I'm currently an M.A. student at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Enrolled in the interdisciplinary Atlantic Canada Studies program, my thesis project examines anatomical models and videos used in sex education curriculums. Other primary interests include feminist theory, representation, Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, consumption, embodiment, DIY culture and activism.

When not at my computer, I might be found knitting, crafting, breakdancing or cooking, sometimes simultaneously. I'm looking very forward to contributing at the PCA/ACA conference, and am excited to meet and learn from like-minded colleagues.

I teach in the English Department at Harper College, which is roughly 20 miles northwest of Chicago. My dissertation, completed in 1993, centered on Dostoevsky and Melville. In the last couple of years I have focused increasingly on tattooing and race in Melville's early works. I initially became interested in this area in 2003 when I traveled to the Marquesas Islands for a Melville conference and expedition. After seeing firsthand the importance of tattooing in local culture, I wrote an article that was selected for a volume to be called Melville and the Marquesas. My article is titled “‘Making Up People’: Fictional Explorations of Race, Color, and Identity in Melville's Typee and Morrison's The Bluest Eye,” and it contains several pages about tattooing. I am not sure of the status of this volume of essays; the University of Hawaii Press recently decided not to publish it after holding it for quite some time, and I believe that it will instead be forthcoming as a special issue of the journal Leviathan.

I then explored the issue of tattooing further in a conference paper called “Tattoos and Other Taboos in Melville's Typee.” I presented this at the 2005 annual conference of the College English Association--Caribbean Chapter; the theme of the conference was "Taboo and Transgression," and the conference was held in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.

I look forward to the opportunity to pursue these ideas further in the context of the PCA/ACA conference, and to learn from others exploring similar territory.

I'm a grad student studying new media textuality at Georgetown University in the interdisciplinary Communication, Culture, and Technology Program. This semester I have worked with scholars at the University of Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) to build a digital version of Shelley Jackson's "Skin" (see my abstract). In October, I presented a paper at the Midwest PCA regional conference, and I am very much excited about contributing to the PCA/ACA conference next spring.

I am a graduate student at Georgetown University, where I have now worked for twenty years. During that time, I published five books, including Modern Mummies (1998) and Conjoined Twins (2003). I have also reviewed books on my website (www.booksaboutbodies.com) and for my favorite journal Fortean Times. After writing my thesis, tentatively titled “The Anatomical Body as Text,” I will receive my M.A. in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program this May. My research has been at the intersection of death, history, and anatomy, with studies of the Digital Humans, Body Worlds plastinates (see my visual analysis), and anthropodermic books—the paper I look forward to presenting at the conference.

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Manitoba. My dissertation examines concepts of inspiration and asphyxiation in the work of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson, among others. I specialize in nineteenth century American literature; aesthetics; poetry, poetics and narrative strategy; concepts relating the body and/or the subject with writing and form; post-structuralist and feminist theories of writing; and philosophical and medical-historical theories of breath, inspiration and asphyxiation. I am also a poet with an interest in subjective expression and the idea of being written. I am currently teaching at Nipissing University.