Mercedes Bunz is Professor of Digital Culture & Society at King’s College London. Her research interest is driven by the question how technology transforms ‘knowledge’; her current project looks into artificial intelligence. Her research is situated between technology studies, theories of media, political economy and contemporary philosophy. Her most recent book is The Internet of Things (Polity Press 2017), co-written with Graham Meikle.

Mercedes is series editor of Search of Media (University of Minnesota Press), together with Wendy Chun, Timon Beyes and Goetz Bachmann. She is co-founder of the open access publishing house meson press and co-edited with Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary (meson press 2017).

Birgit Mara Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research spans literatures in English, French and German from the 19th to the 21st century, with special interest in aesthetics, affect and subject-formation. Her publications include Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (2011), several edited volumes around the configurations of subjectivity, especially in post/colonial constellations of power (Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze. Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (with Lorna Burns, 2012); Singularity and Transnational Poetics (2015); a special issue of PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism on ‘The Ends of Being Human? Re-turning (to) the Question,’ (with Kathrin Thiele, 2018) and recently Hélène Cixous’s Poetics of Voice: Echo – Subjectivity – Diffraction (2025).

Together with Kathrin Thiele, she is founding coordinator of Terra Critica. In that context, she also works on the role of the humanities and their critical heritage. With Timothy O’Leary and Kathrin Thiele, Birgit edits the book-series New Critical Humanities (Bloomsbury) and edited (with Kathrin Thiele) a special issue with Parallax on ‘Diffracted Worlds – Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities’ (2014), as well as (with Kathrin Thiele and Mercedes Bunz) Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary (meson press 2017).

Jacques Lezra is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the Department of Hispanic Studies of UC Riverside, where he joined the faculty in 2016, from New York University. A scholar of comparative as well as Spanish-language literature, Lezra focuses his research in the fields of philosophy; the literature and visual culture of Spain and Europe in the early modern period; Marx and Marxism; and the theory, philosophy and practices of translation. His most recent books are Contra todos los fueros de la muerte: El suceso cervantino (La Cebra, 2016) and Lucretius and Modernity (co-edited with Liza Blake; Palgrave, 2016). His Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (Fordham, 2010) has been published in a Spanish translation (2012) and in Chinese (2013). His latest book Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought is forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield International (Nov 2017) in the book series New Critical Humanities. Earlier work includes a first book, Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe and his edition (with Georgina Dopico Black) of Covarrubias’s ca. 1613 Suplemento al Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana. In addition, Lezra has edited collections of essays on the work of Althusser, Balibar and Macherey, and on Spanish republicanism, and published widely on Shakespeare, contemporary and early modern translation theories and practices, Freud, Althusser, Woolf, animality studies, and other topics. He is the co-translator into Spanish of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight. With Emily Apter and Michael Wood, he is the co-editor of Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), the English translation of Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. With Paul North, he edits the Fordham University Press book series IDIOM.

Sam McAuliffe is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds an MA in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick and his PhD in Philosophy – a study of the image in the work of Adorno, Blanchot and Deleuze – was undertaken at Goldsmiths. He currently teaches courses on the fate of utopia in modern and contemporary political aesthetics, and post-Enlightenment philosophies of nature. His research interests are rooted in the contexts of critical theory, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and Twentieth century art theory and practice, experimental literature and film in particular, and are at present centered on the relation between the gaze and the voice in Blanchot’s theory and fiction.

Timothy O’Leary is a philosopher who moved from Ireland, to Paris, to Australia, to Hong Kong, and back to Australia again. His research is in the area of contemporary European philosophy, in particular the work of Michel Foucault. He has published two monographs, edited several volumes, and published many journal articles on topics including the work of Michel Foucault, the relations between ethics and aesthetics, the ethical dimensions of literature, and philosophical approaches to happiness.

Before coming to the University of New South Wales in Sydney in 2018, he taught philosophy for 17 years at the University of Hong Kong, where he also served as Associate Dean of Arts (Research & Postgraduate), the Head of the School of Humanities, and an elected member of HKU Council. He is particularly keen to promote the critical role of the humanities in our contemporary world of splintered politics, huge inequalities, and a growing environmental crisis.

Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, where she is a member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her research focuses on the critical potential of spectrality and on peripheralized globalization processes, particularly in rural areas. Key publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (2014) and the co-edited volumes Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present (2016) and Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (2024).

Tjalling Valdés Olmos is Assistant Professor of Global Media Histories in the department of Literary & Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches courses in critical and cultural theory, decolonial studies, and gender & sexuality studies. He holds a BA in Chinese Language & Literature from Leiden University, an MSc in History of International Relations from LSE, and an MA in Gender & Ethnicity Studies from Utrecht University. Tjalling undertook his PhD – a study that, through the work of Sylvia Wynter, Raymond Williams, and Laurent Berlant, investigated genres of spatialization and their affective and political function in popular cultural imaginations of non-urbanized geographies – at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World’. Working across transnational and interdisciplinary fields of decolonial and queer studies, his research interests are mainly concerned with the relations between epistemology, affect, and politics as well as the comparative cultural analysis of settler colonialism, non-urban space, sexuality, race, genre, and pop culture. Tjalling’s latest writing appears in the volume Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment, and Care (2023), and he is currently co-editing a forthcoming volume with Esther Peeren on rural imaginations.

