CONSPIRACISM

Nico Baumbach is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University.  His research and teaching focus on critical theory, film theory, documentary, and the intersection of aesthetic and political philosophy. His first book Cinema/Politics/Philosophy was published by Columbia University Press in 2019.  The Anonymous Image: cinema against control is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.  He is also working on a book on conspiracy theory, critical theory, and media.  

Lee Konstantinou is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland. He write the novel Pop Apocalypse (2009), the literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (2016), and the single-novel study The Last Samurai Reread (2022). With Sam Cohen, he co-edited The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012) and with Georgiana Banita he edited Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (2016). He is working on a project called "Creator-Owned Comics."

Andrew Long is a visiting assistant professor in the English and World Literature program at Pitzer College. He has taught literature and media studies at Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University and the American University of  Beirut. He is the author of Reading Arabia:British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880-1930,  and has given papers on conspiracy and Orientalism as well as psychoanalysis. His dissertation was on conspiracy, finance capital, and the modern novel. 

Jay S. Arns teaches in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Writing at Miami University. He is also a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati. His research interests include the rhetoric of science, conspiracy theories, disability studies, and film studies.

Timothy Lem-Smith (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, where he specializes in contemporary multiethnic literature. His first book project, Black and Yellow: Paranoid Aesthetics and Racial Critique in the American Contemporary, investigates how paranoia is being reimagined as a way to critique racial capitalism in recent African and Asian American literature and film. It is under consideration at Stanford University Press.

Flora Arnold (they/them) is a graduate student in Critical Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Their research broadly examines the politics of epistemology and subjectivity in popular culture from affective, literary, and Marxist-Feminist perspectives. Their writing has appeared in Blind Field Journal and Treble Zine.

Zoe Hu is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She specializes in post-1900 American literature and culture, with research interests in gender studies, critical theory and political economy. Her dissertation is on the relationship between writing, social movements, and theories of political consciousness in the 20th-century United States. She has written criticism and essays for Dissent, The Believer, The New Republic, Bookforum, and other places. 

Hanne Nijtmans is a PhD candidate at the American Studies department of the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Her dissertation titled “Conspiracy Care Work: Gender, Labor and the Paranoid Style in American Podcasting” investigates the gendered dimensions of paranoia in American fictional podcasts from the 2010s. Beyond this project, her published work explores questions of agency, complicity, and conspiracy in videogames, TV-shows, and audio dramas. 

Sean Lovitt is an adjunct professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden. His recent published work includes “Surrealist with a Gun: Allen Van Newkirk” in the Journal of Avant-Garde Studies. He has a chapter in a book, forthcoming in 2026: "Hiding Out in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters" in Beyond the Counterculture: Ultraleftist Currents in International Postwar Art, edited by Abigail Susik and David Murrieta Flores. 

Alexander Manshel is an associate professor of American literature at McGill University. He is the author of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia UP, 2023). His writing on contemporary fiction and literary institutions has appeared in venues such as PMLA, American Literary History, MELUS, The New Yorker, and The Nation. He is currently at work on a history of high school English in the United States.

 

Dr Rhona Jamieson is a Research Ireland postdoctoral research fellow at UCD, mentored by Dr Adam Kelly. Her project is ‘The Far Right and the Future: The Narratives of Neoreaction’, with a current focus on Nick Land and Accelerationism. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2024. She is currently developing her thesis into a monograph entitled Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary British Fiction: Hinges, Certainty, and Trust in Narrative Fiction.

Andrea Gadberry is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Dept. of Comp Lit at NYU and at the Gallatin School. She is the author of Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking (Chicago 2020). Her work has appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, differences, and Crisis and Critique. She is  series co-editor of Thinking Literature (Chicago) and is currently at work on her next book, Notes on Clapping, on gesture, its perception, and its interpretation.

V works on novels produced under conditions of authoritarianism, contemporary transphobia, and social reproduction. Her dissertation investigates anglophone novels and the mediation of rising fascism through the figural trans person, with an emphasis on the production of space. V's previous work has been concerned with comparative Asian totalitarianisms, with a particular focus on the literature of North Korea, North Korean defectors, and unconverted long term prisoners.

Dr. Alexander Lowie is a cultural anthropologist, whose research examines alt-right movements in the U.S., focusing on how conspiracism, performance, and media ecosystems shape political identity. His book project, Becoming a (Civil) Warrior, explores the “Patriot Movement” as a site of myth-making and insurgent community and follows the fieldwork he conducted with the Proud Boys and Three-Percenters.

Kyle is a Faculty Lecturer in the Writing Centre at McGill University

Jo Giardini is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College. They are currently working on a book titled Generic Operations: Gender Identity from Clinic to Culture, a critical history of the mid-century clinical conception of gender identity and gender transition, and how this work was absorbed into popular culture and contested by trans writers and activists.