Robert Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Affiliated Faculty in Women’s Studies, and a Faculty member of the Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University. He research focuses on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century intersections between science and literature, as well as more contemporary relationships among biological materials, economics, and information processing technologies. His published work includes Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge, 2007); Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2006), co-authored with Catherine Waldby; and Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002), both co-edited with Phillip Thurtle. He is also editor, with Phillip Thurtle, of the book series In Vivo: Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science, published by the University of Washington Press.
Helen J Burgess is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she teaches in the communication and technology degree program. She is active in the new media research community as editor of the online journal Hyperrhiz: new Media Cultures, and technical editor of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. In addition to Biofutures, she is coauthor of Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars, both titles published in the Mariner10 DVD series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her research focuses on the genre of multimedia scholarship as a form of academic inquiry. She is currently co-writing a book on the practice of multimedia authoring in the context of scholarly research and publication. She has interests in multimedia and web development, open source and open content production, science fiction literature, and print culture. Her next DVD project is Futurama, Autogeddon: Imagining the Superhighway from the World’s Fair to the World Wide Web, a study of media representations of the American Interstate Superhighway system.
Phillip Thurtle is an assistant professor of the Comparative History of Ideas program and the History Department at the University of Washington. He received his PhD in history and the philosophy of science from Stanford University. He has co-edited with Robert Mitchell (English, Duke University) the volumes Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002). He also co-edits with Robert Mitchell the book series entitled In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedicine. His research focuses on identity and biology in the American eugenics movement, the use of new media in popular science, the material culture of information processing, comics and the affective-phenomenlogical domains of media, and the role of information processing technologies in biomedical research. His latest book, entitled The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information Processing in American Biology, 1870-1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), documents the changes in experiences of space and time that allowed for the emergence of thinking in terms of genetics.