Speakers

Ian Baucom works on twentieth century British Literature and Culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and Black Atlantic literatures. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999, Princeton University Press), Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005, Duke University Press), and co–editor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (2005, Duke University Press). He has edited special issues of the South Atlantic Quarterly on Atlantic Studies and Romanticism, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively entitled The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life.

Wolf D. Kittler is a professor in the Germanic, Slavic & Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Kittler's research interests are interdisciplinary. They include Western literature from Greek antiquity to the present, philosophy, art history, history of science, media technology and critical theory.

Brian Krebs is a journalist working on cybercrime and security. Hired at The Washington Post in 1996, Krebs famously founded the SecurityFix blog (2005–2009). After leaving the paper, Krebs continues to write on security issues on “Krebs on Security” (http://krebsonsecurity.com).

Andrew Lakoff is trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine and has conducted research in Argentina, France and the United States. His areas of interest include globalization processes, the history of the human sciences, and the implications of biomedical innovations. Lakoff's first book, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge, 2005), examines the role of the global circulation of pharmaceuticals in the spread of biological models of human behavior. He has also co–edited a book entitled Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practice (Duke, 2006) and has published articles on visual technology and the behavioral sciences, on the history of attention deficit disorder, on antidepressants and the placebo effect, and on forms of expertise in global health. Lakoff's current research concerns the recent articulation of public health and security, and his most recent book publications are the co–edited volume, Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (Columbia University Press, 2008), and the edited volume Disaster and the Politics of Intervention (Columbia University Press).

Michael Madsen has directed several documentaries such as the award–winning To Damascus–a Film on Interpretation (2005) and Into Eternity (2010). A conceptual artist, Madsen is the founder and artistic leader of the Sound/Gallery, a 900–square meter sound diffusion system underneath the Town Hall Square in Copenhagen, Denmark (1996–2001). His selected art projects include: “Audience (van Gogh#7),” the design of SPOR 2007,)" Phase 1: Idea and concept for a new music library in Odense, Denmark. Madsen has also presented talks and lectures at The Royal Danish Academy of Art, The Danish Film School, and The Danish School of Design.

Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at UCSB. with joint appointments in Global and International Studies and UCSB's Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program. Professor McCray is also the co–PI and lead researcher for the NSF–funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society. My research interests concern the interplay between popular culture and politics with modern technology and science.

Colin Milburn joined the UC Davis faculty in 2005. His research focuses on the cultural relations between literature, science, and technology. His interests include science fiction; gothic horror; the history of biology; the history of physics; nanotechnology; video games; and posthumanism. His book, Namovision: Engineering the Future (Duke University Press) was published 2008. He is a member of the UC Davis Science & Technology Studies program, and is affiliated with the programs in Cultural Studies, Film Studies, and Critical Theory.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University and staff cancer physician at Columbia/NYU Presbyterian Hospital, has devoted his life to caring for victims of cancer; as a researcher, his laboratory is on the forefront of discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological techniques. He is the author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, in which he chronicles the history of cancer and illuminates its implications on the human race throughout the centuries.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. She has written and edited four books, including Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, which was published in 2010 by Stanford University Press. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.

Thomas Streeter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Vermont. He is author of The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (NYU Press, 2010), a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology. His award-winning Selling the Air (University of Chicago Press), a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the U.S. broadcast industry and its regulatory apparatus, was published in 1996.

Peter C. van Wyck is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, and graduate program director of the Media Studies MA Program at Concordia University in Montréal. He is author of The Highway of the Atom (McGill–Queen's University Press, 2010), a study of the atomic bomb's origins in Canada's North, and Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) — both of which were awarded the Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize by the Canadian Communications Association.

Giovanni Vigna a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at the University of California in Santa Barbara. His research focuses on web security, vulnerability analysis, malware countermeasures, and intrusion detection. Vigna is also co–director of the Security Lab. He is also part of the International Security Lab and of the Shellphish and Epic Fail hacker groups. Professor Vigna is one of the founders of WebWise Security, Inc., a Santa Barbara–based security consulting firm that provides security solutions, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and source code analysis services to clients world–wide.

Kathleen Woodward, Professor of English, is Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington and Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America, a broad–based network of scholars and leaders of cultural institutions devoted to fostering the development of campus–community partnerships. The author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (1991) and At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams (1980), Woodward is completing a book on the cultural politics of the emotions entitled Statistical Panic and Other New Feelings. She has published essays in the broad cross–disciplinary domains of technology and culture, aging and the emotions in many journals, including New Literary History, Discourse, differences, and Cultural Critique, and is the editor of Figuring Age: Women–Bodies–Generations (1999) and The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (1980).