In/transitive Modernities: Dis/continuities and cultural transformation

• Stéphane Baquey is a poetry critic and an Associate Professor in Modern Literature at Aix-Marseille Université. He is the author of the preface to Kiril Kadiiski’s Poèmes (2006), published jointly by L’Esprit des Péninsules and Kliment Oxhridski University of Sofia, (to be reissued by Belles Lettres). For the last five years, his research has known a new inflection towards the poetics of the place telling from an ecopoetics perspective.
• Raluca Bibiri is an Associate Professor of Film and Women's Studies at the Center of Excellence in Image Studies, University of Bucharest. She has authored two books on the concept of femininity in philosophy, psychoanalysis, culture, and the arts. Her ongoing research projects focus on intersectional posthumanist methodologies exploring social exclusion and institutionalized forms of knowledge and power. She is actively involved in the exchange between academia and society as a documentary filmmaker, reflecting on the instrumentality of the historical archives for the production of new forms of knowledge about the past, through a wider, more inclusive perspective.
• Stamatina Dimakopoulou teaches US literature and culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at New York University and has guest-lectured at Paris-Nanterre. She has published transatlantic avant-gardes across literature and the visual arts. She is a founding member and co-editor of Synthesis, an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies. She has co-founded Transitive Modernities and participates in the CIVIS projects, CARE, and PostRacial Trans-Modernities. With Vassilis Vlastaras (Athens School of Fine Arts), she co-organised practice-based workshops to be followed by an exhibition at Atoposcvc. Currently working on a manuscript on home/lessness.
• Angelos Evangelou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Since 2010, he was a Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His research focuses on the border between madness and reason. Publications include Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida (2017) and articles in academic journals. Since 2015 he is a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy and is an Honorary member of staff of the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Kent. He also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities and the BIP project Care.
• Stephen Forcer is a Professor of French at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara (Legenda 2006) and Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda 2015), which was shortlisted for the 20016 Gapper Book Prize. In 2020-2021 he was a co-investigator on an AHRC research grant into the use of comedy and other performing arts in tackling sexual and gender-based violence, supported by NGOs in Sierra Leone and South Africa. He also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities.
• Astrid Franke is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at Tübingen University. She is the author of Keys to Controversies: Stereotypes in Modern American Novels (1999) and Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (2010) as well as articles on popular culture, poetry, and injustice, and the contemporary American novel. She is a principal investigator in the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center Threatened Orders with a project on the resilience of the racial order in the US. She also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities.
• Mina Karavanta is an Associate Professor of Theory, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Global English Literature at, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She co-edited Interculturality and Gender and Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid and published in journals such as boundary 2, Callaloo, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Symplokē. She has participated in Travelling Concepts (ATHENA) and Behind the Looking-Glass (AHRC). She is co-founder and co-editor of Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies. She has given invited talks in the US, Europe, the Caribbean, and Australia. She has launched the CIVIS project, PostRacial Trans-Modernities, and participates in the BIP project CARE.
• Andrea Kollnitz is an Associate Professor of Art History and director of Studies for advanced level in Art History at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on art and nationalism, art and fashion discourses, the Nordic avant-garde, and connections between fashion and art during modernism. She is co-editor of Fashion and Modernism (Bloomsbury 2018), and A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries. Vol 2 (Brill, 2019). She is currently working on a monograph about the Surrealist artist Leonor Fini and is co-editor of Fashion, Performance, and Performativity (Bloomsbury 2021).
• Alexis Nusselovici is a Professor of General and Comparative Literature at Aix-Marseille Université. His research and publications span translation studies, the experience of exile, European culture, the literature of personal accounts, issues for mixed-race individuals, and the aesthetics of modernity. He is the leader of the ‘Transpositions’ group based at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Literature Study (CIELAM) at Aix-Marseille University and holds the ‘Exile and Migration’ Chair at the College of World Studies (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris).
• Isabella Pezzini is Professor of Semiotics at the Department of Sociology and Communication, Sapienza Università di Roma. She serves on the board of Versus, Quaderni di Studi Semiotici, E/C/, Rivista on-line dell’Associazone Italiana Semiotici. She focuses on contemporary forms of expression, audio-visual language, consumerism and the imaginary, and strategies in efficacity. Publications include: Le passioni del lettore, Saggi di semiotica del testo; Semiotic Efficacity and the Effectiveness of the Text, Trailer, spot, siti, banner. Le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva, Scene del consumo. Dallo shopping al museo, It testo galeotto. La lettura come pratica efficace, Immagini quotidiane, Sociosemiotica visuale.
• Anne Reynes-Delobel is Associate Professor of American Literature at Aix-Marseille Université. She has published widely on American modernisms and the international avant-gardes, and more specifically on their transatlantic circulation in the interwar period. She is the current president of The Kay Boyle Society (an ALA and SSAWAA affiliate) and a co-founder of the Banjo Society-ClaudeMcKay (AMU). She also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities and the BIP project CARE.
• Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe is Associate Professor in Art History at Stockholm University. She participated in the Transnational Perspectives on Women’s Art, Feminism, and Curating (Leverhume Trust). She is the editor of Konsthistorisk tidskrift/ Journal of Art History; an Advisory Board member for the Feminist legacy in Art Museums (Norwegian Research Council). Publications include: (Ed.) Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions, and Curatorial Spaces, and Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art. Her project “Swedish artists en route: Mobility, transnationalism and artistic practices in the early 20th century” was supported by Landskrona museum, Åke Wibergs stiftelse, and Magnus Bergvalls Stiftelse.

