Mimesis Now

Ian Bogost is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (where he is also director of the graduate program in digital media) and founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and creative practice focuses on videogames as cultural artifacts, in particular how they make arguments and express ideas, and on the relationships between hardware platforms and creativity. He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT, 2006); Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT, 2007); How to Do Things with Videogames (Minnesota, 2011) and Alien Phenomenology (Minnesota 2012), and co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT, 2009, with Nick Montfort) and Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT, 2010, with his doctoral students Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer). Bogost's videogames cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His most recent game, A Slow Year, a collection of game poems for Atari, won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 Indiecade Festival.

Stephen Halliwell is Professor of Greek at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Professor Halliwell is one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject of mimesis. His The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, 2002) was awarded the Premio Europeo d’Estetica 2008 by the Italian Association of Aesthetics. He is the author of the classic study Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago, 1986; new ed. 1998), as well as numerous translation/commentaries on texts by Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes. His most recent book, Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge, 2008), was awarded the Criticos Prize. His Between Ecstasy and Truth: Values and Problems in Greek Conceptions of Poetry is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Matthew Potolsky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Mimesis for Routledge’s The Critical Idiom series (2006) and the editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (U of Pennsylvania Press 1999). He specializes in Aestheticism, Decadence, the Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Poetry and Prose, and Critical Theory. His current book project is Workers of the Final Hour: The Decadent Republic of Letters.

Samuel Weber is Avalon Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, and Paul de Man Chair at the European Graduate School. One of the leading American thinkers across the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, Professor Weber has recently authored Theatricality as Medium (Fordham, 2004), Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (Fordham, 2005), and Benjamin’s -abilities (Harvard, 2008). He is the author of two classic studies on psychoanalysis: Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, 1991) and The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition (Stanford, 2000). His work on media theory, Mass Mediaurus: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, 1996), and institutional authority, Institution and Interpretation (Stanford, 2001, 2nd edition), have also been influential. His current book projects include Toward a Politics of Singularity and The Uncanny.