Michael Martin Shea studies Hemispheric American poetics, politics, and cultural production across the 20th and 21st centuries, with a special focus on the US and the Southern Cone. His dissertation project centered on poetic representations of visionary and mystical practices from the 1970s to the 1990s as part of a broader, hemispheric response to the so-called neoliberal turn. His other interests include experimental and avant-garde writing, translation studies, spatial theory and environmental humanities, continental philosophy, and media studies.

Olga received her MA in Comparative Studies and Russian Literature from the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow) in 2018. Her master thesis was devoted to the study of creative writing institutions in Russia specifically the Higher Institute of Literature and Art (1921-1925) founded by Valerii Briusov and the Higher State Literary Courses (1925-1929). In her dissertation Olga is examining questions of mutual influence among formal education, creative processes, and literary evolution in the socialist world as a whole.

Hannah LeClair’s research in British and French literature of the long nineteenth century focuses on realism's visual rhetorics. Her interests include poetry and poetics, aesthetics and visual culture, the nineteenth-century reception of romanticism, and twentieth-century theories of everyday life. She is writing a dissertation about landscape, setting, and the afterlife of picturesque aesthetics in the nineteenth-century realist novel.