Rot and Renewal: Theorizing Decomposition across Space and Time

Rahel von Minden is a Visiting Lecturer in the College Core Curriculum at New York University. They hold a BA in Comparative Literature from Freie Universität Berlin, an MA from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD in German Studies from NYU. Their dissertation project reflects on avant-garde aesthetics and the problem of beginning, and they have published on aesthetic resistance in Emmy Hennings’ prison texts. They are currently working on a new project at the intersection of waste studies and literature.

Cecily Raynor is Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Digital Humanities at McGill University. Her research explores how global forces shape local cultural and linguistic realities, focusing on contemporary Latin American culture. Her current work examines cultural responses to health and environmental crises, including pandemics and waste cultures.

Ariel Ross is a Teaching Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University, and holds a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Emory University. 

Malaika Mitra recently graduated with a MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University. Her major research project discusses the philosophical and environmental ramifications of treating oil as an archive. She presented an earlier form of this research at the Petrocultures Conference in 2024; more recently, Malaika presented on literature that considers humans as animals that may be observed or even consumed by nonhumans at ACCUTE's 2025 annual conference.

Stephanie Sang is currently reading and writing about Asian American imaginative histories especially attuned to material objects and substances. Her dissertation project, centered around decomposition, seeks to analyze Asian American cultural production for its baser (and less transcendental) representations of the environment. She is a PhD candidate in Literatures in English at Cornell University. 

Aditi Sen is an Associate Professor at the Department of History in Queen's University, Canada. 

Sharon Kunde is an Assistant Professor at the Maine College of Art and Design. Her research centers on the racial politics of reading and representing nature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and literary criticism. She received an ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from 2016 - 1017 and an Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2022 - 2024. Kunde writes poetry and fiction as well as literary scholarship.

Kimberly Chung is an Assistant Professor of Korean literary and cultural studies at McGill University. She is author of The Sensational Proletarian: Affect and Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea (Stanford University Press, 2025) and a coeditor of Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation, and Interaction (Phaidon Press, 2020).

Elisabetta Rodio is a PhD student in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University, and her interests include animal studies, ecocriticism, horror-literature and posthumanism. Her research focuses on animal labor in Latin American cultural production, examining how representations of working animals in literature and the arts reshape our understanding of human–animal relationality. 

Christopher Allen Walker is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College. One of the founders of the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, his work, research, and teaching explore interdisciplinary methods. His monograph in progress, Decomposing Futures, traces how changing understandings of decay encouraged writers, activists, and artists to develop new logics for imagining environmental futures. 

Jessica Croteau is the Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Haverford College after receiving her PhD in political theory from Johns Hopkins University. She is the winner of the 2023 Western Political Science Association William E. Connolly Award for an outstanding political theory paper in contemporary democratic thought and serves as a 2025-2026 Awards Committee member for WPSA’s Clay Morgan Award for the Best Book in Environmental Political Theory. 

Anne is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University (MPhil Oxford, AB Princeton), whose research focuses on queer ecologies in the works of Canadian and American authors and artists.

Shivangi “Gigi” Maiti Sengupta is a student at Case Western Reserve University studying Political Science and the History & Philosophy of Science, with minors in Chemistry, World Literature, Bioethics, & Natural Science. She is the founder of SoteriCare, a service organization facilitating narrative medical and bodily exploration for women in correctional facilities. Gigi also explores ecofeminist literatures as a mode of philsophical inquiry and conducts translational breast cancer research.