Desk Chiefs

Stephen Barker (Performance), formerly Chair of Drama, Chair of Art, and Head of Doctoral Studies, is the Associate Dean in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. In former lives a professional actor, director, dancer, and choreographer, he now works centrally in critical, aesthetic, and performance theory. Has written books and articles on numerous artists and philosophers including Nietzsche, Freud, and Beckett; books include Autoaesthetics: Strategies of the Self After Nietzsche; Signs of Change: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern; and Interrogating Images. His most recent book, Thresholds: The Art of Limit-Play, is forthcoming. Barker is a founder of the journal Derrida Today and is on the faculty of the London Graduate School. He has recently translated volumes by Bernard Stiegler and François-David Sebbah for Stanford University Press.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo (Education) is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symplokē, editor and publisher of the American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange. His books include Morality Matters: Race, Class and Gender in Applied Ethics (2002), Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture (2003), On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy (2004), If Classrooms Matter: Progressive Visions of Educational Environments (2004, with W. Jacobs), From Socrates to Cinema: An Introduction to Philosophy (2007), Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (2008, with R. M. Berry), Federman’s Fictions: Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust (2010), Terror, Theory, and the Humanities (2012, with U. Mehan), Academe Degree Zero: Reconsidering the Politics of Higher Education (2012), and Neoliberalism, Terrorism, Education: Contemporary Dialogues (2013, with H. Giroux, K. Saltman, and S. McClennen).

Noelle Dubay (Sexualities) is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation examines nineteenth-century U.S. secularity and magical belief, as mediated in literature of slave revolt and resistance. She has written and presented on nineteenth-century spiritualism and mesmerism, the politics of U.S. swamplands, and contemporary queer theory and poetry.

William Egginton (Theory) is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. He is the author of How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), and In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011). He is also co-editor with Mike Sandbothe of The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (2004), translator of Lisa Block de Behar’s Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003, 2nd edition 2014), and co-editor with David E. Johnson of Thinking With Borges (2009). His most recent book is The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World (2016).

Craig Epplin (Urbanities) is an assistant professor of Spanish at Portland State University. He teaches and writes about Latin American culture, and maintains the blog Nonhuman Collectives.

Rachel Galvin (Literature) is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Center of Johns Hopkins University. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton. Her current book project, Poetry and the Press in Wartime (1936-1945), argues that print journalism offered an unexpected model for wartime poetry and poetics during the tumultuous period spanning from the Spanish Civil War through World War II. In a second book project she theorizes trans-American poetics, contending that 20th-century poetry must be understood in hemispheric terms. Essays related to these projects appear in the Wallace Stevens Journal, Blackwell Guide to Translation Studies, and other publications. Rachel also publishes poems and translations in journals like the Boston Review, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker. She is the author of a collection of poems, Pulleys & Locomotion (2009), and Hitting the Streets (2013), a translation from the French of Raymond Queneau. www.rachel-galvin.com

Jason Groves (Actualities, New Ecologies) received his Ph.D. in German Studies from Yale University in 2012. His writing draws on the recent environmental turn in the humanities in order to reorient the relationship between literature and theories of the earth, particularly in 19^th and 20^th century German literature and thought. These interests inform his current book project, Mineral Imaginaries, as well as several recent contributions to the Critical Climate Change series of Open Humanities Press. He is an Assistant Professor in Germanics at the University of Washington.

Katrin Pahl (Sexualities) is Co-Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Associate Professor of German at the Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching explores emotionality (and how logic might change when one attends to it), sexuality (how it might be informed by political trauma, possibly of a transgenerational nature, and affect the syntax and texture of literature), and sociability (how its historical models might help us now to extend kinship, affinity, and mutual repair beyond the human). Pahl is the author of Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion. She is currently writing a book on Kleist’s Queer Feelings.

Chris Shaw (Science/Technology) is a Doctoral Candidate in English Literature at Texas Tech University, with specialization in Literature and Science, postmodern literature, detective fiction, and the literature of OULIPO. His dissertation explores connections between George Spencer-Brown’s logic and deconstruction, using these to read the novels of Thomas Pynchon. He holds a Master’s in Theory from the University of Western Ontario, a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Michigan State University, and is a licensed professional engineer.

Justin Read (Urbanities) is sealed and porous: imageflood.wordpress.com/about/.

Henry Sussman (Film, Literature) is a Visiting Professor of German at Yale. His life-long interests in systems, improvisational literature, the philosophy and theory of language and communications, and psychoanalysis have found expression in his books–recently, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (Fordham, 2011)—and a vital extension and amplification in Feedback. His Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition was published by Bloomsbury in 2014.