[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on Contamination

[Renate Terese Ferro]

I would like to welcome Bishnu Ghosh, Christina McPhee, and Tim Murray to Week two of our discussion.  All of these guests our friends our subscribers all know from past years of participation on –empyre- and in their research and writing. .  Bishnu Gosh  has been a strong advocate and leader in the fields of cultural globalization and humanities.  We were so lucky to teach with her at Cornell at the Society for the Humanities when the topic was RISK from 2012 to 2113  https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/2012-13-risk
Christina McPhee worked closely with us on this –empyre- platform organizing and moderating many years of –empyre- discussions.  Her work as a painter and artist are simulations of evolving life-forms. Tim Murray ,also a long-time facilitator on –empyre-, has created web-platforms, writings, and curatorial projects evolving around the issues of environmental risk and contamination. I have attached their biographies below. Thanks to all of you for joining in.  

Catherine and Marissa I hope you will also chime in throughout the rest of the month when your schedules permit.  Thank you again for getting us started.   
Best to all of you. 
Renate

Biographies
Bishnupriya Ghosh (US) teaches global media studies at UC Santa Barbara’s Departments of English and Global Studies. Her first monograph, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed cultural globalization and the market for world literatures; and her second,  Global Icons: Apertures into the Global (Duke UP, 2011) focused on globally circulating iconic images that constitute media environments. Around 2009, Ghosh turned to research on risk media from perspectives in the humanities. Both her current projects arise from this turn: she is writing her third monograph, *The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media,* and co-editing *The Routledge Handbook on Media and Risk* (forthcoming 2018).

Christina McPhee’s (US) images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her dynamic, performative, physical engagement with drawing, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphies and mark-making. Her work is in the museum collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum-Rhizome Artbase, and International Center for Photography, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland. Solo museum exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. She has participated in group exhibitions, notably documenta 12 (Magazine Project) with -empyre-, Bucharest Biennial 3, Museum of Modern Art Medellin, Bildmuseet Umea,  and Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive at the University of California.  A new book, “Christina McPhee: A Commonplace Book,” edited by Eileen Joy, is a collection of essays by international critics and artists, is out this autumn with Punctum Books. https://punctumbooks.com/titles/christina-mcphee-a-commonplace-book/  http://www.christinamcphee.net 

Tim Murray (US)  is a Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. A curator of new media and contemporary art, and theorist of visual studies and digital culture, he has been forging international intersections in exhibition and print between the arts, humanities, and technology for over twenty-five years. He is currently the Director of Cornell Council for the Arts at Cornell. He has been a moderator for -empyre since 2007.

A recipient of fellowships and grants from NEA, NEH, Mellon, Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Korea National Research Foundation, Murray is currently working on a book, Archival Events @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).  Among his publications are the books Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art Technologically (Universidad de Murcia, forthcoming, 2017), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998), ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. Xu Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin), co-edited with Yang Shin-Yi (Beijing: Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), and ed. with Irving Goh of The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy, 2 Vols., diacritics (2014-16).



Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
-empyre- moderator