Sorbonne University is a public research university located in Paris, France. The institution's legacy reaches back to the Middle Ages in 1257 when Sorbonne College was established by Robert de Sorbon as a constituent college of the University of Paris, one of the first universities in Europe. Its current iteration was formed in 2018 by the merger of Paris-Sorbonne University and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie.
Birkbeck, University of London, is a public research university located in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. Established in 1823 as the London Mechanics' Institute by its founder Joseph Clinton Robertson and its supporters Sir George Birkbeck, Jeremy Bentham, J. C. Hobhouse and Henry Brougham, Birkbeck is one of the few universities to specialise in evening higher education in the United Kingdom.
The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture is a graduate research institute and gallery located in New York City. It is affiliated with Bard College, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The gallery occupies a six-story townhouse at 18 West 86th Street while the academic building and library are located at 38 West 86th Street.
Steven Kevin Connor, FBA is a British literary scholar. Since 2012, he has been the Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was formerly the academic director of the London Consortium and professor of modern literature and theory at Birkbeck, University of London.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss art curator, critic, and art historian. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art review. He lives and works in London.
Lee Scrivner is an American novelist and cultural theorist known for his books Casinolabs (2024) and Becoming Insomniac (2014), and for his satirical avant-garde art manifestos. He writes on the literature, history, and culture of the Victorian and Modernist periods, as well as on contemporary issues.
Beatriz Colomina is a Spanish-American architecture historian, theorist and curator. She is the founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and director of graduate studies in the School of Architecture.
The Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) is an interdisciplinary humanities center at Duke University dedicated to supporting humanities, arts, and social science research and teaching. Named after the prominent African American historian and civil rights activist John Hope Franklin, who retired from Duke in 1985 as the James B. Duke professor of history, the institute has also made a commitment to promote scholarship that enhances social equity, especially through research on race and ethnicity.
The Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) is a research, teaching, and public events program at UC Berkeley. Its mission is to critically analyze and help shape developments in new media from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives that emphasize humanities and the public interest. Founded in 2004 by Linda Williams, Ken Goldberg, Greg Niemeyer, Whitney Davis, and Cathy Koshland, the organization seeks to study new media from three disciplinary perspectives, the humanities, the arts, and technology. BCNM awards Designated Emphasis Degrees in New Media and Masters Certificates to graduate students and Undergraduate Certificates to undergraduate students at UC Berkeley.
Aikaterini Gegisian, born in Thessaloniki, Greece, is a visual artist, filmmaker, educator, and researcher. Her collage practice spans various mediums, including film, photography, installation, and textile design. She often utilises the photobook format; in 2015, she published her debut photobook, "A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas," contributing to the award-winning Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Her second book, "Handbook of the Spontaneous Other," was published by MACK in 2020 and received international acclaim.
Gregg Lambert is an American philosopher and literary theorist, who writes on Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, critical theory and film, the contemporary university, and especially on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the founding director of Syracuse University Humanities Center, where he currently holds the distinguished research appointment as Dean's Professor of Humanities, and was Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Central New York Humanities Corridor between 2008-2019.CNY Corridor
Penelope Curtis is a British art historian and curator. Fom 2015 to 2020 she was the director of Lisbon's Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, and from 2010 to 2015 director of Tate Britain. She is the author of several monographs on sculpture and has written widely at the invitation of contemporary artists.
The Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) is an interdisciplinary research center at Rice University that focuses on applying the arts, humanities, and social sciences on energy and environmental challenges.
B. Anthony Bogues is a Caribbean political theorist, intellectual historian, writer and curator and currently Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University and the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory. He was an Honorary Research Professor at the University of Cape Town and is currently a distinguished visiting professor and curator at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Center, University of Johannesburg. He is also a Visiting professor of African and African Diaspora Thought at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2024, Bogues received an honorary degree from SOAS, University of London.
Sussan Babaie is an Iranian-born art historian and curator. She is best known for her work on Persian art and Islamic art of the early modern period. She has written extensively on the art and architecture of the Safavid dynasty. Her research takes a multidisciplinary approach and explores topics such as urbanism, empire studies, transcultural visuality and notions of exoticism. In her work as a curator, Babaie has worked on exhibitions at the Sackler Museum of Harvard University (2010), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Smith College Museum of Art (1998).
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, editor and public speaker. In 2017 she was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist endowed foundation that aims to continue the creative and investigative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.
Senam Okudzeto is an American and British artist and educator who lives and works in Basel, London, Ghana and New York City.
Filipa Ramos is a writer, lecturer and curator.
Alan Read is a writer and professor of theatre at King's College London. Read is known as a theatre theorist and cultural activist, with scholarly interests in ethics and the everyday, performed communities, event architecture, and subjectivities of capitalism. Read's work stands as a critique of modernist theatrical orthodoxy critically contesting Peter Brook's idealism of the ‘empty space' awaiting its theatre, a tabula rasa for professionals to enter and exit at will. Read counter intuitively perceives theatre to have been superseded in that populated place by the quotidian performances of everyday life, those that remain for good and ill. Read took up this provocative critique on the National Theatre stage in London in 1994 in public dialogue with Brook's space-designer Jean-Guy Lecat, and joins others in his scepticism of the colonial fantasy of theatre's ‘empty space', including most assertively Rustom Bharucha in Theatre & The World (1993).
Giovanni Aloi is an author and curator specializing in the representation of nature in modern and contemporary art. He teaches art history and visual culture at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and is the co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press book series Art after Nature. Aloi is also USA correspondent for Esse Magazine Art+Opinion.
