BIOS

Augusta X. Thomson is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at New York University, where she is currently working on a Fulbright-supported dissertation project along the Camino de Santiago, in Spain. Her ethnographic fieldwork has been supported by the Council for European Studies, the SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship Program, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Thomson is the director of Nine-Story Mountain, a documentary/auto-ethnographic record of a pilgrimage to and around Mount Kailash in the far west of Tibet; and flotsam, a short film about the haunted Flatbush shoreline of Dead Horse Bay. She is committed to producing writing that extends the trend toward open access in academia, and has written for a variety of journalistic publications including The Daily Beast, Women in the World, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera English, The New Internationalist, Wellesley Magazine, Religion & Politics, and SAPIENS, among other publications.

Ayanni C. H. Cooper is a Program Associate in the Academic Services and Professional Development department with the Modern Language Association. She is a graduate of the English doctoral program at the University of Florida, where she specialized in comics and visual rhetoric. Her research interests include monster theory; gender & sexuality studies; science fiction & fantasy; and the study/creation of multimodal texts. Ayanni co-hosts and produces the public-facing podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which discusses how and why representations of sex, love, and desire in pop-culture matter. Her work can also be found in other public and scholarly forums, including in Monstrous Women in Comics, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook for Black Horror Film. You can find more information about Ayanni, including her publications, at Ayanni.com.

See Quan Zhou's biography page here