Bureaucritics

Members

Felipe Becerra

Felipe Becerra specializes in twentieth-century Latin American literature and cultural studies. He earned his PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University in 2022. His doctoral dissertation examines a series of Latin American publishing projects from the 1960s through the 1980s as authorial practices, focusing on their creative use of discarded materials and office duplicating technologies. He was a commissioned contributor to Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2024), for which he authored the essay “Communities, Bureaucracy, and Office Technologies in Ulises Carrión’s Publishing Projects.” He is currently researching a corpus of twentieth-century Chilean literary works that examine the professions, environments, and institutional dynamics of bureaucratic culture. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Facultad de Letras at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Lola Boorman

Lola Boorman is a Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of York. Her first book, Grammar and Twentieth-Century American Literature (EUP, 2025), explored how a set of US writers engaged the various  and shifting institutional and disciplinary manifestations of grammar (from creative writing, to anthropology, to sociolinguistics) as a key theme in their writing and as a way of parsing difficult questions about gender, race, class, sexuality, and national belonging. Elsewhere her work has appeared in Twentieth Century Literature and Post45 and she is currently co-editing Lydia Davis: Critical Essays (forthcoming EUP, 2027). Her next project examines literary representations of the US postal service in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. 

Isabella Brandalise

Isabella Brandalise is a designer, researcher, and educator with a practice in the intersection of creative inquiry and design for the public realm. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at WonderLab, at Monash University, investigating anticipatory capabilities for policymaking practices. She holds a PhD in Design from RMIT University (2024), an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design (2016), and an MA in Visual Arts from the University of Brasília (2016). In the last ten years, Isabella has worked with Brazilian and international institutions in the development of collaborative projects, applying critical and experimental accounts of participatory design, design ethnography, and communication design. Publications that showcase her work include “Dwellings in Ethernity: Designing and Unraveling the Patadesign School” (co-authored with Henrique Eira and Søren Rosenbak; in Attending (to) Futures, adocs, 2023) and “The Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders” (co-authored with Judy Park Lee and Lucas Vaqueiro; Administory, vol. 8 issue 1, 2023).

Michael Collins

Dr. Michael Collins is a Reader in American Studies at KCL and Chair of the British Association for American Studies. He is the author of two monographs, The Drama of the American Short Story (Michigan) and Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Realism and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (EUP) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (with Gavin Jones). He has published numerous articles in a range of journals and edited collections on figures such as W.E.B Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, and Helen Keller. Most recently, he has been working on topics relating to intelligence testing, meritocracy, bureaucracy, The Panama Canal, and the American Civil Service in literature and culture.

Gary Farrelly

Gary Farrelly is an Irish artist whose work is driven by obsessions with administrative systems, architectural erotics, infrastructure, and speculative administration. He studied at NCAD Dublin, BFA, and LUCA School of Arts Brussels, MFA, and later undertook post MA research at a.pass, Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies, where he explored the figure of the conspiracy theorist as both research methodology and performative approach. Farrelly is Professor at La Cambre ENSAV, Brussels, and has delivered situated research workshops at KASK School of Arts, Ghent, HEAD Genève, HDK Valand Academy of Art and Design, Gothenburg, and Goldsmiths, University of London. His feature length film Glue, co written with and directed by Oisín Byrne, premiered at Salzburger Kunstverein before extended public presentations at Goldsmiths CCA and the Irish Film Institute. His long running artwork Going Postal, a decades long accumulation of image based correspondence, forms an expanding body of work held in the collection of the Muzej Savremene Umjetnosti Republike Srpske in Bosnia. Farrelly is co founder of the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence, O.J.A.I., with German artist Chris Dreier, and also co-founded and curates the off grid performance platform FLYKTIG, Fugitive in Valdres, Norway.

