Aimee Bahng has accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of English at Dartmouth College, beginning in fall 2009. Her dissertation "Speculative Acts: The Cultural Labors of Science, Fiction, and Empire" brings critical attention to speculative fiction by transnational, North American women of color and examines the intersection between science and technology, U.S. imperialism, labor, and migration. Her most recent publication is titled: "Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest" in MELUS 33:4 (Winter 2008); it looks to Yamashita's novel as one example of late twentieth-century revisionist science fictions that call attention to imperial legacies of exclusion, exploitation, and displacement. Drawing on feminist science studies, histories of science and labor, and literary analysis, the article situates emergent science fiction at an important crossroads of science, fiction, and empire.

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Cesare Casarino is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.  He is the author of Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (2002), co-author (with Antonio Negri) of In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (forthcoming in 2008), co-editor (with Saree Makdisi and Rebecca Karl) of Marxism Beyond Marxism (1996), as well as co-translator (with Vincenzo Binetti) of Giorgio Agamben’s Means without End (2000). His essays on literature, cinema, philosophy have appeared in journals such as Cultural Critique, Paragraph, Parallax, Angelaki, Raritan, Social Text, October, boundary 2.

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With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches postcolonial theory, literature, and global media studies in the English Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published essays on literature, film and visual culture in boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Screen; a monograph on the literary political imagination in new global markets, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004); and a co-edited volume, Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Fiction and Film (Garland, 1997). She has recently completed Moving Technologies: Global Icons in South Asia (forthcoming Duke UP), a monograph on mass mediated icons as magical technologies of the popular, as she embarks on a third book on spectral media, The Great Vanishing: the Spectral Modern in South Asia. She is currently engaged in two collaborative projects: a collection on criticism on icons, co-edited with Kajri Jain, "The Recalcitrant Icon;" and a longer collaborative project on risk and uncertainty ("Speculative Globalities"), co-convened with Bhaskar Sarkar at a University of California Humanities Research Institute Residency (2009).

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Colin Milburn is Associate Professor of English and a member of the Science & Technology Studies program at UC Davis. His research focuses on the cultural relations between literature, science, and media technologies. He is especially interested in science fiction, the history of biology, the history of physics, gothic horror, and posthumanism. His book about the onrushing era of nanotechnology, Nanovision: Engineering the Future, was published by Duke University Press in 2008. He is currently writing a new book about the convergence of video games and the molecular sciences, entitled Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter.

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Geeta Patel is Associate Professor of Studies in Women and Gender and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. Her book from Stanford University Press, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji's Urdu Poetry, reads a renegade writer through nationalism, gender, sexuality, and grief in twentieth-century Urdu poetic movements. Her work, circling around prose and poetry in Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Braj and Awadhi, includes translation and short personal pieces. Her theoretical stance, informed by translation theory from South Asian studies, sexuality studies and gender theory, postcolonial, diaspora and subaltern historiography, and crossover questions from the history of science, is fashioned in her most recent manuscript Gendering the Global Nation. Her current project, Financing Selves, on risk, insurance and pensions in South Asia, opens with the early East India Company archives and closes with labor movements in contemporary Sri Lanka.

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Rita Raley is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she specializes in the digital humanities and global studies. Her first book, Tactical Media, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press (Spring 2009), examines the new media art practices that have specifically emerged out of, and in direct response to, both the post-industrial society and neoliberal globalization. She has also published several articles on code as an object and medium of contemporary critical inquiry, political engagement, and artistic and literary production. At present she is working on a series of articles on the topics of precarity, locative media, and mobile media poetics.

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Bhaskar Sarkar, Associate Professor, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, has published essays on philosophies of visuality, postcolonial media theory, and Indian and Chinese popular cinemas. He has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Studies on "The Subaltern and the Popular" and a collection of essays entitled Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, forthcoming). His book on cinema and trauma theory, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition is forthcoming from Duke UP. Sarkar is now studying India and China's repositioning within the global cultural economy, as a way of tracking contemporary "plastic nationalisms."

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Sudipta Sen is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. A historian of late medieval and early modern India and the British Empire, his work has focused on the early colonial history of British India. He is the author of two books, Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace, Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India, London: Routledge, 2002. He is currently working on two book length manuscripts. The first, Ganga: Many Pasts of an Indian River, New Haven: Yale University Press (forthcoming 2008) is an exploration of the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of myth, historical geography and ecology, and the other is a longer term project entitled Retributive Justice: British Rule and Criminal Law in Early Colonial India, 1770-1830.

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