Mindaugas Gapševičius
Mindaugas Gapševičius explores the interplay between non-human agents, human creativity, and environmental processes. He completed his MA studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1999, followed by earning an MPhil from Goldsmiths University of London in 2016, and defending his PhD thesis at Bauhaus University Weimar in 2022.
Since 2015, he has served as an artistic associate at Bauhaus University Weimar, transitioning to a research fellow role in 2022. Gapševičius played a pivotal role in founding Institutio Media, Lithuania’s premier media art platform, in 1998, and later co-founded Migrating Art Academies, a pan-European network supporting emerging artists from 2008 to 2017. In 2016, he collaborated with colleagues from the TOP association to establish Berlin’s inaugural TOP community biolaboratory. In 2019, Gapševičius established Alt lab, a hub for non-disciplinary research based in Vilnius, and more recently, in 2024, he launched the Centre for Non-machines Research in Athens, showcasing his commitment to innovative and boundary-pushing exploration.
Gapševičius’s works have graced prestigious platforms worldwide, including the Ars Electronica festival in Linz (2019-2022), the Lithuanian National Gallery of Art (2019, 2021), MO Museum in Vilnius (2019), Piksel festival in Bergen (2018, 2021), Ostrale Festival in Dresden (2021), and Futureless Festival in Stockholm (2022).
Peter English
Peter English is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. His research focuses on sports journalism and sports media, with an emphasis on journalists, content, and social media. Current projects are examining the Brisbane 2032 Olympics and Paralympics and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. This includes analysing media representations of sporting issues, understanding sentiment, and investigating legacy.
Peter is the author of Olympic Outliers: Brisbane 2032 and the Future of the Olympic Games (Routledge, 2026) and Australian Sports Journalism: Power, Control and Threats (Routledge, 2021). He is also a collaborator in the International Sports Press Survey and the Worlds of Journalism Study.
A co-chair of the IAMCR Media, Communication and Sport section, Peter is also co-editor of Australian Journalism Review. He has worked as a sports journalist for more than two decades, writing across domestic and international media.
Rina Kikuchi
Rina Kikuchi is a literary scholar, poetry translator, and professor of literature at Shiga University in Japan (since 2005), as well as an adjunct professor of poetry in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra (since 2018). Her current research focuses on Japanese women’s poetry of the Asia Pacific War, and she is co‑editing a new bilingual anthology of contemporary Japanese women’s poetry with Jen Crawford.
Kikuchi’s translation practice often involves collaboration, including co‑translation with monolingual poets and “poet‑trio translation” (source‑language poet – poetry translator – target‑language poet translation method). Her bilingual books of poetry translation include Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan (Recent Work Press, 2017, co‑edited with Jen Crawford), Pleasant Troubles (Recent Work Press, 2018, co‑edited with Harumi Kawaguchi), and The Selected Translations of Sagawa Chika Poems (Shichosha, 2023, co‑translated with Carol Hayes).
She has been an Honorary Asia Study Grant scholar at the National Library of Australia (2018) and a writer‑in‑residence with WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange) at RMIT University (2021). She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Warwick, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from Chiba University, which includes a one‑year research period at Trinity College, Dublin.
Somak Mukherjee
Somak Mukherjee is a literary and media scholar working at the intersections of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and urban cultural theory. He completed his PhD in English at University of California, Santa Barbara, where his dissertation, Elemental City: Ecology, Media, and Narratives of Crisis in Postcolonial Calcutta, traced how earth, air, water, fire, and blood shape narratives of ecological breakdown. He has held long-term research and teaching appointments at University of Tübingen, the University of Bologna, and University of Paris 8.
His work examines how novels, cinema, and everyday cultural forms render environmental risk perceptible, with attention to atmospheric politics, media infrastructures, and environmental justice. His current book project, Atmospheric Intimacies: The Cultural Politics of Air in Contemporary Eco-Narratives, studies breathability, pollution, and uneven exposure across Global South archives. His academic writings have been published/forthcoming in Critical Humanities., Amerasia, and edited volumes by Palgrave Macmillan, Oxford University Press, among others.