Speakers

Miles Drawdy is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation explores the braided histories of disability, aesthetics, and performance in seventeenth-century England as embodied by the figure of the ugly actor. Before arriving at Berkeley, he earned an M.A. in Shakespeare Studies from King's College London.

Micah Dubreuil is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is primarily in the philosophy of mind and action, with a particular focus on the nature of practical intelligence, skill, and expertise. He has additional long-standing interests in aesthetics, phenomenology, and the philosophy of imagination.

Irene Franco Rubio is a doctoral student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing designated emphases in gender, women, and sexuality studies and new media. Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, she is a first-generation scholar-activist whose research explores multiracial coalition-building, grassroots resistance, and social movement histories in the U.S. Southwest. Her work is grounded in participatory methods and shaped by her ongoing community organizing, examining how cross-racial solidarity emerges in response to racialized, state-sanctioned violence. Franco Rubio’s scholarship bridges academic inquiry and movement-building, committed to uplifting directly impacted communities through collaborative, justice-oriented research.

Annegret Schäffler is a doctoral candidate and research associate in the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1369 "Cultures of Vigilance" at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After completing her studies in German and English philology in Munich and London with a thesis on deception in Chaucer and medieval European narratives, her doctoral thesis explores the interplay between sartorial dissimulation and states of unknowingness on the early modern English stage. Her research interests include medieval and early modern literature.

Tim Sommer is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he also serves as head of the Shakespeare Research Library. He was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg in 2019 and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. He is the author of Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance (2021) and the editor, most recently, of Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive: Objects, Institutions, and Practices between the Analogue and the Digital (2025). His research has also appeared in journals such as Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Book History, Authorship, and the Journal of World Literature. He is currently working on a book-length study of the production and reception of early Black writing before 1800.

Julia Rössler is a lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in American literary studies at the Amerika-Institut at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She completed her dissertation “Drama After Postmodernism: New Aesthetics of Mimesis on the Contemporary Stage” in 2023. She coedited a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English titled “From Page to Stage: The Role of Creative Interpretation Reconsidered” and her essays have also been published in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism, and Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. Rössler was previously a research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, New York. Her current project focuses on critical cosmopolitanism(s) in American fiction and literary culture between 1865-1900.

Sonja Thiel is a doctoral student in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied philosophy and history at the Humboldt University in Berlin, worked as a participatory museum curator in Frankfurt and other cities, and as the coordinator of museum studies in Germany. Her research interests include critical theory and ethics, museology, and the philosophy of the digital between theory and practice.

Oliver Thomas is a doctoral student in performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to attending Berkeley he was a Cambridge Trust Scholar at the University of Cambridge where he studied for an MPhil in Art, Creativity and Education. His research explores the various theatrical landscapes and performance practices which have arisen in response to a so-called refugee crisis across the Mediterranean; from the Syrian revolution to the present moment of heightened European nativism and bordering.

Isabella Williams is a doctoral student in the French Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her master’s degree in World Languages and Cultures with a specialization in French in 2023 from the University of Utah. Her primary research interests are situated in the nuclear humanities, Pacific Francophone literature, and decolonial studies. She is more broadly interested in the intersection between the arts and technology and in post-human representations.

Alena Zelenskaia is an anthropologist and scholar with a background in journalism. She completed master’s degrees in international relations at Saint Petersburg State University, where she also studied abroad at the University of Miami, and in anthropology at the European University at St. Petersburg. Her early research focused on the white movement press from 1917 to 1922 and on representations of Gorbachev in Western media. More recently, she has studied the identities of Russian-speaking asylum seekers in Germany. From 2019 to 2023 she worked as a research associate at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she investigated marriage migration to the European Union. This project examined the bureaucratic barriers faced by women from third countries who marry EU citizens, as well as the emergence of “vigilance cultures” — the moral discourses, online debates, and other forms of suspicion surrounding binational marriages. She is now completing her article-based PhD at LMU under the supervision of Professors Irene Götz and Eveline Dürr.