• Ileana Marin is Associate Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and at the Center of Excellence in Image Studies of the University of Bucharest, where she is also Chair of the Doctoral School “Space, Image, Text, Territory”. She has published books on tragic myths, Pre-Raphaelite artists, and on Victorian aesthetics of erasure and has written extensively on the de-humanizing power of art and the artistic legacy of communism as well as on the materiality of literary, pictorial, and graphic texts. Winner of several research grants, she has explored interdisciplinary dialogues between text and image and the transformation of artworks into cultural icons.

Invited speakers

• Hélène Aji is Professor of American literature at the École normale supérieure in Paris, and Vice-President of the Institut des Amériques. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas in Austin (2017) and a Guest Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the author of Ezra Pound et William Carlos Williams: Pour une poétique américaine, William Carlos Williams: Un plan d’action, and a book-length essay on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. She co-edited several volumes, most recently, Poètes et éditeurs : diffuser la pésie américaine (depuis 1945), “Records of Contingency: Forms and Media”, and Ashbery Hors Cadre, 2021). She co-directs the series “Intercalaires” (Paris Nanterre UP) and “Seminal Modernisms” (Clemson UP).
• Apostolos Lampropoulos is Professor of Comparative Literature and Vice President for International Relations - Research at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne. He has taught at the University of Cyprus and has also been visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, Stanley J. Seeger Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, and a Marie Curie Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published Le Pari de la description. L’effet d’une figure déjà lue (2002) and is currently completing the monograph Histoires de bouche. He co-edited the special issue “Configurations of Cultural Amnesia” (2010) and “Learning from documenta (forthcoming), and States of Theory. History and Geography of Critical Narratives (2010; in Greek), AutoBioPhagies (2011), Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique (2017), Écriture littéraire, écriture musicale dans la littérature et les arts (2017), and Débordements. Littérature, arts, politique (forthcoming). He has translated into Greek A. Compagnon's Le Démon de la théorie (2003), J. Culler's On Deconstruction (2006) and, with E. Pyrovolakis, Jacques Derrida by Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington (2019). He co-curated (with P. Rehberg) the exhibition Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. He is currently working on a new book around the notion of critical intimacy.

Invited artists

• Maria Glyka has studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in the Athens School of Fine Arts and at the Vakalo Art and Design College. In her work, she brings together external and internal spaces playing with the boundaries of painting, installation and structures made out of paper and cardboard. She investigates everyday characters from urban space, which then connects with inner spaces, used objects and fictional memories. She projects images on their surface being interested on the creation of parallel actions, sounds, images, direct and indirect associations through this process. She has exhibited her work and taken part in many residencies internationally. She is currently teaching contemporary art practice at the Slade Summer School, UCL and Art and Design as an accredited lecturer of the University of Derby in the Vakalo Art and Design College, Athens.
  
