Participant Biographies

Tomi Adeaga (U Vienna) Tomi Adeaga teaches African literature at the Department of African Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna, Austria. She translated Olympe Bhêly – Quénum’s C’était à Tigony into As She Was Discovering Tigony (2017). She co-edited Payback and Other Stories – An Anthology of African and African Diaspora Short Stories (2018). She published Translating and Publishing African Language(s) and Literature(s): Examples from Nigeria, Ghana and Germany (2006). She published: “Colonialism and Sexuality in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda,” in Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) (2020).

Alero Uwawah Agbonkonkon-Ogbeide (Durban U Technology) Alero Uwawah Agbonkonkon-Ogbeide is a Theatre practitioner. She is a PhD student at Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa. Her interest is in Theatre Studies, especially Theatre for Development and Deaf Theatre.

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (U Toronto) Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, Saugeen Ojibway Nation on the Saugeen Peninsula in Ontario. publications encompass poetry, fiction, non-fiction, radio plays, television and film, libretti, graphic novels, and spoken word. Her teaching and creative work is firmly decolonial, a practice of cultural resurgence, affirmation and survivance. Her 2015 book of short stories, The Stone Collection, was a finalist for the Sarton Literary Book Awards, and her collaborative recording A Constellation of Bones was a nominee for a 2008 Canadian Aboriginal Music Award. She has also served as Poet Laureate for Owen Sound and North Grey. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is the founding editor (now managing editor) of Kegedonce Press, one of four established Indigenous-run publishing houses in Canada.

Sara Ali (U Waikato) Sara Ali is currently a PhD candidate at University of Waikato. Her doctoral research is focused on exploring how masculine identities are constructed and presented in Pakistani anglophone fiction. Her poetry has been published in New Zealand's literary journals and she has received a Graduate Student Paper Prize at South Asian Literary Association's 2020 Annual Conference.

Maab Alkurdi (U Waterloo) Maab Alkurdi completed her first MA in English Language from the University of Jordan, her second MA in English Literature from the University of Waterloo and is currently a PhD student at the latter. She is the recipient of UW's Beltz Prize in Literature (2021) as well as the RhetCanada’s Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award (2021). Maab’s research interests include Rhetorics, Life Writings and Counterstories as well as Critical Race Theory and of course Creative Writing.

Lillian Allen (OCAD U) Lillian Allen is a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University. Two time JUNO Award winner and trailblazer in the field of spoken word and dub poetry, Allen artistically explores the aesthetics of old and new sounds in music to create her distinctive leading edge brand of Canadian reggae with new world sounds in her poetry recordings, with her powerful reggae dub poetry/spoken word recordings including ANXIETY (2012), her ground breaking first solo Juno award-winning album, Revolutionary Tea Party, a Ms. Magazine Landmark Album, followed by another Juno winner, Conditions Critical. Allen is a recognized authority and activist on issues of diversity in culture, cultural equity, cross cultural collaborations, and the power of arts in education. She has also held the post of distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Canada’s Queen’s University and University of Windsor.

Shirin Almousa (York U) Shirin Almousa is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Related Literature at the University of York in England. Her research is concerned with the questions of human and nonhuman relationships and their intersections with other social issues such as race, gender, and class in selected African American novels. Her interests broadly revolve around ecocritical, neo-materialist studies, environmental justice, and social inequalities.

Rawan Althunyan (Durham U) Rawan Althunyan is a PhD student in English at Durham University and is interested in contemporary World Literatures and Postcolonial theory. Her research scope is focused on the intersectionality of silence in regard to gender, race and diaspora which are anchored to power dynamics. Her study takes a comparative approach working on selected novels by both male and female Saudi and Nigerian novelists. She is also a lecturer at IMSIU in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Silvia Anastasijevic (Goethe U) Silvia Anastasijevic is a PhD candidate and a member of the adjunct faculty at the Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Her dissertation focuses on the forms and functions of transcultural humor in the Anglophone world, and incorporates examples from traditional to digital media.

Jesse Arsenault (Concordia U) Jesse Arseneault is an assistant professor of English at Concordia University, specializing in multispecies studies, South African cultural studies, and postcolonialism.

Mohd Asaduddin (Jamia Milia Islamia U) Author, critic and translator in several language, Mohd Asadudddin writes on literature, language politics and translation studies. He is currently Dean, Faculty of Humanities & Languages, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Advisor to the Vice Chancellor. He was Fulbright Scholar- in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, during 2008-2009. Earlier he was a Charles Wallace Trust Fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, in 2000. He was a visiting professor/scholar in several Indian and foreign universities.  Among his books are: Complete Premchand Stories,(Penguin Random House, 4 volumes,2017), Premchand in World Languages (Routledge, 2016),  Filming Fiction: Tagore, Premchand and Ray (Oxford U Press, 2012), A Life in Words(Penguin, 2012), and The Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories (2006) He has received several awards for his translation. He is also the Chairperson of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature & Language Studies (IACLALS).

Shashikala Assella (U Kelaniya) Shashikala Muthumal Assella is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. She holds a PhD on contemporary South Asian American women’s fiction from the University of Nottingham, UK and has published and presented her research on South Asian diasporic women’s fiction and identity in edited volumes and conferences. Her research and teaching interests include women's writing, postcolonial fiction, diasporic literature, cultural studies and textual and visual representations of Asian popular culture.

Nuha Askar (Goethe U) Nuha Askar is a PhD candidate at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She studied Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media at Goethe University and graduated with a Master degree in 2019. Her fully funded PhD project is entitled “Beyond the Single Story of the ‘Arab Nation’: Narrating Internal Dissent in Anglophone Middle Eastern Literature”. It examines internal struggles in the Middle East in contemporary anglophone narratives of, namely, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. She has been a guest speaker at several fora sharing her refuge experience and her texts published in German newspapers and collected on her blog: www.nuhaaskar.com.

Veronica Austen (St. Jerome’s U) Dr. Veronica Austen is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. She specializes in Canadian and Caribbean literatures. Her main project at present is a SSHRC-funded exploration how representations of the visual arts are deployed in contemporary Canadian literature to navigate experiences of (un)belonging.

