Birgit Mara Kaiser is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University. Her research interests are aesthetics and affect, Deleuzian and (new) materialist literary criticism, postcolonial and transnational literature. Recent publications include Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (2011), Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze (2012, ed. with L. Burns), “Diffracted Worlds – Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities” Parallax (2014, ed. with K. Thiele), Singularity and Transnational Poetics (2015, ed.). She currently works on a book project on Cixous, Guattari and the production of subjectivity. With K. Thiele, she is founder and coordinator of Terra Critica.