Notes on Contributors

Ian Balfour is an associate professor of English at York University. His research interests include Romantic poetry and prose, contemporary theory and criticism, and eighteenth-century poetry and philosophy (especially aesthetic theory and philosophy of language). He is the author of Northrop Frye (1988) and essays on the Romantics (Wordsworth, Blake, Godwin, Inchbald), Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and on numerous topics in popular culture (music, television, film). His most recent book is The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002).

Étienne Balibar teaches philosophy at the University of Paris X. His books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser); Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities; Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx; The Philosophy of Marx; Politics and the Other Scene; and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship.

Rony Brauman is a doctor and, since 1988, a professor at the University of Paris XII. From 1978 to 1982, he was the coordinating doctor with M»decins sans frontières (Doctors without Borders), and, from 1982 to 1994, its president. While with MSF, he established programs for medical assistance and surgery in Asia, Africa, and Central America, and undertook several missions largely in conflict zones and refugee camps. He has published many essays and books on humanitarianism, including L'Action Humanitaire, Eloge de la Desobeissance: a propos d'un specialiste, Adolf Eichmann (with Eyal Sivan), Les Medias et l'humanitaire, and Devant le mal: Rwanda, un genocide en direct.

Wendy Brown is professor of political science and women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory, Left Legalism/Left Critique (coedited with Janet Halley), and Politics out of History.

Eduardo Cadava teaches in the English Department at Princeton University. His publications include Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, Who Comes after the Subject? (coedited with Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy), and Cities without Citizens (coedited with Aaron Levy). He is currently finishing a collection of essays on the ethics and politics of mourning entitled Of Mourning.

Rebecca Comay teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Program in Literary Studies at the University of Toronto. She has published widely on continental philosophy, literature, and contemporary art and she is currently writing two books: Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the Possibility of Memory and Benjamin's Losses: Between Melancholia and Fetishism.

Jacques Derrida is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and Global Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of several books, including The Gift of Death, Archive Fever, The Politics of Friendship, Specters of Marx, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Of Hospitality, and, more recently, Papier Machine: La ruban de machine á »crire et autre responses and Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison.

Paul Downes is associate professor in the English Department at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Democracy, Revolution and Monarchism in Early American Literature (2002), which won the Modern Language Association Prize for a first book. He is currently working on The Politics of Vulnerability: Human Rights and Ante-Bellum American Literature.

Werner Hamacher is professor of German and comparative literature at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt-am-Main, where he is also the director of the Institute of General and Comparative Literary Study. He is also Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University and the editor of Stanford University Press's Meridian—Crossing Aesthetics Series. His publications include Pleroma—Reading in Hegel: The Genesis and Structure of a Dialectical Hermeneutics and Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. He has three books forthcoming: Politically Read: Essays on Political Aesthetics, Intensive Languages: Three Words of Walter Benjamin, and Category Fatigue.

Thomas Keenan teaches media theory, literature, and human rights at Bard College, where he is associate...