Raquel Baker (California State U) Raquel Baker earned a PhD in English Literary Studies from The University of Iowa, specializing in Postcolonial Studies and 20 and 21st-century African literatures in English. Baker received a BA in Psychology from San Francisco State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Baker is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial and Transnational Literatures at California State University Channel Islands and teaches creative writing, literature, and Africana Studies, with a focus on representations of liberatory consciousness and speculative Black Futures. An attendee of UNISA’s 2020 Decoloniality Summer School, Baker is developing a decolonial framework in her creative practices.

John C. Ball (U New Brunswick) John C. Ball is professor of English at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. He is author of Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (University of Toronto Press) and Satire and the Postcolonial Novel (Routledge), and a long-serving editor of Studies in Canadian Literature. He has published recently in ARIELCommonwealth Essays and Studies, and the Journal of Jewish Identities, and is on the ACLALS 2022 organizing committee.

Anavisha Banerjee (U Delhi) Dr. Anavisha Banerjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Bharati College (University of Delhi). She has been awarded her PhD degree from the Department of English, University of Delhi in 2019 and her thesis deals with the position of women in nineteenth century colonial Bengal. Her area of interests includes gender studies and plays of Shakespeare. She was also the Treasurer of “The Shakespeare Society of India (SSI). She has presented many papers in national and international conferences. Moreover, she has published chapters in books, book reviews in journals and research articles in peer reviewed interdisciplinary and international journals.

Ghosun Baqeel (U York) Ghosun Baaqeel has a background in teaching English, and her early career saw her working as an English teacher at several schools in Saudi Arabia. In 2014, she earned the degree of Master of Art in English from Arkansas State University, USA, and in 2020 received an MA in English Literature and Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent, UK. She is currently a lecturer in English Literature in Taif University, Saudi Arabia and is studying for a PhD at the University of York, UK. Her PhD research topic is Globalism, Postcolonialism, and Double Consciousness in Iraqi Poetry.

Shinjini Basu (Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya U) Dr Shinjini Basu works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata. She did her Ph. D. from the Centre for English Studies (CES), JNU on the relation between crime and colonial modernity. Her areas of interest are literary theories and colonial and post-colonial studies. She has published articles in national and international journals as well as book chapters on translation, post-colonial novel, colonial and post-colonial politics, contemporary theories and culture studies.

Diksha Beniwal (IIT Kanpur) I, Diksha Beniwal, am currently a PhD scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. My research areas include postcolonial literature, Dalit studies, and Dalit literature. I am currently working on the rise of the Dalit middle class and the study of the ways in which it differs from, and is similar to, the Indian middle class that emerged under the British rule. One of my papers titled "Dalit Middle Class and the Crisis of Colonial Modernity: A Study of Ajay Navaria’s Yes Sir" is being published by SAGE's journal 'Contemporary Voice of Dalit' later this year.

Amitendu Bhattacharya (Birla Institute of Technology and Science) Amitendu Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India.

Lihini Boteju (U Kelaniya) Lihini Boteju is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of English of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. She received her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in English Studies from the Department of English from the University of Kelaniya. She particularly has interest in teaching and researching in the areas of speculative fiction, science fiction and cultural studies.

Aidan Bracebridge (Durham U) Aidan Bracebridge is a Wolfson Foundation funded PhD student in the English Studies department at Durham University in the UK. His research focuses on representations of the Western academy in the contemporary South Asian novel, examining literary depictions of Western academic institutions, these institutions’ positions within neocolonialism and globalisation, and the ways South Asian literature written in English is inflected by their influence. Aidan is also the Academic Officer at University College Durham, recently organising the interdisciplinary Durham Castle Conference 2021: Power, Privilege, and Possible Futures, which addressed wide-ranging themes of inequality and decolonisation, on and beyond the British campus.

Michael Bucknor (U Alberta) Associate Professor at the Mona Campus, UWI, Michael A. Bucknor has been a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar (Western University) and a Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Post-doctoral Fellow (University of Michigan) and an Institute of Jamaica’s Gold Musgrave Medal winner for Eminence in the field of Literature. A Senior Editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature, he is past Chair of ACLALS, and co-editor with Alison Donnell of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Widely published in number of international journals, he carries out research on Austin Clarke, Caribbean-Canadian writing, postcolonial literatures and theory, African diaspora studies, masculinities and popular culture.

Carolina Buffoli (U Edinburgh) Carolina Buffoli is a PhD student and tutor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interest focuses on contemporary Anglophone literatures, trauma studies and the Gothic. Her doctoral project addresses the comparative analysis of how contemporary postcolonial and Scottish novels engage with the Gothic discourse to confront the legacies of colonialism, foregrounding issues around narrative, cultural memory, silences and (social) shame.

Chandrima Chakraborty (McMaster U) Chandrima Chakraborty is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Her research is on public memory, nationalist history, masculinity, and religion, with a focus on the literatures and cultures of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her publications include, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises (2015), and Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning (co-edited 2017). She is currently working on a co-edited book on COVID-19 and anti-Asian racism in Canada.

Michael Chapman (Durban UT) Michael Chapman is a researcher-in-residence at the Durban University of Technology and an emeritus professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His publications include Southern African Literatures and, most recently, On Literary Attachment in South Africa: Tough Love. Chapman is editor-in-chief of Current Writing, the official journal of SAACLALS (the Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages).

Antara Chatterjee (IIESR Bhopal) Antara Chatterjee works at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India. Her research interests include South Asian literatures, Partition studies, trauma and memory, environmental and medical humanities. She has received funding from the University Grants Commission, India, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Indian Council of Historical Research and Tata Trusts. She has published in South Asian ReviewHumanities, and in an edited collection The South Asian Short Story (Palgrave). Her co-edited book Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation is forthcoming from Springer in 2022.