Jérémie Ferrer-Bartomeu

A historian of early modern Europe, Jérémie Ferrer-Bartomeu specialises in the political and cultural history of administration during the Wars of Religion. He analyses the circulation of administrative and diplomatic knowledge as well as the materialities that shape the exercise of power. His resolutely interdisciplinary approach combines the historical anthropology of writing, visual studies, and pragmatic sociology to capture the performativity of texts and images within what he calls the ‘European republic of offices’. A former member of the Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), fellow of the Newberry Library (Chicago), and a graduate of the École normale supérieure (Ulm) and the École nationale des chartes (PhD, 2017), he is a former F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher (ULiège/UCLouvain, 2022–2025). Currently, he coordinates the F.R.S.-FNRS Welchange project “Cosmoclash urbain”, with his principal affiliations being UCLouvain and the University of Liège (ULiège). He also serves as Scientific Director at the Presses de l’Université de Liège (overseeing the Patrimoine and Manuels series). Furthermore, he is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (University of Warwick) and an Associate Researcher (Chercheur associé) at the Centre Jean-Mabillon (École nationale des chartes). His previous affiliations include the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours), the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin), and the universities of Neuchâtel, Geneva, and Fribourg. He co-directs the “Parole(s)” series at Brepols. His monograph, L’État à la lettre. Écrit politique et société administrative en France durant les guerres de Religion (Champ Vallon, 2022), was awarded the Tilsit–Institut de France Prize for Administration in 2024.

Nishant Gokhale

Nishant Gokhale is a lecturer in law at the University of the West of Scotland. Nishant has engaged with post-colonial South Asian bureaucracy in his work as a judicial clerk at the Indian Supreme Court, litigator, and a legal researcher. As an academic Nishant’s research examines the English East India Company’s bureaucracy and legal culture. Nishant has published about the official and literary writings of its colonial officials in western India in the Administory Special Issue here, and has spoken on this topic at a conference organised by the United Kingdom’s Open University here.

Livia Kleinwächter

Livia Kleinwächter studied literature, theater, and media studies in Bayreuth and Bochum. She earned her doctorate at the University of Cologne in 2022 with a thesis on the poetics of note-taking. She is currently employed as research assistant on the Weave-project ‘Bureaugraphies’, where she works and publishes on the topic of German office novels in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research interests include praxeology, cultural sociology, pop literature, organizational theory and literature.

Tanja Kapp

Dr. Tanja Kapp is a postdoctoral researcher in Anglophone Literatures at the University of Tübingen whose work explores the cultural forms of ephemerality, with a particular focus on paperwork, transient print cultures, and inter- or multimedial aesthetics. Trained in literary and cultural studies, she is currently working on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetics of belonging and kinship, as well as the epistemologies of ephemeral texts. More recently, she has begun to approach bureaucracy through her interests in documentary practices and the aesthetic/ideological dimensions of paper-based and paratextual media (both as representations and as primary texts). Her research brings together perspectives from literary studies and media theory to examine how a broader sense of office culture emerges in representations of work, and how bureaucratic discipline features in the writing/screening of (postcolonial and/or migratory) subjects across historical and contemporary Anglophone contexts.

Elliott Mills

Elliott Mills holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, where he carried out his research on the writer-civil servant Flann O’Brien with a Postgraduate Scholarship and Postdoctoral Fellowship from Research Ireland. His forthcoming monograph Flann O’Brien and His Media: Writing in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland will be published by Liverpool University Press. Along with Jonathan Foster, he is the co-editor of Irish Writers in the Civil Service (Liverpool University Press, 2026), with whom he also co-edited the special double issue of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies focusing on O’Brien and the civil service. His essay ‘Layered Identities in Cruiskeen Lawn and the Irish Civil Service’ will be published in the volume Flann O’Brien: Palimpsests, Translations and Intertexts (Cork University Press, 2026).

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence, O.J.A.I., is the collaborative artistic practice of German artist Chris Dreier and Irish artist Gary Farrelly, operating since 2015 between Brussels and Berlin as a speculative para intelligence agency. Using self-institution as both subject and method, O.J.A.I. produces performances, installations, publications, and administrative artefacts that mobilise parabureaucratic procedures, obsessive research, correspondence, and embedded investigation. Recurring subjects include corporate architecture, urban peripheries, tunnel infrastructures, and institutional memory. Projects have been presented at Marres, Maastricht, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris, tranzit.ro, Iași, and De Garage, Mechelen. Their publication Self Institution, Terminology Audit, Set Margins, Eindhoven, examines how artist-initiated institutions generate alternative forms of organisation, knowledge production, and exchange. Their current project O.J.A.I. West, developed in the Irish Mid West, investigates the paper trail of pre neoliberal capitalism, breaches of neutrality, and architectural encroachment, culminating in an exhibition and performance at Ormston House, Limerick.’

