Hamza Ahmad is a Pakistani PhD student and instructor at the University of Washington's English Department. Hamza is a lover of Urdu poetry and is enthralled at the prospect of bringing his interests in Urdu to the study of rhetoric with particular attention to locating this work in post and decolonial conversations.
Read Ahmad’s contribution on the Ghazal here.
Dr. Kevin M. Anzzolin, Lecturer of Spanish, arrived at Christopher Newport University in 2021, where he teaches a wide range of classes. His book, Guardians of Discourse: Literature and Journalism in Porfirian Mexico, was published with the University of Nebraska Press in May 2024. His research focuses primarily on Mexican narrative from the 19th- to 21st centuries, and his work has been published in journals such as Letras Hispanas, Hispania, and Studies in Latin American Popular Culture. More information can be found here: https://cnu.academia.edu/KevinAnzzolin
Read Dr. Anzzolin’s study of art and gentrification here.
Sadie Barker lives on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ land, is a PhD candidate in the department of English at Concordia University and co-editor at Refractions. Her research thinks about the postcolonial studies as it bears upon questions of popular culture, genealogies of subjectivity and structures of feeling, aesthetics, and theories of genre. Alongside editing and grad-schooling, Sadie is a curator for the Gender Equity in Media Film Festival and an analyst working within the Tsliel-Waututh Nation’s Treaty, Lands, and Resources Department.
Read our introduction to the third issue here.
Ysabelle C. Bartolome finished her BA in Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She teaches literature and writing at the same university. Her research interests include popular culture, inter-Asian connections, Philippine studies, and biopower.
Read Bartolome’s piece on popular ‘eat the rich narratives’ here.
Arpita Biswas is a PhD student at the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research interests broadly include studies of nationalism, cartography, visual culture and aesthetic theory, embodiment, transnational feminism, and the institutional disciplinization of knowledge. As a part of her dissertation, she aims to study anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations of the Indian geobody, questioning the various modalities through which nations have historically been represented.
Read Biswas’ perpective piece on cow protection art in India here.
Gavin Davies, an independent scholar, completed his PhD in History at the University of Exeter with a thesis titled “Rules Britannia: Board Games, Britain, and the World, c. 1759-1860,” which argues that the imperial impact of Georgian and Victorian board games has been overstated. His research explores the cultural and social dimensions of games and interactive media. He has published on esports, video games, and games culture in forthcoming works with Palgrave Macmillan and De Gruyter. As of January 2025, he is a visiting lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts, teaching on their Critical Games Studies course.
Read Davies’ essay on the presence on Welsh accents in video games here.
Priscilla Jolly is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. She co-founded and co-edits Refractions. Her research interests include speculative fiction, tropes of placemaking, environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. Can talk about movies, TV and houseplants.
Read our introduction to the third issue here.
Payal Nagpal a first-year Ph.D. Student in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. She primarily writes fiction, and her academic interests lie at the intersection of postcolonialism and digital media studies. Her creative work can be found/is forthcoming in New Square Magazine, Scroll.in, and Simon&Schuster India's Cat People, and her critical work in Computers and Composition and constellations.
Read Nagpal’s perspective piece on Tiktok and mimicry here.
Movement artist and writer Bhumi B Patel directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, and science fiction choreographer (she/they). Patel is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University and a founding member of Dancing Around Race. Patel’s erformancework has been presented at Movement Research (NY), The Asia Pacific Dance Festival (Manoa, Hawai’i), Human Resources (LA), CounterPulse (SF), among others. Her research has been presented at the Dance Studies Association annual conference, Performance Studies international, the Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, the National Women's Studies Association annual conference, the Popular Culture Association annual conference, the International Conference on Movement and Computing, and other symposia. Patel been published in Performance Research Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance. She serves as Editorial Assistant for Choreographic Practices. Bhumi was a Women of Color in the Arts Leadership Fellow, a 2022-2023 Dance/USA Fellow, and a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Making art is her way of tracing the deeply woven connections in which we live–past, present, future–as a way to build communities of nourishment and care.
Read Patel’s essay on the function of dance in Bridgerton here.