Ajay K Chaubey (National IT Uttarkhand) Dr. Ajay K Chaubey is an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of  Humanities & Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand. His publications include V S Naipaul (2015), Salman Rushdie (2016) and a trilogy on South Asian Diaspora (2018, 2019 & 2020).  Dr. Chaubey loves to explore the unexplored and nuanced territory of travel narratives on South Asia. He has widely published his essays, interviews, and book reviews in national and international journals, magazines, and anthologies and presented papers on V S Naipaul and Dalit Literary discourse in India.

Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury (Cotton U) I am a Postgraduate in English Literature, with specializations in American Literature and Film Studies. I have attended many National and International Webinars and Conferences on Literature and Theory. I am currently working as a PhD scholar at Cotton University, India. I have also worked as a part-time peer reviewer for Indian e-journals.

Karen Sanderson Cole (U West Indies, St. Augustine) Dr. Karen Sanderson Cole is a lecturer in the Modern Languages and Linguistics Department of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her special area of focus is Caribbean political auto/biographies .

Jack Davies (U California Santa Cruz) Jack Davies is a PhD Candidate in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and holds a Master of Arts from the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He studies the history of the theory of the settler colony, particularly its lineage in political economy and its contemporary expressions in relation to North America, Australia, and Palestine. He has published on finance and authoritarianism and on human rights discourse in refugee status determination. His dissertation is titled, “The Wages of Settlers: Towards a Materialist Theory of the Settler Colony”.

Philip Dickinson (U Lancaster) Philip Dickinson is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies and World Literature at Lancaster University. He has published and forthcoming work in a range of venues including Angelaki, New Formations, Interventions, and the Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel. His monograph, Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing, came out with Palgrave in 2018, and his co-edited special issue of New Formations on 'Animism in a Planetary Frame' appears in 2021. He is currently working on a book about enclosure.

Jill Didur (Concordia U) Dr. Jill Didur is Associate Dean and Professor in English, Faculty of Arts and Science, Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, and co-editor of  Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant, Greening Narrative (2014-2022), that explores how locative and mobile media applications can enhance our understanding of the relationship between the discourses of natural history, globalization, and contemporary perceptions of the environment and sustainability. She is also completing a book about imperialism, gardening, and the environment in postcolonial literature and travel writing.

Farzana Doctor Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and psychotherapist. Born in Zambia, Farzana immigrated to Canada in 1971. While being a social worker, Farzana also enjoys writing with some of her notable works including Stealing NarseenSix Metres of PavementAll InclusiveSeven, and You Still Look The Same. Farzana explores various themes in her writing such as loss, relationships, community, healing, racism, LGBT rights, disasporic identity and feminism.

Sarah Dowling (U Toronto) Sarah Dowling is the author of Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, which received an honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize. In addition, Sarah has published three poetry collections: Security PostureDOWN, and Entering Sappho, which was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize. Sarah teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto, and is currently writing a book about lying down in contemporary literature.

Sam Durrant (U Leeds) Sam Durrant is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison and of several co-edited collections of essays, most recently Refugee Imaginaries (EUP 2020), and together with Philip Dickinson, a double issue of New Formations on ‘Animism in a Planetary Frame’. He is currently working on a book on animism, literature and film, provisionally entitled Channelling Other Spirits: Literature, Animism and the Mimetic Imperative.

Asli Ergün (Goethe U) Asli Ergün is a PhD student at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. She majored in English Studies, Philosophy and Education at Goethe University and holds a state examination for teachers. Her dissertation “Discovering Europe’s Convivial and Transcultural Ordinary in a Multipolar World” examines social imaginaries from the British and European context that turn away from migratory exceptionalism and appreciate novel modes of the ordinary.

Ruth Epochi-Olise Etuwe (Alex Ekweme Federal U) Epochi-Olise Etuwe Ruth studied at the University of Ibadan, where she holds a B.A. [Hons.], M.A. and Ph.D; a director, actor and theatre manager. She is currently a Senior Lecturer of Drama and Theatre at the Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike (AE-FUNAI), Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Epochi-Olise is a Fellow of the Ife Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), whose research and teaching interests cuts across Dramatic Literature, Theatre Studies Carnival Arts, Gender/Performance Studies and Children’s Theatre. She has published academic papers in reputable local and international journals as well as reviewed and co-edited articles in national and international journals.

Alicia Fahey (Capilano U) is a settler-scholar and interdisciplinary instructor whose research and teaching interests involve Canadian literature, culture, and visual arts and Indigenous art and literature from Turtle Island.

Onaopemipo Fayose (North-West U) My name is Onaopemipo Abigail Fayose; I am a post-graduate (Masters of Arts in English) student of North-West University, Mafikeng, South Africa. My interest areas include ecocriticism, protest fiction, feminism and postcolonial literature. As a student, I intend to expand my knowledge in these fields and add to the growing body of knowledge to climb the ladder in the research fields.

Miki Flockeman (U Western Cape) Miki Flockemann is Extraordinary Professor in the Dept of English at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her  publications include comparative studies of diasporic writings from South Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean with an emphasis on transitional aesthetics. She has also published extensively on contemporary South African theatre trends with a recent emphasis on the transformative and decolonial potentiality of affective performance aesthetics.

Megan E. Fourqurean (U Leeds) Megan E. Fourqurean is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds. Her research explores the intersection of gender identity and indigenous religion in West Africa and the diaspora. Her current doctoral thesis focuses on the political and theoretical impact of contemporary Mami Wata worship on constructions of gender and sexuality in recent Nigerian fiction. Megan approaches her work from an interdisciplinary perspective, incorporating the environmental and medical humanities into her research along with the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, queer theory and diaspora studies.

Nitika Gulati (U Delhi) Nitika Gulati is Junior Research Fellow, Ph.D. at the Department of English, University of Delhi. She served as an Assistant Professor at College of Technology and Engineering, Udaipur from 2018-2021. She pursued her B.A. Hons. and M.A. in English from University of Delhi. She recently completed a collaborative research project on English Skills for Employability as its Principal Investigator. Her research areas include mental health literature, feminist literature and English Language Teaching.

