Sneha Chowdhury is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature. She finished her B.A., M.A., and MPhil in English literature from the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interests include romantic and modernist poetry in English and German, theories of the lyric and literature, and South Asian modernisms. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Language Notes (German issue), German Life and Letters, The Modernist Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She is the recipient of Brown University’s Presidential Fellowship and was recently awarded a DAAD German Studies Research Grant.

Amber Hawk Swanson is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. Through performance, her work explores care, animacy, and desire as they function in the context of queerness and disability. Her complementary scholarly interests focus on investigations of enabling objects and actions; technologized, roboticized, and transpeciated bodies and selves; animacy and animal intimacy; and worldmaking in the online forums and livestream channels that have served as the primary platforms for her work. Her practice has embodied these concerns through a material and conceptual engagement with captive marine mammals, silicone Dolls, and networks of care among the community of silicone Doll-loving men known as iDollators. She has exhibited internationally for the span of her twenty-year career, with recent venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), PS2 (Belfast, UK), Denny Gallery (New York, NY), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY) and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). She is the creative director and one of three cocreators of The Harmony Show and has taught in the sculpture department of Rhode Island School of Design.

Photo by Elena Bulet i Llopis