Marcy Dinius, DePaul University

Marcy Dinius is an associate professor of English at DePaul University. Her research specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture—in particular, she has explored the relationship between visual and print culture in this period, a historical moment that saw the development of diverse technologies for the production and reproduction of images, such as daguerreotype and the photograph. Her book The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of Daguerreotype (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) examines how the first written and published responses to the daguerreotype set the terms for how we now understand the representational accuracy and objectivity associated with the photograph, as well as the democratization of portraiture that photography enabled.

Harris Feinsod, Northwestern University

Harris Feinsod is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches 20th and 21st century literature and culture of the US, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. His first book,The Poetry of the Americas from Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2017), provides a literary history of the relations between poets in the US and Latin America in an era of cultural diplomacy, from the Good Neighbor Policy of World War II through the cultural dimensions of the Cold War into the early 1970s.

Megan Heffernan, DePaul University

Megan Heffernan is assistant professor and Director of Combined BA/MA in English program at DePaul University. Her research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, with special interests in the material and cultural histories of the book; poetry and poetics; and early modern theories of aesthetic style, value, and periodization. She is currently at work on a book that shows how habits of collecting short poems came to direct literary craft and interpretation in the century after Tottel’s “Songes and Sonettes” (1557). In gathered poetry by Gascoigne, Whitney, Spenser, Donne, and Shakespeare, poets and stationers developed an experimental poetics that could connect the literary imagination to the period’s evolving textual practices.

Patrick Jagoda, University of Chicago

Patrick Jagoda is associate professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, as well as co-editor of Critical Inquiry and co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. His teaching and research focus on digital games, electronic literature, virtual worlds, television, cinema, the novel, and media theory. His first book, Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016), examines American narrative, visual, and interactive artworks that encourage a critical and even transformative engagement with the network as a dominant category of life since the mid-twentieth century. In addition to his critical work, he helps run the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, which uses digital storytelling, videogames, and emerging new media forms to explore social, emotional, and sexual health issues with marginalized and sexual minority youth on the South Side of Chicago.