Anna Guttman (Lakehead U) Dr. Anna Guttman is a full professor in the department of English at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She is the chair of the Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies, the oldest and largest international organization dedicated to the study of postcolonial literature. She is also the author of Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature (2013) and The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature (2007) and co-editor of The Global Literary Field (2006). She publishes in a variety of areas, including gender and sexuality studies, globalization studies, and popular culture.

Doris Hambuch (United Arab Emirates U) Doris Hambuch  is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at United Arab Emirates University. Her publications include essays on Caribbean literature, ecocriticism, film analysis, and trans-cultural feminism. She is a contributor to the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies and to the Routledge Who’s Who in Contemporary Women’s Writing. She edited special issue 6.2 of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studieson Caribbean cinema. Her current research focuses on polyglot art practices. Her collection All That Depends (2019) combines poetry and photography.

Felicity Hand (UA Barcelona) Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  She teaches post-colonial literature and history and culture of Britain and the U.S.  She has published articles on various Indian Ocean writers including M.G.Vassanji,  Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown  and Lindsey Collen and  has recently edited a volume of essays on the South African Indian playwright Ashwin Singh, Durban Dialogues Dissected (2020).  She is the co-director of the research group Ratnakara which explores the literatures and cultures of the South West Indian Ocean.  The group’s current project is: Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World. Felicity is also the editor of the electronic journal IndiaLogs.

Denise Handlarski (Trent U) Dr. Denise Handlarski is an Assistant Professor at the Trent School of Education. She has a PhD in postcolonial literature, a background in gender studies, and experience in formal and community education settings. Dr. Handlarski’s work is on History and literature/reading in the classroom, critical race theory and gender studies, and well-being/spirituality in education.

Heike Harting (U Montreal) Heike Härting is an associate professor of English literature a the Université de Montreal. She specializes in postcolonial, globalization and planetary cultural and literary studies. She is the founder and co-director of the Centre de recherche des études littéraires et culturelles sur la planétarité (CELCP) and the principal investigator of the FRQSC funded research team grant Cultural and Literary Planetary Studies: Practice, Epistemologies, and Transformative Pedagogies. She has published on postcolonial and contemporary Canadian writing, planetary epistemologies of reading, narratives of global humanitarianism, violence and warfare, and is presently working on pandemics and "planetary health humanities."

Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U) Jennifer Henderson is a professor in the Department of English and the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Settler Feminism and Race-Making in Canada and the co-editor of Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Her recent publications concern genre conventions in the settler-colonial management of historical reckoning.

Muchativugwa Liberty Hove (North-West U) Muchativugwa Hove is a Full Professor in English Language & Literature and formerly a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Limpopo, South Africa. He is Deputy Director in the School for Literature and Language Education. Current research interests are in nation and narration, critical literary theory, cultural metissage and applied language studies, especially curriculum renewal through the decolonisation project, curriculum theory and pedagogics of teaching English. Muchativugwa Hove is a National Research Foundation (NRF) C rated researcher with  more than 35 articles in national and international journals, 12 book chapters, 6 co-edited books and an edited book on auto/biography.

Liz Howard (U Toronto) Liz Howard earned her Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at various institutions such as McGill University, University of Calgary, and Sheridan College. She is an adjunct professor and lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tentwon the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was released in June 2021.

Nicola Hunte (U West Indies, Cave Hill) Nicola Hunte is a lecturer in the Literatures in English discipline at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies.  With her interest in the creative arts, she serves as the editor of POU, Cave Hill’s journal of creative writing as well as on the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment committee for the promotion of literary arts in Barbados. Her research interests are the critical works of Guyanese writer/theorist Wilson Harris and speculative fiction from the Caribbean and African cultural diaspora.

Cajetan Iheka (Yale U) Cajetan Iheka is an associate Professor of English researching and teaching in the fields of on African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature. He is the author or editor of four books. His first monograph, Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge UP 2018), won the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 African Literature Association First Book Prize. Most recently, he completed African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP 2021). He is the editor of Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (MLA 2021), and co-editor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (Rochester UP 2018) and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today (ALT 38, 2020).

Camille Isaacs (OCAD U) Camille Isaacs is an Associate Professor of English at OCAD University in Toronto, specializing in postcolonial, and black diasporic literatures, particularly the Caribbean and Canada. She has considered the transmission of affect through social media for African women in the diaspora: “Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence through Social Media in the Work of Adichie and Bulawayo” was published by Safundi. In addition, her edited volume, Austin Clarke: Essays on His Works, gathered critical essays on Clarke’s work. Her current research considers aging and memory in Caribbean literature.

Elizabeth Jackson (U West Indies) Dr Elizabeth Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad) campus. She has published two single-authored books, and a third is forthcoming: Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), Muslim Indian Women Writing in English: Class Privilege, Gender Disadvantage, Minority Status (Peter Lang 2017), and Beyond Diaspora: Global Childhoods and Cosmopolitan Identities in Literature (forthcoming with Brill). She is also the author of numerous articles in academic journals, including the Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureARIEL, and Women: A Cultural Review, among others.

Seema Jena (New York U) Seema Jena. Founder/Editor of the first South Asian literature Journal titled DASKHAT. Award winning playwright of the play, ‘No Place in Paradise’ and winner of the Jonathan Cape award for the Most promising Black British Writer. Author of the books, Voice and Vision of Anita Desai, and Narrative Frameworks in Indian Women’s Writing and Text, Film, Theory. Currently working on a documentary titled, Ganga: River and Godess.

Clara A.B. Joseph (U Calgary) Clara A.B. Joseph is professor of English and adjunct professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. She has co-edited four collections of essays. She is also the author of four monographs: The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP 2008), The Face of the Other (A Long Poem)(Brisbane: Interactive Press 2016), Dandelions for Bhabha (Brisbane: Interactive Press 2018), and Christianity in India: The Anti-Colonial Turn (London and New York; Routledge 2019). She co-ordinates the Postcolonial Studies Research Group at the University of Calgary.

