Who We Are

Daniela Gandorfer

Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Comparative Literature
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Zulaikha Ayub

PhD Candidate
School of Architecture
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Daniela studied German Literature and Law at the University of Vienna. She holds an MA from the University of Vienna (AUT) and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (USA). Her research is inherently interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of law, literature and media studies, STS, natural sciences, and philosophy. It focuses on a materialist ethics of thought as well as the matter(s) of theory, understood as a material-discursive practice of sensing and sense-making. 

Daniela’s doctoral dissertation, “Matterphorics: On the Laws of Theory” was advised by Eduardo Cadava, Patricia J. Williams, Judith Butler, and Peter Brooks, and challenges contemporary notions of “theory”—whether legal, literary, and/or scientific—while proposing a different approach of doing theory in the contemporary world, namely in one with ever-expanding capitalist modes of extraction, the rise of new forms of fascism, a disregard for science in favor of populist fact construction, and major political and environmental transformations inextricable from climate change and the unequal distribution of its effects.

Daniela has taught, co-thought, and guest lectured at various institutions, including Princeton University, Pratt Institute (NY), the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (with Sanford Kwinter), and Utrecht Summer School (with Rosi Braidotti). She has given talks at Yale University (CT), Cardozo Law School (NY), San Francisco State University (CA), Utrecht University (NL), and Birkbeck Law School (UK), among other. 

Her past collaborative projects include:

Synesthesia of Law
(Princeton University /Sciences Po Law School, Paris). Participants included: Christian Biet, Yishai Blank, Eduardo Cadava, Emanuele Coccia,  Allen Feldman, Peter Goodrich,Bernard Harcourt, Bradley McCallum,  Andereas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Kendall Thomas, Julie Saada, Mangalika de Silva, Ann Stoler, Mariana Valverde, Jesus Velasco, Eyal Weizman,  Patricia Williams, Mikhaïl Xifaras, and Carey Young)

Reading Matters
(Princeton/UC Berkeley). Participants included: Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Judith Butler, Eduardo Cadava, Angela Creager, Raviv Ganchrow,  Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Stefan Helmreich, Sanford Kwinter, Katrin Pahl, Gayle Salamon, Dabarati Sanyal, and Patrica J. Williams)

Rhizomatic Reading
(Princeton/Yale University/Stanford University). 

Daniela has published on legal, media and literature theory, as well as philosophy. She is currently working on a book project concerning force and law and is co-editing the Research Handbook in Law and Literature (Edward Elgar Publishing) with Peter Goodrich and Cecilia Gebruers.

In addition she is, together with Zulaikha Ayub, co-editor of a Theory & Event Special issue (Johns Hopkins Press) entitled “Matterphorical,” which includes contributions from Karen Barad, Eduardo Cadava & Eyal Weizman, Emanuele Coccia, Raviv Ganchrow, Peter Goodrich, Suzanne Guerlac, James Martel, Katrin Pahl, Andreas Philipopulous-Mihailoppolus, Elizabeth Povinelli, Debarati Sanyal,  Philip Steinberg, Elizabeth Johnson,  and Patricia J. Williams.

Trained as an architect, Zulaikha’s research is mostly concerned with systems of media, secrecy, and technology in relation to the Manhattan Project and subsequent nuclear armaments. Reading across valences of drawing, image, science, and text, and adopting methodologies from critical geography, new materialism, nuclear studies, and media archeology in addition to architecture, she aims to portray more accurately these histories and their entanglements with the present. Key to this work is keeping an open-field approach―moments, “things”, people, buildings, are always situated, just like the knowledges that are explicitly or invisibility produced within, between, around, and of them.

Recent projects include the Beyond Extraction Counter Conference, cartographic data visualization for the “Public Lands, Private Hands” exhibition at the Lewis Center for the Arts, curation of the “Post-Course” exhibition at the Projekt Bauhaus Werkstatt in Berlin, and continued engagements at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meetings. Her writings have been published in DAMN° Magazine, The Funambulist Magazine, Very Vary Veri, Antipode Foundation, Representation: Discourse, A Series on Architecture (Princeton University Press, forthcoming), and her work has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture (New York), the Cooper Union, and the Galleria Tulpenmanie (Milan).

Zulaikha is a founding member of the critical geography collective Graphe, and has maintained a freelance graphic design practice for 10+ years. She has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Cooper Union, a Masters of Design Studies (with Distinction) in the History and Philosophy of Design from Harvard University, and is completing her PhD at the Princeton University School of Architecture. She has taught graduate and undergraduate design studios, lectures, and seminars at Pratt Institute, Mississippi State University, Catholic University of America, Mountainview Correctional Facility, and City College of New York.