Judy Park Lee

Judy Park Lee is a researcher and service designer with a focus on building more equitable public services, spaces, and institutions. She is currently the design research director at the Public Policy Lab. Over the past decade, she has conducted research across varied domains, including public health, housing policy, public sector design, and civic technology. In the realm of bureaucracy studies, Judy explores the narrative representations and aesthetics of bureaucracy. Her work includes the Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders, an archive of mundane yet wondrous bureaucratic objects exhibited through a series of immersive, participatory installations in New York City and Brasília (publication in Administory, vol. 8 issue 1, 2023, with co-authors Isabella Brandalise and Lucas Vaqueiro). Judy holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design and a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University. 

Kerstin Stüssel

Michaela Telfer

Michaela Telfer is a Research & Instruction Librarian at the University of Connecticut Stamford. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California in 2022 and her MLIS from UCLA in 2024. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century Russian/Soviet and French literature, bureaucracy, new materialism, affect theory, folklore, and archival studies. She especially focuses on the ways in which literary authors engage with the materiality of textual objects and bureaucratic forms of knowledge production to critique state power and imagine the body of the civil servant. She has published on the bureaucratic fiction of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Administory respectively, and is currently revising her dissertation, “The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: Bureaucratic Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Russian and French Literature” into a first monograph.

Lucas Vasqueiro

Lucas Vaqueiro is a civic designer, researcher, and educator interested in exploring how government bureaucracy can afford wonder. Informed by his experience working with cities across the Americas, from New York to São Paulo and Montreal to Montevideo, his practice includes installations, publications, and community engagement that reframe bureaucracy as a civic infrastructure worth reimagining—and celebrating. His work has been featured at Milan Design Week and the Creative Bureaucracy Festival. Lucas holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design and a BA in International Relations from the University of São Paulo. He is currently a researcher for the FGV Arte and a New City Critics Fellow, publishing for Urban Ominbus.

Pieter Vermeulen

Pieter Vermeulen is a Belgium-based art critic, curator, and lecturer known for his transversal approach. He teaches contemporary art and theory, artistic research, cultural sociology, and self-organization at PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt and St. Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp. His writing has appeared in a wide range of contemporary art magazines, academic journals, and exhibition catalogues, and he has edited several artist monographs. In 2023, he curated the group exhibition The Seduction of the Bureaucrat at Kunsthal Mechelen, featuring artists such as Apparatus 22, Jan Banning, AA Bronson, Anna Bella Geiger, LAb[au], Ariane Loze, Wesley Meuris, Pilvi Takala, Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence, and Vermeir & Heiremans, among others. His reflections on the project were later published in Revue FACETTES and in his recent book The Sleep of Reason: Critical Perspectives in Contemporary Art (MER Books/Owl Press, 2024).

www.pietervermeulen.be

Benno Wagner

Benno Wagner is an Extraordinary (apl.) Professor of Literary Theory and Modern German Literature at the University of Siegen (Germany). He studied Communications and Literature at the Ruhr University of Bochum, Ethnology in Brisbane (Qld.), and received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Siegen. Habilitation with a thesis on risk and accident in the work of Franz Kafka (1998, University of Siegen), Associate Professor from 1999-2004, Extraordinary Professor since 2005. In 2011/12, Associate Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei, 2012/13 Chair of German at Chinese Culture University (Taipei). 2013-2016 Associate Professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. 2016-2022 Professor at the School of International Studies and Core Advisor in the Global Engagement Program of Zhejiang University. Since 2023 Wagner has served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Austrian School of Government, Vienna.

Christian Wimplinger

Christian Wimplinger works at the intersection of cultural theory and public administration. He is a researcher at the Austrian School of Government within the Federal Chancellery, where he focuses on integrating scientific evidence into policy development and serves on an interministerial working group on departmental research. Alongside this institutional work, he is completing a PhD in German Studies at the University of Vienna, writing a dissertation on the cooperative writing practices of Frankfurt School theorists Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge — a project that brings questions of bureaucracy, collaborative knowledge production, and critical theory into productive dialogue. His broader intellectual interests lie in how organizations — whether state administrations or intellectual communities — generate, negotiate, and transmit knowledge, and in what the history of critical thought can teach us about the cultures of contemporary governance.