Professor Dmitry Mikhel
is from the Department of Russian Civilization?s History, Faculty of History, Saratov State University, Russia. His current research interests include the role of the body and of modificatory practices in post-soviet Russia. Dmitry is currently working on the first edited collection of papers on modificatory practices to be published in Russian.
Nikki Sullivan
is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Australia, and is Director of the newly established Centre for Applied Somatechnics. She is the author of Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001, and A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/ New York: New York University Press/ Melbourne: Circa. Her research focuses on a range of modificatory practices and the complex and contradictory ways in which these currently function in the constitution of particular ‘types’ of body-subjects. Nikki was one of the organisers of the Body Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves conference at which a number of the papers in this issue were presented. She is now organising the Body Modification Mark II conference which will be held at Macquarie University in April 2005: www.ccs.mq.edu.au/bodmod
Paddy Hartley
is a UK-based artist who is currently working with Dr Ian Thompson from the Department of Oral Maxillofacial surgery at King?s College, London, developing implants and surgical masks for patients undergoing reconstructive surgery. Paddy is the recipient of a number of grants from the Wellcome Trust, and a series of his images are currently on display at the Science Museum, London as part of the Wellcome Trust exhibition, Future Face: www.wellcome.ac.uk/node6330.html.
Cathy Hawkins
is an honorary associate and tutor in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. Her doctoral thesis was entitled The Woman Who Saved the World: Re-imagining the Female Hero in 1950s Science Fiction Films. She is particularly interested in the female hero in popular film, and her research interests include the history of science fiction in cinema and television, gender and popular culture (particularly discourses of women as killers), and science and gender.
Harminder Dosanjh Kaur
teaches part-time in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Hull, UK She is reviews editor of the Journal of Gender Studies. Her research interests include feminist philosophy of the body; bodies and identity; and medical images.
Margrit Shildrick
is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Women’s Education, Research and Resource Centre, University College Dublin and until recently was a Visiting Professor and Director of Studies, Critical Disability Studies Program, York University, Toronto. Margrit is the author of Leaky Bodies and Boundaries. Feminism, Deconstruction and (Bio)ethics , London & New York: Routledge, 1997 and Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self , London: Sage, 2002. She has co-edited the following texts: M. Shildrick & R. Mykitiuk (eds.) Ethics of the Body: Postconventional Challenges, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005 (in-press) , M. Shildrick & J. Price (eds.) Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/ New York: Routledge, 1999 , and M. Shildrick & J. Price (eds.) Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Bio/logical Body , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Petra Boynton
is a lecturer in international health services research, Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, University College London. She lectures and supervises postgraduate students in Risk Management, Health Informatics, and Research Methods in Primary Care; teaching GPs, nurses, surgeons, and pharmacists. Her research focuses on evaluating research methodologies, and sex and relationship health. Petra trains GPs to communicate effectively with patients about sexual health issues, and is the sex editor at http://www.menshealth.co.uk, the agony aunt at the teen website http://www.mykindaplace.com/agony and presents a regular sex and relationships phone in for BBC Radio 5 Live. For more information visit http://www.drpetra.co.uk
Robert Payne
received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2003. His thesis, entitled ?Emission: Fictions of the Televisual?, is an analysis of constructions of mediated subjectivity in the fiction of Bret Easton Ellis, on talk show TV, and on the Internet. He currently teaches in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney and in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. Most recently, his work has been published in Postmodern Culture.
Greg Hainge
is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. He has published a monograph and numerous articles on Celine and many other articles on film, Critical Theory and music. He is the editor of the Australian Society for French Studies and serves on the editorial boards of Culture, Theory and Critique and Etudes Céliniennes as well as the council of the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide. He is currently researching cultural manifestations of noise and will shortly move to a new position at the University of Queensland, Australia.
Daniel Nourry
is a PhD student in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Australia. His research focuses on the body of the martyr in discourses on sacrifice and sublimity. He was one of the organisers of the Body Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves conference at which a number of the papers in this issue were presented