Bruno Bosteels, "The Melancholy Left"Bruno Bosteels is Associate Professor of Spanish at Cornell. Bosteels received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania (1995; MA 1992), and his AB in Romance Philology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (1989). Before coming to Cornell, he held positions as an assistant professor at Harvard University and at Columbia University. He is currently preparing two book manuscripts, After Borges: Literature and Antiphilosophy and Badiou and Politics (forthcoming from Duke University Press). He is also translating and introducing two books by Badiou: Can Politics Be Thought? followed by An Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State and What Is Antiphilosophy? Essays on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan (both for Duke University Press). He is the author of dozens of articles on modern Latin American literature and culture, and on contemporary European philosophy and political theory. His research interests further include the crossovers between art, literature, theory and cartography; the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s; decadence, dandyism and anarchy at the turn between the 19th and 20th centuries; cultural studies and critical theory; and the reception of Marx and Freud in Latin America.

Rubén Ríos Avila, "A Bite of Visibility: on Queer/Latino Shame"Rubén Ríos Avila is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. His research interests are contemporary Latin American and Puerto Rican literatures, Lacan, film and literature, contemporary poetry, and literary theory. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. He has worked as visiting professor and scholar at Brown University, Emory University, Harvard University, University of Notre Dame, and Yale University. His publications include Embocadura (loosely translated into English as “mouthpiece”) (Tal Cual Publications 2003), a collection of essays on popular culture; La raza cómica (The Comical Race, of the subject in Puerto Rico) (Callejón Publishers 2002), which approaches the subject of identity politics on the island; and numerous articles for both specialized journals and the popular press. He hosts a weekly show on film criticism, En cinta (On film) for TUTV, Puerto Rico’s PBS channel.

Paul Grimstad, "Three Heretics"Paul Grimstad is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York Universityin 2007 and his B.A. in English Literature in UW-Madison in 1996. His book project, Experience and Experimental Writing from Emerson to William James, explores the links between philosophies of experience and literary innovation in Emerson, Poe, Melville, Charles Peirce, William and Henry James, Henri Bergson and John Dewey. The further aim of the study is to show how literary experimentation for these figures often arose from non-American encounters, and as such complicates the project of establishing an original American literature in the nineteenth-century.

Bruce Holsinger, "The Gods of Theory and the Work of God: Liturgy in Theory, Practice, and Theory of Practice"Bruce Holsinger is Professor of English, Music and Chair of the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University; MA in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from University of Minnesota; and BMusA in clarinet performance from University of Michigan. Professor Holsinger specializes in musical and literary relations in the European Middle Ages, with particular interests in liturgical studies, the history of sexuality, and the premodern roots of modern critical thought. His first book, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford UP, 2001), won the AMS's Philip Brett Award, the Modern Language Association's Prize for a First Book, and the Medieval Academy of America's John Nicholas Brown Prize. His second book, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (U of Chicago P, 2005), explores the shaping role of medievalism and medieval studies in the work of Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, and other members of the critical generation in postwar France. Articles and review essays have appeared in Speculum, Journal of Plainsong and Medieval Music, GLQ, Journal of Medieval Latin, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and elsewhere. His current projects include a book on post-9/11 medievalism and the rhetoric of international relations as well as a very long-term project, The Work of God: Liturgical Culture and Vernacular Writing in England, 650-1550, examining the institutional and aesthetic impact of liturgy on the history of musical and literary writing from the Venerable Bede to the Reformation. He has held or currently holds research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Martin Puchner, "Theater and Philosophy: Socrates on the Modern Stage"Martin Puchner is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Hopkins, 2002) and Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, 2006). He has published or has essays forthcoming in the London Review of Books, Raritan Review, Yale Journal of Criticism, The Drama Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, New Literary History, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Journal among others. His edited books and introductions include Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (Barnes and Noble, 2003), Lionel Abel's Tragedy and Metatheatre (Holmes and Meier, 2003), The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (Barnes and Noble, 2005), and Modern Drama: Critical Concepts (Routledge, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (Palgrave, 2006) and of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Drama. He has just signed on as the new general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. He also serves as editor of the journal Theatre Survey.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "The Weight of the Past"Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor and Chair of English at George Washington University. His recent publications include Hybridity, Identity & Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: Of Difficult Middles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Medieval Identity Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), The Postcolonial Middle Ages (St. Martin's Press, 2000), and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).