PRESENTERS & PARTICIPANTS.

Espen J. Aarseth is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Oslo and Principal Researcher at the Center of Computer Games Research at Copenhagen. A pioneer in the academic studies of video games he is co-founder and editor of Gamestudies.org and the author of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press 1997).

David d'Avray is Professor of History at UCL. Having worked on medieval marriage, on preaching and on attitudes to kingship and death he is currently preparing a book on Rationalities. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Henrietta Bredin writes regular arts features for The Spectator and is publications editor for Opera North. She recently worked with the Philharmonia Orchestra as production co-ordinator for performances of Vaughan Williams' Pilgrim's Progress at Sadler's Wells and in October 2007 curated a festival of events around Wagner's Ring cycle at the Royal Opera House.

Kai Brodersen is Professor of Ancient Culture and President of the University of Erfurt. His research focuses on Greek and Roman historiography and geography, on oracles and wonder-texts, and on social and economic aspects of history. He has also worked on Asterix and edited a volume on questions of counterfactual history in antiguity, Virtuelle Antike (Primus 2002).

Jenny Davidson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She writes about eighteenth-century literature and culture; other interests include British cultural and intellectual history and the contemporary novel in English. The author of two novels (Heredity and The Explosionist) her most recent book is Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (Columbia, 2009). In 2005-2006, she was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA.

Catherine Gallagher is Eggers Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton University Press, 2006). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received NEH, ACLS, and Guggenheim fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Ernst-Wilhelm Händler is the author of several novels. He studied Philosophy, Management Science and Economics at the University of Munich where he received a PhD in 1980. He is the recipient of the 1999 Erik-Reger Prize and the 2006 Hans-Erich-Nossack Prize. His latest novel, Die Frau des Schriftstellers, was published by Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt in 2006.

Heike Harmgart is a Principal Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development where she has particular responsibilities for Armenia and Turkmenistan. She holds a PhD in Economics from University College London and is also affiliated with the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She has published about the Florida election disaster, supermarket regulation and problems of trust. More recently, she has co-authored (with Steffen Huck and Wieland Müller) three articles on Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser.

Simon Hornblower is Professor of Classics and Grote Professor of Ancient History at UCL. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has worked extensively on classical Greek historiography (especially Herdotus and Thucydides).

Steffen Huck is Professor of Economics at UCL. The recipient of a 2004 Philip Leverhulme Prize, his research has investigated the role of trust and fairness for competition as well as issues in bounded rationality and evolutionary game theory. More recently, he has worked on counterfactuals in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser and belief systems in Lohengrin.

Sir Peter Jonas was General Director of English National Opera from 1985 to 1991. In 1993 he became General Director of the Bavarian State Opera, a post he held until he retired in 2006. He has a first degree in English Literature and studied Opera and Music History as a postgraduate. In 1974 he joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra where he was Director of Artistic Administration before he moved to ENO. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal College of Music. He was knighted on New Year's day 2000. He holds teaching posts at the Universities of St. Gallen and Zurich and the Bayerische Theaterakademie.

Paisley Livingston is Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His books include Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Cornell UP), Literary Knowledge (Cornell UP), Models of Desire (Johns Hopkins UP), Literature and Rationality (Cambridge UP), and Art and Intention (Oxford UP, 2005).

Peggy Mädler is an artist in Berlin. She has a PhD in theatre studies and has worked as dramaturg and theatre director. She is co-founder of the Laboratory for Counterfactual Reasoning, an art project that can be vistied at http://www.laborfuerkontrafaktischesdenken.de.

Wieland Müller is Professor of Economics at Tilburg University. He studied Mathematics in Dresden and Berlin before pursuing a PhD in Economics at Humboldt University. His main research interests are in game theory, industrial organization, and experimental economics. More recently, he has worked with Harmgart and Huck on rational choice in Richard Wagner's operas.

Isabel Ostermann is Artistic Director: Special Projects at the Berlin State Opera. She studied with Peter Konwitschny and Harry Kupfer and has worked with directors such as Christoph Marthaler and Christoph Schlingensief (in Bayreuth). Prior to joining Unter den Linden she has directed operas at the International Music Festival at Gut Immling and several German opera houses such as Regensburg, Dortmund, and Erfurt.

Sir Norman Rosenthal was Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts for 31 years. His many path-breaking exhibitions include the 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting that brought to the forefront works by Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer; the 1997 show Sensations that featured many controversial works from the Saatchi collection; the 2005 China: The Three Emporers and many others. He was knighted in 2008.

Julia Schleipfer is an artist in Berlin. After studying English and American Literature she embarked on an acting and directing career.She is co-founder of the Laboratory for Counterfactual Reasoning, an art project that can be vistied at http://www.laborfuerkontrafaktischesdenken.de.

Stephen Smith is a Professor of Economics and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences at UCL. His research deals with issues in environmental regulation and the economics of European tax policy. He is a member of the DEFRA Academic Panel on Environmental Economics and has acted as a consultant for many national and international organizations such as HM Treasury, the OECD, and the IMF.

Chris Starmer is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics at the University of Nottingham. His main research interests are in individual and strategic decision making, experimental economics and the methodology of economics. He also plays the drums in UK's premier funk band, speedometer.