Sunu Rose Joseph (National IT Karnataka) Sunu Rose Joseph is a full time PhD candidate in English Literature at National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India, working in the area of Environmental Humanities. She has two International Conference Papers at Durham University and EFLU Hyderabad to her credit. She has over 5 years of professional experience in academics and industry.

Jyotishman Kalita (IIT Mandi) The author is a doctoral candidate at School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi and Assistant Professor of English at Gauhati University, Assam, India. The author’s research areas include ecocritical theory, speciesism, ecocritical pedagogy, climate fiction and folklore. The author seeks to facilitate transitions from ecocritical theory to ecocritical practices through pedagogy and encourage crossdisciplinarity in ecocritical theory.

Debamitra Kar (Women’s College, Calcutta) Debamitra Kar is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Women’s College, Calcutta, India. She has been awarded a Ph.D. for her work on ‘Conflict zone Literature’ under the department of English, University of Calcutta. Her area of interest includes Conflict Management, Trauma Studies, New Historicism, and Performance Theory.

Soumya Kashyap (IIT Patna)Soumya Kashyap is an Institute fellow (PhD) and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Patna (India). She has presented paper in prestigious international forum such as “Contemporary Women’s writing and the Medical Humanities”, organized by School of Advanced Study, London. Her article on ‘mothers-to-be’ appeared in Feminism in India and review article on Artificial Reproductive Technology has appeared recently in Journal of Literature and Science. For her PhD dissertation, she is working broadly in the field of Medical Humanities with a focus on the issues of infertility and maternal health as reflected in Indian Women’s writing.

Ramanpreet Kaur (U Western O) Ramanpreet Kaur is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is writing her dissertation on gender politics in the androcentric historiography of Punjabi theatre. Her research interests are Postcolonial literature and theory, Indian theatre, and history of Punjab. In addition to her research, she develops tools, games, and interactive methods for teaching Hindi and Punjabi.

Ankita Kaushik (U Delhi) Ankita Kaushik, Doctoral Research Scholar, Department of English, University of Delhi. My doctoral research focuses on the idea of sustainability, cosmopolitanism and migrant communities settled near river Yamuna in the city of Delhi. Other areas that I have worked in are contemporary cultural and literary theory, with special focus on oral history and archives, urban studies, cosmopolitan theory, popular music and nationalism.

Kristine Kelly (Case Western Reserve U) Kristine Kelly teaches in SAGES, the general education program at Case Western Reserve University. As a researcher and teacher, her interests range from electronic literature and digital media studies to British colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary Anglophone literature and cultures, especially related to travel and mobility.

Arshad Said Khan (U Alberta) Arshad Said Khan is a PhD candidate at the department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta. He is currently writing his dissertation on representations and self-representations of the Indian hijra subject. Khan previously attended Yale University as a Fulbright scholar. He is interested in how Southern gender variant identities challenge and reimagine ideas of citizenship and nationalism.

Rakibul Hasan Khan (U Otago) Rakibul Hasan Khan is pursuing his PhD in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He received an MPhil, MA, and BA (Honours) in English from the University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. He taught at two universities in Bangladesh for eleven years before moving to New Zealand in 2020 for further study. He has published a number of research articles, and presented papers at international conferences. Postcolonialism, eco-postcolonialism, and globalization studies are his main areas of research interest.

Feisal Kirumira (U Alberta) Feisal is a doctoral student at the University of Alberta. His area of interest is curriculum studies with an emphasis on antiracist pedagogy informed by African wisdom, with a slice of philosophical hermeneutics. His dissertation is entitled: Desecration of Black Resilience Through Post-Secondary Racial Restructuring: Toward Kigandan-inspired Extricare Inquiry. Preveiously he was Special Advisor to the Dean, Augustana Campus, University of Alberta (on international student programming), and the Faculty Advisor for the Diversity Working Group, Afro-Youth Club, Muslim Students Association, and the Asian Pacific Students Club at Augustana Campus. Feisal was also a member of the Alberta Antiracism Advisory Council (2019 – 2021), and a member of the City of Edmonton Antiracism Advisory Committee.

Elisabeth Knittelfelder (U Vienna) Elisabeth Knittelfelder holds a PhD in English and American Studies from the University of Graz and is an awardee of the Marietta Blau Scholarship. She spent extensive research periods at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa and at Potsdam University in Germany. Her work exists at the convergence of literary studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, global feminism, decoloniality, Black studies, and dramaturgies of cruelty and trauma. Her current research explores the nexus of intersections between necrocapitalism, crisis, and violence towards aspects of (global) migration, (colonial) border epistemologies, climate justice, and (decolonised) trauma studies.

Shubhanku Kochar (Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha U) Dr. Shubhanku Kochar is currently working as an Assistant Professor at University School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi. His areas of interest include African and African Diasporic Literature along with Environmental literary criticism. He has written a novel titled Everything Will Be Alright. His scholarly publications include Treatment of Violence: A Reading of Toni Morrison’s Selected Fiction and An Ecocritical Reading of Alice Walker’s Selected Works and numerous research papers in national and international journals. His latest book Environmental Post-Colonialism: A Literary Response was published in 2021. His forthcoming book, Refrigerated Cultures: A Literary Perspective will be published by Vernon Press.

Neil ten Kortenaar (U Toronto) Neil ten Kortenaar is a professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he teaches African, Caribbean, and South Asian literature. He is the author of Self-Nation Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy, and Debt Law Realism: Nigerian Novelists Imagine the State at Independence.

Shashikantha Koudur (National IT Karnataka) Shashikantha Koudur is a Professor in Humanities at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal with over 20 years of academic experience, He has supervised 3 successful PhD candidates and have a significant number of publications and other achievements in research to his credit.

Safa Kouki (U Montreal) Safa Kouki is affiliated with the Research Center for Planetary Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Montreal. She recently defended her PhD thesis (jointly funded by the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education and the University of Montreal), which undertook a critical assessment of what she calls “refugee camp literature” as both a cultural commodity and a literary and interdisciplinary genre on its own terms. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures and theories, literary and cultural perspectives on planetarity, and the so-called “refugee question.”

