in the United States. Currently he is working on a book that investigates artistic responses to rupture in the commodity form co-created by capitalist realism and petroculture. 

Sophia Hershfield is a third year Cinema and Media Studies PhD student at York University. She earned her BA (hons.) in English and Philosophy from the University of Winnipeg, and an MA in English with a specialization in Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on the Frankfurt School of critical theory, cultural studies, Marxism, and contemporary cinema.

Carlos Amador teaches in the Romance Languages and Literature Department at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of numerous pieces on Latin American Cultural Production, Media, Literature, Film, and the visual arts. His new book, Unobligated Bodies: Latin America's Lumpen Aesthetic Categories is due in late 2026. 

Salvador Avalos is a PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literature department at State University of New York at Buffalo. Salvador specializes in Latin American and Nahuatl literature. 

Yufan Chen is a Ph.D candidate in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His dissertation project explores the emergence of new ecologies of narrative consumption in postsocialist China. Broader interests include modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature, marxism, and psychoanalysis. 

Jason Willwerscheid is Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Providence College in Rhode Island, where he teaches courses in statistics and data science. In addition to a PhD in Statistics from the University of Chicago, he holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. His current projects span statistical genetics, Bayesian methodology, baseball analytics, and videogame industry studies.

Robin Blyn is a Professor of English at the University of West Florida. Her first book, The Freak-Garde: Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America, studies the generation of alternatives to the subject of liberal capitalism in the U.S. Her current book project disentangles the legacies  of the socialist anarchist movements that emerged following the fall of the Berlin Wall in response to neoliberal globalization.

Maria Bose is an assistant professor of Global Studies at Providence College in Rhode Island. With Jason Willwerscheid, she’s now at work on a handful of books: on the transmediation of Bethesda Studio’s Fallout franchise; Sony’s post-recession corporate-media evolution; and AAA RPGs and the mediation of deglobalizing transition. She recently served on the advisory board of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP.)

Victoria Lupascu is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her research interests comprise of 20th and 21st century Chinese, Romanian and Brazilian literature and film, medical humanities and visual culture. Her work explores how writers, directors and artists engage with and produce medical narratives to engage with less visible histories of cultural, economic and social disposability. 

Chloé is a master’s student in Comparative Literature and a Student Success Advisor at the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Montreal. Her current research focuses on the critical depiction of discipline and power dynamics in modern Chinese literature. Holding a bachelor’s degree in Translation, she worked in the field for several years before shifting her career toward academia. She nurtures a passion for language as a means of transmitting knowledge and artistic expression.

Darwin Tsen is an assistant teaching professor and coordinator of the Chinese language minor at Syracuse University. Darwin’s fields of study include modern and contemporary Chinese and Japanese literature and culture, critical theory and literary theory, film, Asian and Eastern European postsocialism, as well as Asian American literature.