Varieties of the Impersonal

My name is Tong Liu, and I am a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate at Stanford English. I am currently dissertating on two competing regimes of British modernism—one metaphysical-symbolist and the other humanist-allegorical—with a genre-theoretical treatment of “the ordinary” as a mode of writing in the twentieth century. My discussion of the ordinary splits it into two subcategories: pastoral and autobiography.

Joseph Henry is a PhD Candidate in the art history program at the CUNY Graduate Center and a curatorial fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery. His scholarly and curatorial work focuses on European modern art, with particular attention to questions of expression, affect, labor, and primitivism. His dissertation, "Spiritualized Machines: Die Brücke, Expressionism, and Wilhelmine Modernity" charts the complex prefigurations of machinic and technologized form in the development of German Expressionism.

Jason Q Han is a second-year PhD student in the Literary and Cultural Studies program at UW-Madison. His primary research interest is in unifying media with contemporary theory to illuminate features of political and psychic discourse. His current topic of interest concerns the practice and ethics of solitude from pre-Romanticism into Romanticism into Modernism, theory, and film.

Jacob Reimer is a PhD student in Comparative Literature, studying predominantly the intersection of Black and Jewish theory through the framework of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, Jacob is interested questions about the nature of relationality, specifically in its political utterance. In general, this work relies on the legacies and bibliographies of German Studies, Jewish Studies, Black Studies, Continental Philosophy/Theory, Psychoanalysis, and the question of Aesthetics and Politics.

Leland Jasperse is a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he recently received his PhD. His current book project examines asexual aesthetics and politics at the fin-de-siècle. His writing appears in Signs, American Literature, and the LA Review of Books.

Conall Cash is a 2023-25 Canadian Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature, based at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia. He was previously Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne, after completing his PhD in the Romance Studies department at Cornell University in 2022. Recent and forthcoming publications on modernist literature, cinema, and philosophy can be found in New Literary History, Film-Philosophy, Angelaki, MLN, and b2o.

Maïté Marciano is visiting assistant professor of French at Centre College and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature and thought. Her research and interests include but are not limited to critical theory, diasporic and migration studies, and Mediterranean studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled, The French Novel in the Time of Disaffection, which traces a genealogy of disaffection from the Vichy Regime to the end of the twentieth century and investigates how writers employed anti-cathartic effects to address ethical and political forms of violence.

Alexandra Irimia works on a Humboldt postdoctoral project concerned with contemporary bureaucratic fiction. Jonathan Foster, doctoral researcher at the University of Stockholm, is finalizing a thesis titled “Writing the State: Administrative Fiction in Long-Nineteenth-Century British Fiction” and has published on literature and bureaucracy. They co-edited a special issue of Administory themed “Administrative Cultures and their Aesthetics” and co-founded the Substack newsletter Bureaucritics.

Bella Grigoryan is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She's the author of Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762-1861 (2018) as well as articles and essays on 18th- and 19th-century Russian literature, history, and politics. She is currently completing a manuscript that takes a new materialist approach to the interplay between politics and the print media in Russia, 1801-1855.

Elias Kleinbock is a Lecturer in Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. He completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, with a dissertation titled 'Labors of Formation: Pedagogy and Collectivity in the Modernist Frame.' He works on comparative modernism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, and histories and theories of education.