Aditi Krishna (Dalai Lama Institute of Higher Ed) Aditi Krishna is a research scholar working on the ethic of care and intersectionality of philosophy and literature. She ahs finished her MPhil from the department of English, The University of Delhi. Her dissertation was titled “Facets of Care: A Study of Care Relations in Contemporary Indian Stories” where she explored the nexus between mental health, care and Levinasian ethics. She is currently working on her Ph.D. proposal while teaching at The Dalai Lama Institute of Higher Education, Bagladore, India.

Lilika Kukiela (U Toronto) Lilika Kukiela is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Toronto. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation focuses on how imperial and post-imperial Japan signifies in post-1945 multi-ethnic American literature that resists and complicates one’s relations to American empire.

Eeva Langeveld (U Munster) Eeva Langeveld is a recent graduate of the MA National and Transnational Studies at the University of Münster and is currently conducting field studies in Helsinki (Finland) for the MA Social Anthropology. Her academic interests lie with memory studies, postcolonial history, and children’s literature.

Isabella Lau (U Calgary) I am a M.A. student at the University of Calgary and non-fiction editor at filling Station Publication Society. My research interests are Asian Canadian Literature, diaspora studies, language and cultural studies, and postcolonial theories. Most of my works are critical research projects on Asian representation in literature, and postcolonial and cultural studies. I am currently working as a graduate research assistant at the U of C Department of English.

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Toronto Metropolitan U) Anne-Marie Lee-Loy is the current Chair of the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University.  Her research considers the construction and usage of "Chineseness" as a socio-cultural political identity primarily in the Anglo-Caribbean, but also in dialogue with the Americas more generally. She is the author of Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature.

Judith Leggatt (Lakehead U) Judith Leggatt is an Associate Professor in the English department at Lakehead University, Canada, where she teaches Indigenous literature and science fiction.  She has published articles on a variety of topics, including Indigenous science fiction, tricksters in Indigenous literature, and Indigenous comics. Together with Monica Flegel, she has co-authored Superhero Culture Wars: Politics, Marketing and Social Justice in Marvel Comics (Bloomsbury 2021).

Christine Lorre-Johnston (Sorbonne Nouvelle U) Christine Lorre-Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in English at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. Her research focuses on Canadian and New Zealand literature, women’s writing, and the genre of the short story. Recent publications include Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Short Stories: ‘A Book with Maps in It’(2018), ‘Unsettling Oceania,’ a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2018), and ‘Afterlives of the Bible’, a special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature (2018).  She is the current Editor of Commonwealth Essays and Studies, and a CNRS Research Fellow in 2020-22.

Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead U) Cheryl Lousley is Associate Professor in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University with a focus on contemporary Canadian, postcolonial, and global environmental justice writing and cultural studies. Her research appears in The Oxford Handbook of EcocriticismThe Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literary TheoryGlobalizationsResilienceGlobal Ecologies and the Environmental HumanitiesPopular Representations of Development, among other places. She is a Past President of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) and the founding series editor for the Environmental Humanities book series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press since 2007.

Randy Lundy (U Toronto) Randy Lundy is Cree, Norwegian, and Irish and is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation. Randy’s notable works include poetry books titled Blackbird Song and Field Notes for the Self. He currently serves as editor for the Oksana Poetry and Poetics series. Randy Lundy joined the English Department at University of Toronto, Scarborough.

Irikidzayi Manase (U Free State) Irikidzayi Manase is a Professor of English Studies and Academic Head of Department at the University of the Free Sate, South Africa, and current Chair of SAACLAS. His areas of research are the city and youth in Southern Africa and Africa, African literatures, speculative fiction and African futures. He recently guest edited the October 2021 Current Writingjournal issue in honour of Michael Wessels and Journal of Literary Studies special issue on African literatures about old and new contagions and being human in times of viral infections, and is finalising co-editing a Literary Geographies special issue on African Futures.

Rita Maricocchi (U Munster) Rita Maricocchi is a research assistant and PhD student at the Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at the University of Münster. Her current PhD project focuses on intersections of the Anglophone and Germanophone in the (postcolonial) German literary and cultural sphere. Additional research interests include postcolonial comics, multilingual literature, and decolonization movements.

Laura Moss (U British Columbia) Laura Moss is Professor of Canadian and African Literatures at the University of British Columbia. She held the Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies from 2019-21 and served as the editor of the scholarly journal Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review from 2015-20. In addition to five edited books on literary history, postcolonialism, and Canadian writing, Moss has published research on GMO seed practices, TRCs in South Africa and Canada, narrative competence and the medical humanities, literary pedagogy, public arts policy in Canada, and public memorials. She is currently the Associate Dean, Students in the Faculty of Arts at UBC.

Michaela Moura-Kocoglu (Florida International U) Michaela Moura-Koçoğlu earned her Ph.D. in Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. She teaches Feminist Theory, Gender and Genocide, as well as courses on Gender Violence and Global Women’s Writing at Florida International University in Miami, USA. Her research interests include Studies in Gender Violence and Trauma; Women and Genocide; Indigenous Feminism; Online Violence Against Women; and Trans-Indigenous Literary Studies. Dr. Moura-Koçoğlu’s most recent article “Decolonizing Gender Roles in Pacific Women’s Writing: Indigenous Feminist Theories and the Reconceptualization of Women’s Authority” was published in the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing (2017).

Durba Mukherjee (IIT Kanpur) Durba Mukherjee is a part-time Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a full-time assistant professor at Kalimpong College, West Bengal. The topic of her doctoral dissertation is ‘The Portrayals of India as a Physical Space: Narratives of Indian Return Migrants after Independence’ and her broader field of research includes Indian middle-class self-fashioning, travel writing, autobiographical texts, and narratives of home.

Sayan Mukherjee (Dhirubhai Ambani IICT) Sayan Mukherjee is a Ph.D. student at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar. He completed his Master’s Degree in English from the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, and his Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University in Kolkata. His research interests include graphic narratives, visual arts, and culture studies.

