The Thread is run by Nicky Falkof, Sarah Joshi, Seph Rodney and James Wilkes.
Nicky holds a BA and a postgraduate Honours in English from the University of Cape Town, and a Masters in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex. Her doctoral research, an attempt to excavate a forgotten corner of the narrative of decolonisation, is on the cultural pathologies surrounding the end of whiteness in late apartheid South Africa. Other interests include Hollywood genre cinema, particularly action and science fiction; feminism; film and psychoanalysis; theorising the masculine body on screen; technology and the Cold War in 1980s popular culture; and the colonial and postcolonial occult. She has been, in various other incarnations, a journalist and editor, author of feminist polemics (Ball and Chain: the Trouble with Modern Marriage, Vision Books 2007) and singer in a Yiddish reggae band.
Sarah holds a B.A. in Classical Archaeology and a M.A. in Humanities. After finishing her M.A., Sarah taught for a Humanities and Philosophy department at a local college in California. While her M.A. thesis was on the missionary compulsion to write in the last quarter of the 19th century in India, her current PhD research concerns contemporary Bollywood cinema and the negotiation of interracial relationships and cultural citizenship in diasporic-centric films. Sarah’s other research interests are 18th and 19th century travel writing, the 1947 Partition of India, and most things related to popular culture and cinema.
Seph sincerely wishes that the moments of a genuine, electric contact were just simply guaranteed by the work of art. Unfortunately, they are not. Therefore he has chosen to engage with art and cultural criticism in a few ways: He is host and partner of the intermittent radio show The Thread, which broadcasts on Resonance FM. As such, he attempts to help to make a space for real inquiry into current culture, not for critique, but for comprehension. He also occasionally writes for an art journal or two. However, he spends the majority of his time working on his research PhD in the London Consortium program. His work concerns the visitor’s experience, perceived through the lens of migration, and using the case studies of two great museums of modern and contemporary art to contrast ways of obtaining symbolic capital. He intends to submit this thesis in September 2010. He comes originally from Jamaica and though filtered through New York and LA, still prefers (second to seeing compelling work) reading a good long novel under the mango tree in his old backyard.
James was born in Poole, Dorset. He has a BA in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology, and an MA in Creative Writing, and is now working on a PhD about the construction of landscape in the Isle of Purbeck. He also writes art criticism, poetry and drama; Interior Traces, a radio play about brain imaging technologies, was broadcast in 2009. His poetry publications include Ex Chaos and A DeTour (both Renscombe Press, 2006), and Reviews (Burner Veer, 2009). His first full collection, Weather A System, is published by Penned in the Margins.