Instructors

HANNA MUSIOL (she/her)

Hanna Musiol is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at NTNU and an affiliated faculty of the Human Rights Institute at SUNY Binghamton. Her research interests include literature, site-specific storytelling, theory, and critical pedagogy, with emphasis on migration, political ecology, and environmental and human rights. She publishes frequently on aesthetics and justice, and her work has appeared in DHQ, Environment, Space, and Place, Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis, Writing Beyond the State, & more. Musiol regularly co-organizes city-scale curatorial and and civic engagement initiatives, such as Narrating the City, Of Borders and Travelers, Spectral Landscapes, or Resist as Forest. She frequently collaborates with urban storytelling initiatives such as Literature for Inclusion, and has been involved in transmedia storytelling research projects (Narrating Sustainability, One by Walking,  & ENVIROCEN).

LIBE GARCÍA ZARRANZ (she/her)

Libe García Zarranz is Professor of Cultural Theory and Literatures in English in the Department of Teacher Education at NTNU, Norway. Her research sits at the intersection of Canadian literary studies, visual studies, and affect theory, with a focus on feminist, queer, and trans approaches. She is the author of TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics, Literature, and Art (University of Alberta Press, 2024). She is the leader of the research group TransLit: Sustainable Ethics, Affects, and Pedagogies at NTNU and a member of the international research project Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene.

T.L. COWAN (she/they) & JAS RAULT (they/them)

T.L. Cowan (she/they) is Associate Professor of media studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as a cabaret and video artist. Their research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices focusing primarily on trans- feminist, queer, and disabled/disordered ways of working. Her creative-research practice moves between page, stage, and screen.

Jas Rault (they/them) is an Associate Professor of media studies in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Rault’s research focuses on trans-feminist and queer digital praxes and protocols; media histories of settler coloniality, white supremacy and sexuality; aesthetics and affects of social movements.

Together, Cowan and Rault co-direct three online research environments: the Cabaret Commons, the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC), and the Critical Digital Methods Institute (CDMI) and are the authors of the book Heavy Processing and many journal articles, as well as co-editors of two journal special sections: “Metaphor as Meaning and Method in Techoculture” in Catalyst: Feminist, Theory, Technoscience (2022) and “Feminist Mediations” in Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (2011). They also collaborate on performance and other projects, including the staged photo series Fancy Fridays.

ELENA PÉREZ (she/her)

Elena Pérez is Associate Professor of Drama and Theatre at the Department of Art and Media Studies at NTNU, Trondheim. She has a PhD in art and technology (2016), where she investigated the creative potential of digital media in the performing arts, particularly in multimedia theatre, telematic and pervasive performance. She works with performing arts, technology and sustainability. She uses theories and methods from performance studies, post-humanist scholarship, and media and game studies to investigate contemporary art fields of practice such as performance and technology and ecological theatre. Her latest publications are Interactivity and Togetherness in Digital Theatre (2022) in an anthology published by Arts Council Norway and Turning it sustainable: implementing sustainability goals in theatre productions at NTNU (2023) in the Nordic Journal of Art and Research.

NORA SØRENSEN VAAGE (she/her)

Nora S. Vaage is a philosopher and scholar of art and media studies. Nora has for many years focused on bio- and eco art and biohacking. Her recent research focuses on the tensions of care, control and environmental media, and she is principal investigator of the work package Experiential Soils within the research project Anthropogenic Soils: Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships on a Troubled Planet (2022-28). Nora is associate professor of art and media studies at NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology and at Nord University, and lead researcher at NOBA – Norwegian Bioart Arena, Campus Ås.

TOM NURMI (he/him)

Tom Nurmi is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture in the Department of Teacher Education at NTNU. His historical work examines the intersections of literature and environmental science in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, with broader theoretical interests in energy humanities, critical plant studies, waste studies, and the biopolitics of visuality, especially for younger readers.