Samir Gandesha | gandesha@sfu.ca
Director, Institute for the Humanities 
Professor, Department of Humanities

Samir Gandesha is currently a Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the relation between politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. He has contributed chapters to numerous volumes including The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (2003), Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (2004), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (2014), The Sage Handbook on Frankfurt School Critical Theory (2018), The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (2018), as well as to a wide range of journals including Political Theory, New German Critique, Constellations, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Logos, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Discipline Filosofiche, Estudios Politicos, Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, Radical Philosophy, and Constelaciones: Revista de Teoria Critica.

He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012) and co-editor (with Johan Hartle) of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017), also with Johan Hartle.  He is editor of Spectres of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical and Contemporary Perspectives (Pluto, 2020), and co-editor (with Peyman Vahabzadeh) of Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian H. Angus, Beyond Phenomenology and Critique (Arbeiter Ring, 2020), In the Spring of 2017, he was the Liu Boming Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Nanjing and Visiting Lecturer at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in China. In January 2019, he was Visiting Fellow at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and in February of the same year, he was Visiting Lecturer at Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas - FFLCH-USP (Universidade de São Paulo).

Ian Angus | iangus@sfu.ca
Professor Emeritus, Department of Humanities

Ian Angus is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He has published in the areas of contemporary philosophy, Canadian Studies, and communication theory. A Festschrift on his work has been edited by Samir Gandesha and Peyman Vahabzadeh: Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian H. Angus, Beyond Phenomenology and Critique (Arbeiter Ring, 2020). His most recent book is Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World (Lexington Books, 2021). Some of his work is available at: https://sfu.academia.edu/IanAngus.

Stephen Collis | scollis@sfu.ca
Professor, Department of English

Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talonbooks 2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks 2010), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks 2016), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talonbooks 2018). In 2019, he was awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust of Canada Poetry Prize in recognition of his body of work. In 2021, Talonbooks will publish A History of the Theories of Rain. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. 

David Mirhady | dmirhady@sfu.ca
Department Chair, Department of Humanities

David Mirhady's research spans several related fields: Greek rhetoric, law, and the school of Aristotle. It began with a dissertation on the political and legal writings of Aristotle's student Theophrastus. In order to get a background for that, he looked at Aristotle's approach to legal argumentation in his Rhetoric, which led to articles on the parallel accounts of argumentation on documentary forms of evidence in the Rhetoric, its contemporary, the Rhetoric to Alexander, and in the Athenian orators, the speeches of one of whom, Isocrates, he translated. He has also continued his interests in the parallels between the Rhetoric and the Rhetoric to Alexander, which led to a Loeb translation of the latter, and in other students of Aristotle, the Peripatetics, including Dicaearchus, Hieronymus, Phaenias, Clearchus, and now Critolaus. 

Adel Iskandar | afarag@sfu.ca
Assistant Professor, Global Communication
Committee Member, Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies

Adel Iskandar is an Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is the author, co-author, and editor of several works including Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution (AUCP/OUP); Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (Basic Books); Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press); Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing); and Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar's work deals with media, identity and politics; and he has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His forthcoming publications are two monographs, American Public Diplomacy Between Hybridity and Hegemony: On Hearts and Minds (Routledge) and Transcultural Empire in the Middle East and North Africa: Political Communication, Public Diplomacy, and Resistance (IB Tauris). His research also addresses the political role of memes and digital satire. Iskandar's engaged participatory research includes supporting knowledge production through scholarly digital publishing such as Jadaliyya and academic podcasting such as Status where he hosts and cohosts several programs including "Pressing Matter" with Malihe Razazan, and forthcoming review and interview show "Booked." His community research agenda also involves showcasing local grassroots participatory creative production by communities in the Middle East to confront the rise of extremism. Iskandar's work also involves the autobiographical documentation and self-representation of Syrian newcomer women in the Lower Mainland illustrates their ingenuity in the face adversity. Prior to his arrival at SFU, Iskandar taught at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC as well as the University of Texas-Austin.

Dimitris Krallis | dkrallis@sfu.ca
Professor, Department of Humanities
Director, SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies

Dimitris Krallis was born in Athens where he lived during his childhood, teenage, and college years. At the University of Athens, he studied political theory and, inspired by his professors of history, decided to risk all by applying for a graduate degree in Byzantine Studies. This took him to the University of Oxford where he studied Byzantine social and political history. After an interruption of four years dedicated to military service and to teaching at the American College of Greece in Athens, he moved to the US and the University of Michigan for his doctorate. Upon graduation, he joined the faculty at Simon Fraser University where he works at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies and the Department of Humanities.

Eirini Kotsovili | dkotsovi@sfu.ca
Lecturer, Department of Humanities
Member, SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies

Eirini D. Kotsovili studied History, Hispanic studies at McGill University (B.A) and Literature at University of Oxford (M.St, D.Phil), where she was also Junior Dean (Somerville College). At SFU, she is a Committee member of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies; an Associate member of GSWS and WLL. She serves as an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Modern Hellenism and leads the Memory and Trauma through History and Culture research cluster, together with Dr. Capperdoni and Dr. Horncastle (Humanities Department). Her research and teaching interests revolve around the notions of gender and identity, Modern Greece (comparative/transnational approach) and contemporary cultural production reflecting on the relation between past and present within various socio-political contexts.