Angelie Multani (IIT Delhi) Angelie Multani is Professor of Literature at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. She is interested in theatre, contemporary fiction and Indian writing in English. She has published extensively on the plays of Mahesh Dattani, and also on Fantasy Literature and the Indian novel in English.

Francesca Mussi (U Northumbria) Francesca Mussi is a Leverhulme ECR Fellow in the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University. Her current research project examines how Indigenous literature can complement and challenge the work carried out by the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Canada 2008-2015) by contributing to ongoing discourses of healing, justice, and Indigenous resurgence. This research builds on her first monograph, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC: Fictional Journeys into Trauma, Truth and Reconciliation (Palgrave 2020) which explores the intersections between trauma, memory, reconciliation, and narrative within the context of the South African TRC.

Jonathan Nash (Victoria U) Jonathan Nash is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, and he studies contemporary refugee writing.

Isaac Ndlovu (U Venda) Isaac Ndlovu teaches in the Department of English, Media Studies and Linguistics at the University of Venda, South Africa. His research interests are African narratives of crime and imprisonment, contemporary South African and Zimbabwean fiction and life writing. His recent publications are: “Writing and Reading Zimbabwe in the Global Literary Market: A Case of Four Novelists” in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2020); “Rewriting the Colonial Gaze? Black Middle Class Constructions of Africa in Sihle Khumalo’s Travel Writing” in Auto/Biography Studies (2020) and “Writing in and about Prison, Childhood Albinism and Human Temporality in Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory” in the Journal of Literary Studies (2018).

Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State U) Janet Neigh is an Associate Professor of English at the Erie campus of Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Recalling Recitation in the Americas: Borderless Curriculum, Performance Poetry, and Reading (University of Toronto Press, 2017).

Brendon Nicholls (U Leeds) Brendon Nicholls is Associate Professor in Postcolonial African Studies (University of Leeds). Nicholls is author of a monograph, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading, and an edited collection on Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. His articles appear in the Cambridge Companion to Salman RushdieModern Fiction StudiesResearch in African LiteraturesJournal of Commonwealth LiteratureAfrican Identities and Cultural Critique. His ACLALS paper forthcoming in New Formations. Nicholls serves on the Worldwide Universities Network Global Africa Group Steering Committee.

Naomi Nkealah (U Witwatersrand) Naomi Nkealah is a senior lecturer of English in the Division of Languages, Literacies and Literatures in the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research specializes in the re-theorisation of African feminisms for contemporary African scholarship and the exploration of representations of gendered violence and women’s empowerment in African women’s literature. Her most recent publication is the book Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film (Routledge, 2021), co-edited with distinguished professor, Obioma Nnaemeka.

Susie O'Brien (McMaster U) Susie O’Brien is a professor of English and Cultural Studies. Her teaching and research focus on postcolonial environmental humanities. SSHRC-funded research includes participation as a co-investigator in an MCRI (Major Collaborative Research Initiative) on Globalization and Autonomy (2002-2007), and individual projects focused on postcolonialism and the environment (2001-2004) and a study of the concept of resilience in postcolonial culture and ecology (2009-2012). She is also a collaborator on a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (2016-2019) on narratives of resilience. Her publications focus on postcolonial ecology, the slow and local food movements, risk and resilience. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Unsettling Resilience Stories, which analyzes the usefulness and the limitations of the concept of resilience through an anti-colonial ecocritical lens.

Isaiah Ode (U Lagos) Isaiah Ode is my name. I hail from Edo State, Nigeria. I have an M.A degree in Theatre Arts from the University of Lagos; B.A from the University of Benin, and Nigeria Certificate in Education, College of Education, Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria. I am a member of NANTAP, SONTA and WAACLALS. I am a creative and determined person with a humble personality. I am a poet, an actor, director and freelance teacher. I am passionate about affecting positive change, hence my desire for knowledge to achieve that.

Stephanie Oliver (U Alberta) Dr. Stephanie Oliver is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in contemporary Canadian and diasporic literature at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus. Her research interests include literary representations of smell and diaspora, sensory encounters with oil, and the poetics and ethics of breathing in settler atmospheres.

Sarah Olutola (Lakehead U) Sarah Olutola, also known as Sarah Raughley, is currently a professor in the English Department at Lakehead University. Sarah is an emerging Young Adult fiction writer, with notable works including The Bones of RuinLegacy of Light, and Seige of Shadows. Sarah has been nominated for the Aurora Award for Best YA Novel. Her research covers representation of race and gender in popular media culture, youth culture, and postcolonialism.

Prateeksha Pathak (York U) Prateeksha Pathak is a graduate student at York University, Canada. Her project examines the role of tangible heritage in preserving the culture and untold stories of displaced communities from Jammu and Kashmir. She also runs a digital archive 'Kashmir Untold'. Her research interests include material culture, memory studies, diasporic literature, migration and displacement and culture studies.

Prateek Paul (Columbia U) Prateek Paul is a PhD student in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) department at Columbia University. He pursued his MPhil research on the urbanity of caste in Hindi Dalit literature, in the Department of English at Delhi University. He has previously been Writing Faculty at Ashoka University, where his course, "Writing the City", scrutinised variegated ideas, practices, and strategies of reading and writing about/in the city. For his PhD research, he aims to study the contemporary Dalit public sphere and its print culture in a bid to analyse Dalit urbanism(s) in the neo-liberal Indian city.

Senath Walter Perera (U Peradeniya) Senath Walter Perera is Professor Emeritus (English) at the University of Peradeniya.  He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick on a Commonwealth Scholarship and subsequently secured Fulbright Fellowships to Virginia Tech and Cornell.    His publications are primarily on Postcolonialism and Sri Lankan Literature. He has edited The Sri Lanka Journal of the HumanitiesPhoenix and Navasilu and is Bibliography representative in Sri Lanka for JCL. The current Chair of SLACLALS, he has also chaired the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia), the Gratiaen Trust and been on the Advisory Board of SARE and the DSC prize for South Asian Literature.

