Writing Beyond the State

Alexandra S. Moore is a Professor of English and Co-Director of the Human Rights Institute at Binghamton University, USA. Her most recent publications include the monograph Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture (2016) and several co-edited collections-Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Survivors and Human Rights Workers (with Swanson, 2018); The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (with McClennen, 2015); and Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (with Goldberg, 2015). Her current research focus is on cultural representations of rendition, torture, and indefinite detention in the war on terror. Samantha Pinto is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her book Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (NYU Press, 2013) was the winner of the 2013 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for African American Literature and Culture from the MLA. Her second book, Infamous Bodies (Duke University Press 2020), explores the relationship between 18th- and 19th-century black women celebrities and discourses of race, gender, & human rights. Currently, she is at work on her third book on race, embodiment, and scientific discourse in African American and African Diaspora culture.