Marian Bleeke has a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art Department at Cleveland State University. She is a founding member of the Material Collective. Marian is also a yogi, yarn-bomber, poet, crafter, baker and cook; a cat-lover and a francophile; and a daughter, sister, colleague, and friend. (m.bleeke@csuohio.edu)
Helen J. Burgess is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University and editor of Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. She works in electronic literature, physical computing, textiles and digital humanities. Her most recent exhibits include “MashBOT” and “Loving-Together with Roland Barthes,” both part of a collaborative series of physical computing/Twitter interventions into Barthes’ writings on the subject of love. She is currently working on a third deformation, “Clotho.” (polyrhetor@gmail.com)
Lara Farina is an Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University and a co-editor of the quarterly journal, postmedieval. She is the author of Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing, and has published articles on medieval and modern reading practices, queer theory, tactility, and “disabled” sensation. She has co-edited, with Holly Dugan, a special issue of postmedieval on “The Intimate Senses” and is currently enthralled by the sensitive powers of plants. She makes elixirs, potions, and cocktails in her spare time. (Lara.Farina@mail.wvu.edu)
Wendy Farina has an MA in Music Composition from Mills College and is an artist and musician in San Francisco, CA. She has performed and recorded with a number of bands including T.I.T.S., Towel, Condor, Amber Asylum, and is currently (with KellyAnn Nelson) making music as Electronic Death Registry. She was a 2013 Individual Artist Grant recipient from the San Francisco Arts Commission for a series of videos about fictional environmental phenomena. She also enjoys writing, drawing, painting, and making animations. (wlfarina@gmail.com)
Kathleen Coyne Kelly is Professor of English at Northeastern University. She has published in Arthuriana, Exemplaria, postmedieval, Studies in Philology, and Year’s Work in Studies in Medievalism. She is the author of Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages and A. S. Byatt, and co-editor (with Marina Leslie) of Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, co-editor (with Tison Pugh) of Queer Movie Medievalisms and Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales. (k.kelly@northeastern.com)
Brianna Jewell earned her PhD from UT-Austin in May 2016. In her dissertation, "To Cut the Past; Queer Touch, Medieval Materiality, and the Craft of Wonder," she describes medieval and postmedieval textual moments that theorize how wonder enables seemingly impossible connections—connections between, for instance, the past and the present, the divine and the earthly, the dead and the living, and the conflicting parts within oneself. She is interested in the intersections of feminist and queer theory, and privileges gut feelings in her teaching. (brianna.c.jewell@gmailcom)
Katherine Richards is a Doctoral candidate at West Virginia University. She is interested in the intersection of medicine and celebrity in the eighteenth century. She has an article forthcoming in SLI that focuses on the presence of the actress in Anne Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest. She is currently working on her dissertation, which investigates the influence of eighteenth-century medical practices on the lives and celebrity of actresses. (krichards@mix.wvu.edu)
Lisa Weston is Professor of English at California State University, Fresno. With Carol Pasternak she edited Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England (2004). She also contributed a chapter on "Saintly lives: friendship, kinship, gender and sexuality" to the Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (2013). She has written on Old English magical texts and wisdom literature, as well as on the literary culture of early medieval monastic women. Her research currently focuses mainly on intersections of literacy and sexuality in Old English and Anglo-Latin texts, though she maintains an interest in medieval and early modern magic. (lisa@csufresno.edu)