Lucy Alford, Wake Forest University
Lucy Alford is assistant professor of literature at Wake Forest University, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American and comparative poetry and poetics. Her book, Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia University Press, 2020) examines the modes of attention poems both require and produce, drawing examples from a range of historical and linguistic settings. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and a PhD in Modern Thought from the University of Aberdeen. Her poems have been published in The Warwick Review, Literary Matters, Streetlight, Harpur Palate, Mantis, Atelier, and Action, Spectacle.
D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University
D. Graham Burnett is a professor of the History of Science at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). He works at the intersection of scholarly inquiry and artistic practices, and is interested in the shifting forms of knowledge associated with the research humanities (and its alternatives). He is the author of a number of books, including Masters of All They Surveyed (2000), Trying Leviathan (2007), and The Sounding of the Whale (2012), and he serves as an editor or board member at several journals and publishing platforms, including Cabinet (Berlin), Public Domain Review (London), and Lapham’s Quarterly (New York). He is associated with the ESTAR(SER) collective, and works with the Friends of Attention.
Henry Cowles, University of Michigan
Henry Cowles is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, where he is affiliated with the Science, Technology, and Society Program, the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. His research and teaching focus on the sciences of mind and brain, evolutionary theory, and the experimental ideal in the United States and Great Britain. His first book, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey, was published by Harvard University Press in 2020. Among his ongoing projects is a history of habit from the celebration of daily routine in Thoreau’s Walden to the rise of “persuasive technologies” in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Sonali Chakravarti, Wesleyan University
Sonali Chakravarti is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. Her work on justice, in its restorative, retributive and transformative forms– has focused on truth commissions, post-genocide justice, and the American jury system. She is the author of Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence (2014) and Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life (2019).Her article “Wanted: Angela Davis and a Jury of Her Peers” is forthcoming in Political Theory. In addition to scholarly journals, her writing has appeared in Jacobin, the Nation, Salon and the Boston Review.
Carolyn Dicey Jennings, University of California, Merced
Carolyn Dicey Jennings is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at University of California, Merced. She works at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience on the topic of attention. She is interested in the ability to direct one’s own mind through attention and the impact this ability has on other functions of the mind, such as perception and action. She is the author of The Attending Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2020) as well as numerous articles.
Natasha Dow Schüll, New York University
Natasha Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her 2012 book, Addiction by Design, parses the intimate relationship between the experience of gambling addiction and casino industry design tactics, showing how architectural, atmospheric, ergonomic, audiovisual, and algorithmic-computational techniques are marshalled to suspend—and monetize—gamblers’ attention. Her current book project, “Keeping Track,” explores the rise of sensor-based, digital technologies of the self and the new modes of introspection, self-care, and self-regulation they offer. Her documentary film, Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, has screened multiple times on PBS and appeared in numerous film festivals. Her research and op-eds have been featured in 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Salon, NPR, WGBH and WNYC.
Joanna Fiduccia, Yale University
Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, where she teaches European and American modernism and the historical avant-garde. Her scholarship and art criticism on both modern and contemporary art has appeared in publications including October, Parkett, Spike, and Artforum, alongside numerous catalogues, and she is currently completing her first book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism. Her research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Brown Foundation, and the Society for French Historical Studies. She was a founding co-editor of the journal of art history apricota and is associated with the ESTAR(SER) collective.
Jonardon Ganeri, University of Toronto
Jonardon Ganeri is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Attention, Not Self (2017), a study of early Buddhist theories of attention; The Concealed Art of the Soul (2012), an analysis of the idea of a search for one’s true self; Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (2020), an analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy of self; and Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide (2021), a review of the concept of inwardness in literature, film, poetry, and philosophy across cultures. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the only philosopher to do so.
Yael Geller, Princeton University
Yael Geller is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in History of Science in Princeton University. Her research sits at the confluence of psychology, psychiatry, neurology, philosophy, and ethics. She’s also a resident in psychiatry in Be’er Ya’acov Mental Health Center in Israel, and a literary critic in the national daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Her first novel, Land of Ararat, was published in Israel in 2016.
Orit Halpern, Concordia University
Orit Halpern is a Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal. Her work engages histories of computing, cybernetics, urbanism, and design. She directs two research groups at the intersection of art, design, and science studies:
www.d4disruptingdesign.net and www.speculativelife.com .
