contributors
Dianne Bos has been teaching and exhibiting her photo-based work internationally for over forty years. Some of her recent exhibitions feature handmade cameras, walk-in light installations, and sound pieces. She has evolved various thematic bodies of work and merged technical innovations to create new visual hybrids: her innovative uses of pinhole, film, camera obscura, photogram, installation, and cyanotype all explore the world around us. “The excitement, for me, lies not in photographing and reproducing something I can see, but in revealing the imperceptible (and maybe only the imagined) using the physics of light and time and traditional darkroom techniques.” www.diannebos.ca.
Marjan Eggermont is a professor (teaching) and associate dean sustainability in the Schulich School of Engineering, in addition to serving as the co-director for the UNU Hub at the University of Calgary, current SDSN co-chair (research), and one of the academic co-leads for Democracy, Justice, and Sustainability in the Institutes for Transdisciplinary Scholarship. She is a Biomimicry Institute fellow and has been working in the field of bio-inspired design since 2004 with a focus on visualization and abstraction. She co-founded and designs Zygote Quarterly (zqjournal.org), an online bio-inspired design journal, to showcase the nexus of science and design.
Jim Ellis is professor of English at the University of Calgary and director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, Canada’s oldest humanities institute. He teaches sixteenth-century poetry and prose, about which he has written numerous essays and books, including, most recently, The Poem, the Garden and the World: Poetry and Performativity in Elizabethan England (Northwestern University Press, 2023). As director of the CIH, he has edited a series of books on the environmental humanities: Calgary: City of Animals (2017); Water Rites: Reimagining Water in the West (2018); and Intertwined Histories: Plants in Their Social Contexts (2019).
Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary, in Treaty 7 territory. He founded the Blasted Tree Publishing Company in 2014, and his first book, Barcode Poetry, was published in 2021. Kyle’s first trade book of poetry, Supergiants, is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in 2025. His most recent chapbooks include About Me from No Press and Building Permit: Capitol Hill from Gap Riot Press.
Stefania Forlini is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century literature, material culture, science, and science fiction. She recently edited the Broadview critical edition of Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895) and has published in the areas of Victorian studies, science fiction studies, the digital humanities, and humanistic information visualization.
Alice Gorman is an internationally recognized leader in the field of space archaeology. Her research on space exploration has been featured in National Geographic, New Scientist, and Archaeology magazine, and her book Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future (2019) won the NIB Award People’s Choice and the John Mulvaney Book Award. She is a faculty member of the International Space University’s Southern Hemisphere Space Program in Adelaide. She has worked extensively in Indigenous heritage management, providing advice for the mining industry, urban development, government departments, local councils, and Native Title groups in New South Wales, Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland. She is also a specialist in stone tool analysis and the Aboriginal use of bottle glass after European settlement.
David Hoffos has maintained a multidisciplinary practice since 1992, with over forty solo exhibitions at public institutions across North America and Europe. In 2009 their sprawling, six-year installation series, Scenes from the House Dream, debuted at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, before a cross-country tour that included the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. In 2014 Hoffos completed permanent public sculpture projects in Grande Prairie and Lethbridge. They have received numerous awards, including, the Images Grand Prize, 2007, and the inaugural Sobey Art Award (second place), 2002.
Noreen Humble is professor of Classics and associate director at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. She has written widely on the ancient Greek authors Xenophon and Plutarch, as well as on their reception from the classical world to the present day. She is the author of the award-winning Xenophon of Athens: A Socratic on Sparta (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is currently engaged in a number of international collaborative projects looking at the transmission of ancient histories through the lenses of book history and translation studies.
M. N. Hutchinson has been a working photographer for over thirty years. He both runs a commercial business whose work included album covers for A&M Records and is a nationally recognized professional artist. His practice has been contrarily cross-media. He has exhibited photographs, printmaking, sculptural installations, audio, video, and performance works. He completed his MFA in new media at the University of Calgary and has presented his work and theories in over twenty lectures and public presentations. He has been the recipient of several grants and awards both nationally and locally. He has also invested a considerable part of his career in the community, having been both a co-director of Truck Gallery and photography facilitator at the Banff Centre, as well as sitting on several boards.
