Miniature as Method

Christiane Frey is Assoc. Prof. of German and Co-Director of the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought at JHU. She previously held positions in German, Comp Lit, and the History of Science at the Univ. of Chicago, Princeton, NYU, the HU Berlin. Her publications include Laune: Poetiken der Selbstsorge von Montaigne bis Tieck (Fink 2016); and ed. volumes, among them Milieus of Minutiae (2024); Short Forms and Their Affordances (2023); and Säkularisierung (Suhrkamp 2020).

Rosa van Hensbergen is Assistant Professor in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Her first book, Moving with Words: Butoh Notation after Tatsumi Hijikata (forthcoming, OUP), theorises the notational method of butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. She has also written on contemporaneous American and European experimental performance. Alongside her academic work she publishes poetry, translations, and makes collaborative performance work. 

Alex Benson is Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College. He writes about U.S. literary histories, specializing in the study of language politics, old media, and the environmental imagination. He is the author of a number of essays in journals and edited volumes and of a monograph published by UNC Press in 2023: Sound-Blind: American Literature and the Politics of Transcription. 

Ada Smailbegović is a poet and theorist born in Sarajevo and currently living in Brooklyn. She is an Associate Professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, ecologies of displacement, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. Ada is the author of two books Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (Columbia UP, 2021) and The Cloud Notebook (Litmus, 2023).

Kayle R. Avery is an interdisciplinary curator, historian, and PhD candidate at the University of Delaware writing at the intersection of imagination, creativity, and virtuality. His latest work explores the history and material culture of imagined worlds—from the first model train enthusiasts to the colonial revival and contemporary video games. His forthcoming dissertation considers the social history of model railroading in the United States through its visual and material culture. 

Caroline LaPorte-Burns is a PhD candidate in art history at McGill University. Her dissertation examines the relationship between violence and ornament in its survey of early modern Dutch pearl resource harvest and craft. Her research has been supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the Max Stern Museum Fellowship. Caroline received a BA in Art History and German from Barnard College and an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art. 

Stella Rossikopoulou Pappa is a PhD candidate at MIT in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in the History and Theory of Art and Architecture. Her research examines design history, play, and engineering, proposing methodological frameworks that articulate pedagogy and creativity through technical precision. She is a founding member of the EAHN Interest Group Children Matter and serves as a board member and session chair for DocTalks, advancing interdisciplinary dialogue in design research.

Julia Chang is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Cornell University. Her specializes in nineteenth-century Spanish literature, contemporary Spanish non-fiction and visual art, and Philippine literature in Spanish. Her work also engages with feminist and queer theory, histories of racial formation, disability studies, and game studies. Chang is the author of Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

Brandon Borcoman is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and also teaches first-year composition at CCNY. His research interests include modernist poetics, as well as philosophies of difference. 

Bryan Klausmeyer is Associate Professor of German at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the intersection of 18th- and 19th-century German literature, the history of science, and media studies. He is currently completing a monograph that examines the poetics and pragmatics of small forms in the long 18th century, with a focus on the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Goethe.

Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, where she specializes in modern European art and the historical avant-garde. Her first book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, will be published this spring with Yale University Press.

Melinda Alliker Rabb is Professor of English at Brown University and the author of Miniature and the English Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2019), as well as Satire and Secrecy in English Literature 1650-1750 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and numerous articles and chapters on literature and culture of the long eighteenth-century. Her new book is Parting Shots: War Trauma and Literature of the Long Eighteenth-Century.