Caroline A. Brown, Associate Professor of English, is an alumna of Vassar College (BA) and Stanford University (MA/PhD). She specializes in 20th-century US literature and culture, women's studies, and the literature of the African Diaspora. Professor Brown is the author of The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity (Routledge, 2012), which examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to (re)envision the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Analyzing how the works of contemporary African-American women novelists intersect with those of postmodern visual artists, The Black Female Body maps how black aesthetic and performative practices reimagine American citizenship and national belonging.

Professor Brown is currently at work on two projects. Dark Eros: Madness, Mayhem, and Cultural Mourning in Women's Novels of the Black Diaspora is a book-length project analyzing black women's experimental writing strategies as the crossroads where aesthetic praxis morphs into political engagement. Barack Obama: A Cultural Study explores Barack Obama as the template on which she graphs the intersections of race, demographic shift, and presidential politics. In doing so, she interrogates both the influence of popular culture on political transformation and the impact, in turn, of politics on cultural production.

Philippe Despoix is an expert on 18^th-century literature and takes an interest in European scientific voyages of the Enlightenment and, in particular, as a member of the Gestes admirables research group, in the role and dissemination of engravings. He is also a specialist in 20^th-century Germanic thought, and a member of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, where he co-directs the PUM collection. He is also a member of the trans-Atlantic doctoral academy "Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Space."

As a member of the scientific committee of the Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité, he collaborates with the team working on "archiving in a digital age" and directs the Intermédialités journal on the history and theory of arts and letters and techniques. His current research concerns the function of the media in memory and intercultural processes. He is preparing a book that examines the relationship between photography, anthropology and history from an intermedial perspective.