» Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. He is also currently Diane and Howard Wohl Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C. He is the co-author (with Dominic Williams) of Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz (2016) and the author of After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint (2012). He has also co-edited (with Ika Willis) a special issue of the journal parallax on the theme of Trans-: Across/Beyond (2016).

» Jonathan Deutsch, Ph.D., is Professor of Culinary Arts in the Center for Food and Hospitality Management and Department of Nutrition Sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. When not in the kitchen, he can be found behind his tuba.

» D Ferrett is a writer and academic based at the Academy of Music and Theatre Arts, Falmouth University where she teaches on the music courses with particular interests in pop, philosophy, feminism, and sound studies. She has a background in blues, indie and punk, performing and writing as a singer. D is an Editor for the IASPM Journal and is currently producing a series of radio programmes featuring interviews with musicians on themes of melancholy, desire, loss, politics, mental illness, the occult and witchcraft. She is also writing a book entitled Dark Sound: Feminine Voices in Sonic Shadow based on the cultural and historical association between women and the dark as embodied in the work of specific female musicians (the book will be published by Bloomsbury as part of the ex:centrics series).

» Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She is currently at work on a book entitled Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion. Three of her danced lectures can be found at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage website.

» Bridget Hayden is a musician, writer and artist who found notoriety as a multi-instrumentalist in experimental drone music ensemble Vibracathedral Orchestra at the turn of the century. Since 2006 she has produced a catalogue of accomplished compositions and is accredited for a thoroughly contemporary and remarkably sensitive readdress to the blues music tradition, most notable of which is A Siren Blares In An Indifferent Ocean, released on KRAAK records in 2011. Two further albums have since been self released, and she is currently working on a book and double LP, Pure Touch Only From Now On, They Said So, which documents attempts to reintegrate body and spirit after experiencing long term trauma. She also regularly collaborates with writer and artist Claire Louise Potter on themes of dissociation.

» Edgar Landgraf is Professor of German at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). He received his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University in 1998. His research interests include German literature, aesthetics, and philosophy from the Enlightenment to today as well as critical improvisation studies, performance studies, systems theory and theories of posthumanism. Recent publications include articles on improvisation, Goethe, Kant, Kleist, Nietzsche, DeLillo and Niklas Luhmann. His book Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives was published in 2011 with Continuum (reissued as paperback by Bloomsbury in 2014). He is coeditor of the anthology Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences After Kant (Bloomsbury) and is working on a monograph on Nietzsche’s Posthumanism.

» Gunter Lösel heads the Research Focus Performative Practice at the Zurich University of the Arts (since 2014) and has been publishing on the theme of improvisation since 2004. He is working as an improvisational actor with his own theater group and holds a Ph.D in Theatre Studies as well as a diploma in psychology.

» Tracey Nicholls is an Associate Professor in the School of International Peace Studies at Soka University, Tokyo, where she teaches peace studies and gender studies. During the decade in which Black Lives Matter emerged as a political movement, she was appointed as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lewis University, in the greater Chicago area of the United States, and was co-director of their Women’s Studies Program. She is author of An Ethics of Improvisation: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future (2012). Her current book project identifies rape culture as a structural violence, and considers ways an ethics of improvisation might support “culture-jamming” efforts to dismantle it.

» Benjamin Piekut is a historian of experimental music, jazz, and rock after 1960. His first monograph, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, was published in 2011 by the University of California Press. He is also the editor of Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (Michigan, 2014) and co-editor (with George E. Lewis) of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2 volumes, 2016). His second monograph, The World Is a Problem: Henry Cow and the Vernacular Avant-garde, is under contract with Duke University Press. His essay in The Drama Review, “Deadness,” co-authored with Jason Stanyek, received the “Outstanding Article Award” in 2011 from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Previously a lecturer at the University of Southampton in the UK, he is now an associate professor in the department of music at Cornell.

» Denis Podalydès is an actor of stage and screen and a stage director. He is a Sociétaire of the Comédie-Française. Podalydès has authored several books including Scènes de la vie d’acteur (2006) and Voix off (2008). He is the co-author (with Gabriel Dufay) of the preface to a recent edition of Denis Didérot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien (2012).

» Adrian Rifkin’s work broaches a wide range of academic fields including art history, cinema, image culture, popular and classical music, literature, pornography, cultural history and cultural theory. His books to date include Street Noises: Studies in Parisian Pleasure, 1900-40 (Manchester University Press, 1993), Ingres Then, and Now (Routledge, 1999) and most recently Communards and Other Cultural Histories (edited by Steve Edwards, Haymarket, 2018) – a collection of essays spanning the last four decades. Rifkin has also curated two exhibitions (with Grant Watson) dedicated to the aesthetics and politics of the British composer and improviser Cornelius Cardew, held at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (2008) and The Drawing Room, London (2009). In recent years, Rifkin’s teaching and research have focused extensively on the relationship between art education and radical pedagogy.

» Bernard Stiegler is Director of the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI), Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, which he founded in 2006. He is also the founder member of the activist group Ars Industrialis, established in 2005 and the online philosophy school pharmakon.fr, based in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, since 2010. He is currently working as the philosopher-in-residence in the experimental "contributory territory" of Plaine Commune, in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis. He has written over 30 books, many of which are now available in English. Works in English translation include In Disruption: How Not to Go Mad? (forthcoming), The Automatic Society Volume 1: The Future of Work (2016) and States of Shock: Knowledge and Stupidity in the 21st Century (2015), all published by Polity.

» Marcel Swiboda received his Ph.D in Cultural Studies from the University of Leeds, in 2003. He has subsequently written numerous articles on the topic of im-provisation in relation to philosophy and theory. He is the co-editor (with Ian Buchanan) of Deleuze and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). His current research mainly focuses on improvisational and philosophical responses to shock in the history of industrial modernity and in the contemporary age of “disruption”.

» Gustav Thomas is the non-improvising name used by the UK citizen William Edmondes, who is a performer/composer and visual artist, and has been a full-time member of staff at Newcastle University’s music department (The International Centre for Music Studies) since 2004. As a performer and recording artist his current projects include YEAH YOU (with Elvin Brandhi), Kleevex (with Faye MacCalman) and Gwilly Edmondez (solo & collaborative improvisation). At Newcastle he has taught non-notated composition, free music and historical-cultural classes on Hip Hop, Jazz and Noise.

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Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (issn: 1557-2935)

editor-in-chief: Michael LeVan (Washington State University, Vancouver)
the city editor: Daniel Makagon (DePaul University)
digital horizons editors: Craig Gingrich-Philbrook (Southern Illinois University) and Daniel (Jake) Simmons
   (Missouri State University)
performance & pedagogy editor: Christopher J. McRae (University of South Florida)
book review editor: Christopher J. McRae (University of South Florida)

banner/issue image by Michael LeVan