Stefanie Hessler, Kunsthall Trondheim
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer and editor. Her work focuses on ecologies, technology and expanded definitions of life and non-life from an intersectional feminist perspective. Hessler is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, curator of the 17th MOMENTA Biennale in Montreal (2021), and visiting research scholar at Westminster University in London. Recent curatorial projects include “Down to Earth” at the Gropius Bau/Berliner Festspiele, Berlin (2020); “Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II” at TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space, Venice (2019); the 6th Athens Biennale (2018); and with D. Graham Burnett the symposium “Practices of Attention” at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018). Her monographic book Prospecting Ocean was published by The MIT Press and TBA21–Academy in 2019.
Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State University
Alexandra Hui is an Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and Co-Editor of the journal Isis. Her monograph, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (2012), several articles, and co-edited 2013 Osiris volume and Testing Hearing: the Making of Modern Aurality (2020) focus on music, sound, and science. Her two current research projects examine the co-development of listening and background music technology and how scientists listen to the environment.
Sarah J. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania
Sarah J Jackson is a Presidential Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A 2020 Carnegie Fellow, she studies how media, journalism, and technology are used by and represent marginalized publics. She is the author of Black Celebrity, Racial Politics and the Press (2014) and #HashtagActivism:Networks of Race and Gender Justice (2020), and serves as an editor or board member at Communication Theory, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Political Communication. She also serves of the advisory boards of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and the Social Science Research Council’s MediaWell project.
Carlos Montemayor, San Francisco State University
Carlos Montemayor is a Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His research focuses on philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science. He is the author of Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time (Brill, The Netherlands, 2013), co-author (with Harry H. Haladjian) of Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention (MIT Press, 2015) and co-author (with Abrol Fairweather) of Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention: A Theory of Epistemic Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He writes a blog for Psychology Today on consciousness and attention.
Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Digital Studies Institute and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on race, gender, and the Internet, most recently Racist Zoombombing (Routledge, 2021, co-authored with Hanah Stiverson and Kyle Lindsey) and Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2020, as Precarity Lab).
Jesse Prinz, City University of New York
Jesse Prinz (F. Hominidae) was weened in an insular ecological niche in a humid continental climate zone. After migrating inland for synaptic restructuring, he found refuge in several other regions. Now he forages once again in the island of his ontogeny, but it has since been reclassified as a subtropical climate zone. During his perambulations, Prinz configured lexical items into several monographs and more than several articles, contributing, albeit negligibly, to deforestation. All this in an effort to alter conspecifics’ doxastic structures with respect to issues such as emotion, ethics, enculturation, and experience. Other alliteratively itemizable interests include attention and art.
Nick Seaver, Tufts University
Nick Seaver is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he teaches in the program on Science, Technology, and Society. His research examines the cultural theorizing of technical experts, particularly in fields related to machine learning. He has published on topics including commercial theories of context, the anthropology of trapping, and ethnographic methodologies for studying algorithmic systems. His current book project, Computing Taste, explores how the developers of algorithmic music recommender systems understand and justify their work. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and former co-chair of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing.
Justin E. H. Smith, University of Paris
Justin E. H. Smith is university professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. He is the author of Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (2019), The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (2016), Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: The Concept of Race in Modern Philosophy (2015), and Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (2011), all with Princeton University Press. He is an editor at large of Cabinet, and is associated with the ESTAR(SER) collective. The main-belt asteroid 13585 Justinsmith bears his name.
Richard Spiegel, Princeton University
Richard J. Spiegel is a PhD candidate at Princeton University in the Program for the History of Science and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. His research focuses on the intersection of European social, intellectual, and cultural history from 1700, with an emphasis on the history of the humanities and the human sciences. He is published in the British Journal for the History of Science, and his work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion, and The Social Sciences Research Council, among other organizations. His dissertation looks at the role of philosophical psychology and the language of attention in forming the cultural ideology of the educated middle-class in central Europe.
Shadab Tabatabaeian, University of California, Merced
Shadab Tabatabaeian is a Ph.D. student in Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on cognitive and neural mechanisms of creative problem-solving. She is particularly interested in using complex dynamic systems theory to study how the interaction between the brain, the body, and the environment gives rise to creative solutions.
John Tresch, Warburg Institute
John Tresch is Mellon Professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Trained in anthropology and history and philosophy of science, he is the author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (2012) and The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science (2021), and is working on a book on representations of the universe called Cosmograms: How to Do Things with Worlds. He is editor of the History of Anthropology Review.