Janneke Adema (she/her) is a cultural and media theorist working in the fields of (book) publishing and digital culture. She is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University) where she convenes the post-publishing research strand. In her research she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, post-publishing, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, ScholarLed, and Post Office Press (POP), the Copim community, and the Research England and Arcadia funded Open Book Futures project. Her monograph Living Books. Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021) is openly available. You can follow her research on https://www.openreflections.org/.
Simon Bowie is a culture writer, film critic, open source systems developer, and radical librarian. As an experienced open source software developer, he is primarily working as part of the Copim community on the Open Book Futures project to enable open access book publishing and experimental publishing. He is a solutions architect and a full-stack LAMP developer with experience of working on implementations of open source library and information systems and publishing platforms. He has an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck, University of London and as a cultural studies writer he has covered a range of film festivals and reviewed films for publications and podcasts. His academic work has covered posthumanism in the video game Outer Wilds, New Sincerity in contemporary indie video games, and the depiction of time and trauma in the TV shows Twin Peaks: The Return and Yellowjackets. Website: https://simonxix.com; Knowledge Commons: https://hcommons.org/members/simonxix/
Adeola Eze is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University with a research interest in cultural memory and its influence on contemporary literature. Her research focuses on the discovery, reception, and experimental use of ancient book formats within the modern literary landscape. Adeola’s doctoral research critically assesses the discovery, preservation, reception, and reuse of ancient book formats in contemporary literature through an experimental approach. The study explores how ancient societies utilised texts and images to communicate and disseminate knowledge, shedding light on the material culture of past civilisations and their practices of discarding and repurposing materials in literature production. Outside her primary research, Adeola’s research interest also stretches to children’s literature, investigating how children engage with literature and how their earliest encounters with stories shape their understanding of literary constructs based on convention and expectation. With a passion that burns brightly, Adeola co-founded a literacy centre for children, Jordan Hill Creative Writing & Reading Workshop and Jordan Hill Books, a publishing firm solely for young writers, in Lagos, Nigeria in 2011.
Judith Fathallah received her PhD in media and cultural studies from Cardiff University in 2014. Her thesis concerned fanfiction and changing ideologies of authorship, for which she received the Centre for Journalism Studies PhD Research Award 2010-11. This thesis formed the basis of her first book Fanfiction and the Author which is available to read Open Access at OAPEN. She went on to a lectureship in digital media at Bangor University in North Wales, a postdoctoral research role at Solent University, where she developed her interests in fandom, new media, and music. Judith published Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture which is the only academic monograph on emotional hardcore to date. Throughout this time, Judith became increasingly interested in new forms of publishing, digital literacies, and the importance of open access publishing for a fair and equitable academy. Thus in 2021, she became a member of the COPIM project (Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs), specifically the creation and launch of the Open Book Collective (OBC). Judith is particularly interested in the embryonic field of fan studies and true crime. ln 2023 she published Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killeras an open access book with OBC member mediastudies.press. She is working towards the launch of a network of academics interested in this area, following her keynote panel at Fan Studies North America 2024. Website: https://fathallahjudith.wixsite.com/my-site
Gary Hall is an experimental critical theorist who works at the intersections of digital culture, politics and philosophy. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he is founding director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. He is author of A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), The Inhumanist Manifesto (Techne Lab, 2017), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016), The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016), Digitize This Book! (Minnesota UP, 2008), and Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002). He is also co-author of Públicos Fantasma – La Naturaleza Política Del Libro – La Red (Taller de Ediciones Económicas, 2016) and Open Education (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), and co-editor of Experimenting (Fordham UP, 2007) and New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006). He has over 30 peer-reviewed publications in edited books and academic journals, including American Literature, Angelaki, Cultural Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, New Formations, The Oxford Literary Review, Parallax and Radical Philosophy. In 1999 he co-founded the open access journal Culture Machine, an early champion of OA in the humanities. In 2006 he co-founded Open Humanities Press (OHP), which he still co-directs. Gary blogs at: www.garyhall.info. Humanities Commons: https://hcommons.org/members/garyhall/
Clare Harvey is a traditionally published historical fiction author (Simon & Schuster UK) with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham. She is currently a postgraduate researcher at Coventry University, working towards her PhD: Co-authoring with forgotten voices – applying remix theory to writing historical fiction. As the title suggests, she’s particularly interested in how archival texts documenting lived experience can be repurposed into new historical fiction. Whilst this is practice research – Clare is writing a novel using cut-up methodology as a stepping off point – the process itself necessarily interrogates alternative ways of writing and thinking about how the past is portrayed in a post-digital era. Website: https://clareharvey.net/
Rebekka Kiesewetter is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. From an intersectional feminist perspective, she works on the ethical, political, epistemic, and psychosocial dimensions of research, communication, and publishing using experimentation to enact more equitable and pluriversal futures for scholarly knowledge creation and sharing. Rebekka researches on the Open Book Futures (OBF) research project; she is a a co-convener of the Radical Open Access Collective, a co-editor of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers experimental book series with Open Humanities Press, and a an editor of the experimental continent. journal. Her most recent publications include ‘Experiments towards Editing Otherwise’ (2024) in Culture Machine 23 and ‘Reframing the “International” in UK International Scholarship: Perspectives on Diversity and Equity beyond English as Lingua Franca and Multilingualism’ (2024) in Journal for Electronic Publishing 27(3). Website: https://www.rebekkakiesewetter.com
Alexandros Plasatis is a doctoral student at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures. He is the founder, publisher and lead editor of the other side of hope: journeys in refugee and immigrant literature, a literary magazine edited by immigrants and refugees that publishes poetry and prose by migrants from around the world. Established in 2021, the other side of hope receives funding from Arts Council England, and became the UK’s first ever literary magazine of sanctuary. His first book, Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness, narrates the lives of the undocumented Egyptian migrants who work as fishermen in a Greek town, and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Stories from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net. He has a PhD in ethnography-based Creative Writing. Website: www.alexandrosplasatis.com
Emeritx: Maddalena Fragnito, Valeria Graziano, Patrick Hart, Kaja Marczewska, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Samuel Moore, Peter Willis