Conference Organizers (email: traffic2026ucr@gmail.com)

	Padma Rangarajan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British Literature, particularly the literature and history of empire. She is the author of Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2014), a study of the literary legacy of translation policy in the British Empire, particularly India. Her next book, Insurgent Fictions: The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. She it at work on a new project, tentatively titled Hydraulic Empire.
	Fuson Wang is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he specializes in British Romantic literature, disability studies, and the medical and health humanities. He is the author of two books. A Brief Literary History of Disability (Routledge 2022) is a monograph about how disability theory reshapes our notions of literary periodization. And The Smallpox Report: Vaccination and the Romantic Illness Narrative (University of Toronto Press 2023) is a literary historical account of smallpox vaccination that contends that the disease’s eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. His work has been supported by UCHRI, the Huntington Library in San Marino, and UCOP.
	Susan Zieger is a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British and related literatures and cultures, with an emphasis on the novel, ephemera, and other mass media forms. Her first book, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), describes how metaphors of addiction such as exile, self-enslavement, and disease circulated through literature and culture to forge the new identity of the addict. Her second book, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2018), contends that our twenty-first-century moment of digital media saturation was formed through nineteenth-century encounters with printed ephemera. Her third book, Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space (University of California Press, 2025), offers a new theory of modern power as the capacity to move goods, people, and information efficiently to optimize capital. In 2024, Zieger was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Resident in the “Rethinking Capitalism” working group. With Nicole Starosielski and Matt Hockenberry, she edited the volume Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media, (Duke University Press, 2021); with Kelly Rich and Nicole Rizzuto, she edited The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, 2022), which won the Modern Language Association Prize for Best Edited Collection.

For more information, please contact traffic2026ucr@gmail.com.