Donald Ault
Donald Ault is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton and Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas, co-editor of Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, and editor of Carl Barks: Conversations. He served as consultant and contributor to The Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge and The Barks Library in Color. His work has appeared in journals such as Studies in Romanticism, Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Wordsworth Circle, The Keats-Shelley Journal, and The Comics Journal, as well as in various essay collections, including Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. He was executive producer and editorial supervisor for the video production The Duck Man: An Interview with Carl Barks.
Ron Broglio
Ron Broglio is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute for Technlogy’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture where he teaches and researches 18th century and British Romantic literature. He is finalizing a book project, Landscape and Technology: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments 1760-1830, which addresses cartographic, meteorological, and agrarian technologies in British landscape aesthetics during the 18th century. He has published essays on William Blake in Visible Language, TEXT Technology, The Wordsworth Circle and Praxis. Ron has recently authored a variety of essays on contemporary animals in art and culture including an essay on pets in Reykjavík recently translated into Icelandic, artists diving with sharks and painting them under water, and an essay on the Tendergene, a recently trademarked product used in contemporary cattle breeding.
John Coulthart
John Coulthart’s first illustration work was for the Hawkwind album “Church of Hawkwind” in 1982. Since then his designs and illustrations have appeared on record sleeves, CD and DVD packages for Cradle of Filth, Alan Moore & Tim Perkins, Steven Severin and Fourth World music pioneer Jon Hassell. John is a regular illustration contributor to America’s Arthur magazine. As a comic artist, John produced the Lord Horror series “Reverbstorm” with David Britton for Savoy Books, and received the dubious accolade of having an earlier Savoy title, “Hard Core Horror” 5, declared obscene in a British court of law. A new comic series, “The Soul,” is being planned with Alan Moore (From Hell, V for Vendetta). As a book designer and illustrator, John continues to work for Savoy Books and in 2003 designed the acclaimed “Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases,” edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. John’s work has been showcased in “Rapid Eye,” “Critical Vision,” “Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror,” “EsoTerra,” CNN.com and the Channel 4 television series “Banned in the UK.” He lives and works in Manchester, England.
Nelson Hilton
Nelson Hilton directs the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia. His “
& the play of ‘textuality'” appears in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies (2006), ed. Nicholas M. Williams, and “Chip off the Old Board” in Technology and English Studies (Erlbaum, 2006), eds. James A. Inman and Beth L. Hewett.
Esther Leslie
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002) and Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion 2005). She is a co-editor of Historical Materialism, and she is in the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and an editor of Revolutionary History. She co-organises a regular seminar in London called “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.” Together with Ben Watson she runs the website www.militantesthetix.co.uk.
Arkady Plotnitsky
Arkady Plotnitsky is a Professor of English and a Director of the Theory and Cultural Studies Program at Purdue University. He has published several books and many articles on British and European Romanticism, critical and cultural theory, continental philosophy, philosophy of physics, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His most recent books are The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the “Two Cultures” (2002) and Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (2006), and a collection of essays, Idealism Without Absolute: Philosophy and Romantic Culture, co-edited with Tilottama Rajan (2004).
Joel Priddy
Joel Priddy is a cartoonist and educator living in Memphis, Tennessee with his philosophical wife and two cryptic felines. His works include the award-winning graphic novel, Pulpatoon: Pilgrimage, and short works that have appeared in many anthologies, including Houghton-Mifflin’s The Best American Comics 2006. He has long nursed the unacted desire to produce a biographical graphic novel about William and Catherine Blake.
Matthew Ritchie
Acclaimed in the art world for his ambitious and influential installations of painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, and projections, Matthew Ritchie’s wide-ranging visual investigations of the architecture, history and dynamics of mental structures are the defining characteristic of his work. In 2001, Time magazine included Ritchie in its list of 100 innovators of the new millennium, naming him as a person exploring “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought.” More omnivorous than omnipotent, encompassing everything from cutting-edge physics, ancient myth, neo-noir short stories and medieval alchemy to climate change, contemporary politics and economic theory, his installations are based equally on an internally consistent fictional ecology and our constantly changing factual understanding of our universe. Typically, for his exhibition “We Want To See Some Light” at Portikus, Frankfurt, in 2005, he collaborated with a visual neurologist, an architect, a group of students and a philosopher to examine the physical limits of generated knowledge. His most recent exhibition in New York incorporated a major architectural intervention, a black latticework sky, 30 feet across, floating at the literal and conceptual center of the exhibition. Adventurous viewers could ascend into the sky and walk out to an oculus at the core of a suspended sphere where a projection of a parallel world, a vision of a possible future, unfolded its story.
His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide including: the Whitney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Bienal and the Sydney Biennial. His recent solo exhibition “Proposition Player,” organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, traveled to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2005. Major installations will be on show through 2006 in both “Radar,” the inaugural exhibition of the Denver Art Museum, and “The Guggenheim” at the Bonn Art Museum. A permanent installation (and the largest ever GSA commission), designed in conversation with Pritzker prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, will open in December 2006 in a new Federal Courthouse in Oregon. Recently Ritchie has been collaborating with London-based architect David Adjaye on a project for the Hayward Gallery, London for 2007, which will contain an interactive performance space designed by the artist and with NY based architect Philip Wu on a permanent commission for CACI, Brazil for 2008. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and numerous other institutions worldwide.
A three-dimensional artists’ book is in development with Rizzoli and is planned for release in 2007. Matthew Ritchie was born in London in 1964; he lives and works in New York City.
Bryan Talbot
Bryan’s first published illustrations appeared in the British Tolkien Society Magazine in 1969. In 1972, in collaboration with a fellow student – the cartoonist ‘Bonk’ – he produced a weekly strip for the college newspaper. He worked extensively with the British Underground scene for many years, writing The Chester P. Hackenbush Trilogy, The Omega Report, and Frank Fazakerley, Space Ace of the Future. In 1978, Talbot started work The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, a series which won numerous awards and influenced Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman among others. He worked on DC titles including Hellblazer, The Sandman, and a two part Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight arc entitled Masks. Recently, he has published a sequel to Arkwright entitled Heart of Empire (1999), a critically acclaimed meditation on child abuse entitled The Tale of One Bad Rat (1995), and a “dream documentary” of Alice Liddel, the Sunderland area, Lewis Carroll, and storytelling called Alice in Sunderland (2007). He is also currently writing Cherubs! a supernatural comedy/adventure involving five cherubim put on trial for committing murder in heaven. Cherubs! is due out in June. Please visit www.bryan-talbot.com for more information.
Roger Whitson
Roger Whitson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida. He recently published an essay entitled “Jerusalem and the ‘Jew’: Biopolitics Between Blake and Spinoza” for the fall 2005 issue of Romanticism on the Net. His “Applied Blake: Milton’s Response to Empire is forthcoming in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies as well as his “Millenarian Blake: Eternal Apocalypse in the Frontispiece to Jerusalem” in Julian Wolfreys’ upcoming collection Millenial Blake. He is currently working on his dissertation: a reading of Romantic poets through the lens of postmodern British authors and globalization.