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• Vassilis Vlastaras is Professor of Fine Art at the Athens School of Fine Arts. As an artist and researcher, is interested in public and private memory, an investigation that often leads him to the archive, using reports and journalistic sources from the media. Acting sometimes as an “activist” and others as an “ethnographer” he often highlights forms of documentation and narrative, that broadens his artistic research. Creating files and documentaries, getting ownership of publicity mechanisms, conducting interviews, statistical studies and online activity are some of the forms of structure and development of his artistic identity. Statistical surveys, public records, social criticism, surveys of economic and cultural operation, mark the beginning of many of his activities, forming his personal view-point in his practice as an active artist and tutor. 
  
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• MASI was founded in Paris in 2018 by architect and urban scenographer Madlen Anipsitaki, a graduate of Paris-Malaquais Architecture School, and sociologist and artist Simon Riedler, a graduate of Paris-Dauphine and Paris-Diderot– specialising in international migrations and interethnic relations. Their common (play)ground is the theatre of the city; their manifesto engages the need for blending people, materials and symbols from different backgrounds; their artistic gesture ties urban scenography interventions in the public space to their transmedia archive. At Eleusis2023 European Capital of Culture, MASI is currently coordinating ith Joshua Olsthoorn and Andreas Polyzogopoulos, the social sculpture and film Persephone, the red carpet (June 2023). Previously, research on environmental interdependence through the urban scenography A thread network in the urban fabric drove the duo from Paris to 9 cities of 7 Central and South American countries, with local and academic partners such as UNAM in Mexico, UNAC in Bogota, Escola da Cidade in São Paulo. The archive work of the Thread networks, started during MASI’s residency with the Ateliers Médicis and encouraged by the SNF ARTWORKS prize; their work was exhibited at the Espace Voltaire and the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2019/2020, cur. PAN) and at the Steinzeit Gallery (Berlin, 2022, cur. AthenSyn). The documentary in progress Sí Po' has been selected for the Evia Film Project (Thessaloniki Film Festival, 2022). In Athens, the duo partnered with the Victoria Square Project (Square with a view and Trikiklo, Art in transit, 2021-2022), Greenpeace and the SNFCC (Klepsydrogeios, Earth in hourglass, 2022). In Paris, MASI also created Crossing walls for the Nuit Blanche and held the workshops with architecture students “To the limit” and “1 km as the crow flies" (2021) which were described by Francis Alÿs as a “magnificent act of resistance to the pandemic”.
  
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• Katerina Patroni studied Filmmaking at E. Hadjikou Film School, Athens, The London International Film School, London and the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield. She has studied Greek culture and civilization at the Hellenic Open University, and holds an MA in Theology. She has written and directed feature and short length films and taught filmmaking at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and the State School of Drama of Northern Greece. Her films have been shown in many festivals and have won many awards
  • Selected Filmography
    • 2021 Dont Break my Stones
    • 2019 The Fourth Character
    • 2013 The Art of Crisis
    • 2012 Democratia, the Way of the Cross (co-director)
    • 2011 99 Laskareos st., Athens
    • 2010 Meetings with Kiki Dimoula
    • 2008 The Third Takis
    • 2005 The Painting
    • 2003 Men at Sea
    • 1995 Shoreline
    • 1990 Ellipsis
• Electra Stampoulou engages in art and research. Her practice mainly develops around questions related to narrative, dissemination, iterability, the undecidable, and the enchanting. Her work, usually in the form of installations, performances, and texts, wavers between the fictional and the factual. Employing time-dependent processes, various media, and often tactile and olfactory components, she attempts to explore among others, shared experience, agency, indeterminacy, and the digressive. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Athens School of Fine Arts on an IKY scholarship and carries out artistic research in Berlin under the auspices of Stiftung Berliner Leben. She holds a BA in English literature from NKUA, an integrated MFA in visual arts from ASFA, and an MPhil in ethics from NKUA.