Philip P. Langill is associate professor (teaching) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary and was appointed director of the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory in 2006. He teaches physics and astrophysics and has received numerous awards, including the Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Award and the Faculty of Science’s Award for Community Engagement (Established Career category). He is currently the honorary president of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Calgary Centre. He is a strong advocate for the preservation of naturally dark skies at night and strives to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into his teaching and outreach.
Elyse Longair is an artist, curator, and image theorist currently pursuing her PhD at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on collage history, collage as research creation, and institutional strategies of collecting and curating collage. Among recent awards, she studied collage in Paris at the Centre Pompidou thanks to the David Edney Research Award, and was awarded the Exposure Emerging Photographer of the Year Award by Exposure Photography Festival, earning her a solo exhibition at Contemporary Calgary. Longair’s “simple image” theory in collage reimagines the role of images away from the overt complexity that dominates our world, opening up new possibilities for imagined futures.
Hilding Neilson is an astrophysicist and assistant professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, where he works on the intersections of stellar and exoplanet astrophysics, the search for life in our galaxy, and Indigenous methods or ways of knowing. More specifically, he studies variable stars and exoplanet host stars to understand their physical properties. He then weaves traditional Western science and Indigenous methods to understand biological and technological signatures of extraterrestrial life to consider if and how astronomers should search for life. Dr. Neilson is Mi’kmaq and a member of the Qalipu First Nation in Newfoundland.
Chris Pak is a lecturer in contemporary writing and digital cultures at Swansea University, Wales. He is an award-winning literary scholar whose research into science fiction and climate change investigates how anticipatory narratives inform the climate imaginaries of the past, present, and future. He has published on geoengineering and terraforming (the adaptation of planetary environments) in science fiction and its relationship to contemporary science, policy, and activism. His book Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2016) is available online via open access. He is currently working on projects about science fiction and biophilic design.
Naomi Potter has been the director/curator of Esker Foundation in Calgary since 2012. From 2009 to 2011, she was curator of Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. She has been a jury member for numerous Canadian art awards, including the Curatorial Selection Committee for Venice 2019. She currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and is a member of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program Committee at the Banff Centre. Potter holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and an MFA in sculpture from Concordia University, Montreal.
Keith Sidwell is emeritus professor of Greek and Latin at University College Cork and adjunct professor of Classics at the University of Calgary. His books include Lucian: Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches (Penguin, 2004); Aristophanes the Democrat: The Politics of Satirical Comedy during the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge University Press, 2009); The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (1615) (Brepols, 2011), with David Edwards; Poema de Hibernia: A Jacobite Epic on the Williamite Wars (Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2018), with Pádraig Lenihan; and Lucianus Samosatensis, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum vols. 13 and 14 (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, forthcoming 2025). He has just completed a monograph on Lucian entitled The Witty Philosopher: Lucian and the Serio-Comic.
Dr Robert Thirsk has academic backgrounds in mechanical engineering, medicine, and business administration. He has flown on two space missions as a member of the Canadian Space Agency’s Astronaut Corps. Bob first flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1996 as part of the Life and Microgravity Spacelab mission. His second flight, in 2009, was a six-month expedition aboard the International Space Station. Bob and his station crewmates performed multidisciplinary research, robotic operations, and maintenance of spacecraft systems and payloads. Bob continues to be a strong promoter of a national economy based upon exploration, innovation, and lifelong learning.
Nancy Tousley, recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, is a nationally known senior art critic, arts journalist, and independent curator. Born in the United States, she held curatorial positions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario before moving to Calgary, where she was the art critic and an editor at the Calgary Herald for thirty years. She has written essays for more than sixty public art gallery and museum catalogues and books. Her feature writing and reviews have appeared in magazines such as ArtsCanada, Vanguard, Parachute, Canadian Art, and Border Crossings.