Keynote speakers

Mica Gherghescu holds a PhD in art history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, with a dissertation on the forms of language artists invent, concrete and visual poetry, and experimental writing. She served as an associate curator for the “Imaginary languages” section of the Nouveau Festival in 2013, she supervised research for the Martial Raysse retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2014, and she organized several spotlight exhibitions on Aimé Césaire (2016) and visual and sound poetry (2017). A former art history grantee of the Centre Pompidou, she is now a curator in charge of programming and scholarly partnerships at the Kandinsky Library, and is involved in the Globalization, Art, and Prospective collective at the French National Institute for Art History (INHA).

PhD in art history and curator at the Kandinsky Library of the Centre Pompidou.

Daniel Starza Smith is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at King's College London. His books include two monographs – Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter (with Jana Dambrogio, 2025), and John Donne and the Conway Papers (2014) – and two edited collections – Liber amicorum H. R. Woudhuysen (with Hazel Wilkinson, 2024) and Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (with Joshua Eckhardt, 2014). He is General Editor of the correspondence of John Donne for Oxford University Press, and has published widely on manuscript culture in early modern England. In 2021, he was part of a team that x-rayed and virtually unfolded an unopened letter from the 1690s without breaking its seal.