Melanie Sehgal is Director of Research at the Institute for Basic Research into the History of Philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. Holding a PhD in Philosophy from the Technical University of Darmstadt, she is the author of Eine situierte Metaphysik. Empirismus und Spekulation bei William James und Alfred North Whitehead (2016). Her work focuses on forms of speculative thinking beyond the nature/culture divide, with particular interest in classical pragmatism, process philosophy and science and technology studies. Since 2012 she has been hosting the workshop and lecture series ‘Experimental Speculations/ Speculative Experimentations’ in Frankfurt/Oder and Berlin. Together with artist Alex Martinis Roe, she is leading the transdisciplinary and experimental working group FORMATIONS, which explores ways of knowing beyond modern disciplinary habits of thought.

Kathrin Thiele is Professor of Gender, Culture & Ecologies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. There, she is also the current director of the Graduate Gender Programme and the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG). Trained in gender studies, sociology, literary studies and critical theory, Kathrin’s feminist research engages with questions of onto-epistemology, relationality and planetary coexistence from queer feminist, decolonial and posthuman(ist) perspectives. As a critical thinker, she is committed to emancipatory disruptions and a push for transformation, yet with careful attention to constitutive frictions in ‘relational matters’ and highlighting the always asymmetrical power relations we inhabit. Kathrin’s publications include her monograph The Thought of Becoming. Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life (2008), multiple co-edited books as well as journal articles and guest-edited special issues in Humanities and Social Science academic journals. Her most recent publications are Intra/Sections: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Concepts of Multiplicity (with J. Haase, 2025) and Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture: A Contemporary Guide to Gender Studies (with R. Buikema and L. Plate, 2025).

Together with Birgit M. Kaiser, she is founding coordinator of Terra Critica, and with Timothy O’Leary and Birgit M. Kaiser she is series-editor of ‘New Critical Humanities’ (with Bloomsbury Publishing).

Vicki Kirby is an Australian anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Her book publications include What if Culture was Nature All Along? (2017); Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (2011); Judith Butler: Live Theory (2006); and Telling Flesh: the substance of the corporeal (1997). The motivating question behind her research is the puzzle of the nature/culture, body/mind, matter/ideation division, because so many political and ethical decisions are configured in terms of this opposition and its cognates.

Sybrandt van Keulen teaches Aesthetics at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a Phd in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, entitled On cosmopolitics, deconstruction particularly with respect to the oeuvre of Kant, Lévi-Strauss en Derrida. His work focuses on art and critique in the critical tradition (from Kant, the Frankfurt School and Derrida). Van Keulen has directed seminars at Jan van Eyck Academie, Franck Mohr Institute and PhdArts. He is former chief editor of Esthetica. Tijdschrift voor Kunst en Filosofie. Van Keulen edited a collection essays on critical effects of art and philosophy: Hoe kunst en filosofie werken (Boom 2014).

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and English at Penn State University, USA. She specializes in utopian and speculative literature, with a focus on feminist utopianism, and is the current president of The Society for Utopian Studies. Her publications deal primarily with contemporary women’s literature—though she began her career teaching and writing about nineteenth-century British literature. Her most recent book is Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions (2013). Other publications include: The Scandal of Susan Sontag (with B. Ching; 2009); The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives (editor; 2000); and A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet (1996).

She is currently writing a book entitled Becoming Plastic, which focuses on the notion of plasticity as a structuralization of the “possibility of another world.” This monograph, centered on the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou, extends the themes of Postmodern Utopias, namely: hospitality; utopia; aesthetics; and feminism. In February 2018 opens an art exhibition entitled Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State. Wagner-Lawlor co-curated this exhibition with Joyce Robinson, curator at the Palmer Museum, and Heather Davis, co-editor of The Art of the Anthropocene (2015).

Shannon Winnubst is Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University, where she teaches courses in queer theory and Afropessimism. She holds a BA from the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame and an MA and PhD in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University. Trained in the history of western philosophy, she has particularly focused on French scholars across the twentieth century, especially Bataille, Foucault, Irigaray & Lacan.

Her research interests have focused on the complexities of race and sexuality as mutually animating social dynamics, particularly in specific historical registers of colonialism, classical liberalism, and neoliberalism. Increasingly interdisciplinary, she remains committed to psychoanalytic cultural analyses alongside historical and sociological research. In addition to numerous articles and essays, she has published three books: Queering Freedom (2006); Reading Bataille Now (editor; 2006); and Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics (2015). She also co-edited, with Lynne Huffer, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2013-18 and, with Jana Sawicki, a special issue of Foucault Studies, “Foucault and Queer Theory” (2012).