Roopa Philip (Jyoti Nivas College) I am employed as assistant professor at the department of English, Jyoti Nivas College Autonomous (Bangalore) since 2008. I completed my PhD (2013) from JNU, Delhi. My areas of research interest and focus are gender studies, women’s writing, revisionist writing and Indian Literatures.

Alfrena Jamie Pierre (U West Indies, Trinidad) Alfrena Jamie Pierre is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies in Trinidad. In 2021 she presented “Who are We? Explorations of Self in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s “Mother Poem” and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin” at the 39th  West Indian Literature Conference. Her paper, “The God Question in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin” was published in volume IV of the journal Meditating and Mediating Change: State  ̶  Society  ̶ Religion. Ms. Pierre’s research interests include, representations of Christianity in literature, George Lamming, Caribbean poetics, identity and trauma.

Mariam Pirbhai Mariam Pirbhai is a creative writer and academic. She is a professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University and is the former president of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS). Some of notable works by Mariam include Outside People and Other Stories, and Isolated Incident. Mariam is currently working on two new projects, one that is scheduled to be published by Fall 2023.

Eva Ulrike Pirker (Heinrich Heine U Dusseldorf) Eva Ulrike Pirker is a senior lecturer in Anglophone Studies and coordinates the programme of the Centre for Translation Studies (ctsdus@hhu.de) at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. She has published widely on anglophone and postcolonial literatures and arts. Her research focuses on historical culture, cultural translation and formal approaches to cultural narratives. Currently, she works on generational experiences in 'postmigrant' situations.

Tehmina Pirzada (Texas A&M Qatar) Dr. Tehmina Pirzada is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M at Qatar. She specializes in the cultural constructions of Muslim girlhood and Muslim adolescence in the material, visual, and digital cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work has appeared in South Asian ReviewJournal of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies, and Journal of South Asian Popular Culture amongst others.

Saba Pirzadeh (Lahore U of Management Science) Saba Pirzadeh is assistant professor of English at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. Her research examines violence, natural degradation, socio-ecological justice, and ethics of representation in literary texts. In 2019, she was a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Her work has been published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentISLEParergonInterventions, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene.

Jill Planche (Toronto Metropolitan U) Jill Planche is an academic with a professional background in arts in Canada. Education: PhD English Literature (York U, 2007) and PhD Interdisciplinary Humanities (Brock U, 2020) – focused on the space of theatre and its role in South Africa’s social-political-economic discourse explored through Deleuze’s minoritarian conceptualization, feminist decolonial geography and primary research of contemporary theatre practice in South Africa. Currently, Jill is an independent scholar and sessional instructor (Ryerson U and Brock U). Research interests include postcolonial/decolonial literature; ‘minor’ theatre’s role in contemporary discourse in South Africa and Canada; decolonizing knowledges; posthumanism; the Anthropocene, and social justice.

Esther Pujolras-Noguer (U Lleida) Esther Pujolràs-Noguer is a Serra-Húnter Fellow in postcolonial literature at the Universitat de Lleida. She is the co-director of the research group, Ratnakara, which specializes in the study of Indian Ocean literatures and cultures. Her research interests revolve around the convergence of gender and ethnicity and the representation of trauma. She is a member of the funded research project Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World and has published on Indian Ocean writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah and M.G. Vassanji. She is the co-editor of Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing, published by Brill Rodopi.

Basmah Rahman (Queens U) Basmah Rahman is a Ph.D. student at Queen’s University in the Department of English Language and Literatures. Her research focuses on Canadian Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) literature and intersections of identity representation within public education systems. As an Ontario high school teacher and an English Language Learner’s instructor, Basmah prioritizes inclusive literacy models to further student engagement and representation in classrooms. Furthermore, she is interested in decolonial and anti-oppression teaching pedagogies that centre community engagement. Basmah hopes that her research will help develop primary and secondary educational curriculums, specifically teacher resources, and undergraduate humanities courses.

Shazia Rahman (U Dayton) Shazia Rahman is Associate Professor of English specializing in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Dayton. She is the guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of South Asian Review volume 42.4 titled “The Environment of South Asia.” Her book Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women’s Literary and Cinematic Fictions (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019; Lahore: Folio Books, 2021) analyzes Pakistani women’s cinematic and literary fictions to amplify their environmental ways of belonging that counter religious nationalism. Rahman’s articles have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature,  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Environmental Communication among others.

Gillian Roberts (Nottingham U) Gillian Roberts is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Culture in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Prizing Literature: the Celebration and Circulation of National Culture (2011) and Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border (2015); co-editor of Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (2014); and editor of Reading between the Borderlines: Cultural Production and Consumption at the 49th Parallel (2018). She is currently completing a monograph on postcolonial film adaptation for Edinburgh University Press.

J. Coplen Rose (U Toronto) Dr. J. Coplen Rose currently works as an educator and scholar in Toronto, Canada. He teaches postcolonial studies, fantasy fiction, and introductory courses devoted to critical writing and reading. Coplen’s research interests include South African theatre and literature, science fiction and fantasy, and trauma studies. He is planning to return to South Africa in 2022 to expand the scope of his research project on Imraan Coovadia. Coplen also serves on the Executive Council of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies.

Moumita Roy (Jamia Millia Islamia U) Moumita ‘Megh’ Roy is a PhD scholar at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. She is a member of the IACLALS. She takes a keen interest in diaspora, race, ethnic and postcolonial studies. She is also an alumna to Calcutta University and Delhi University in India.

Shazia Sadaf (Carleton U) Shazia Sadaf teaches Human Rights and Social Justice in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Her research interest lies in the intersectional areas of War on Terror Studies, human rights discourse, and post-9/11 Anglophone literature. Shazia holds a doctorate in English in postcolonial literature from Western University, Canada, and a masters in English Literature & Language from King’s College London. Shazia has several published articles and book chapters and is currently working on a monograph on Pakistani speculative fiction.

Jason Sandhar (U Western Ontario) Jason Sandhar teaches postcolonial ecocriticism, literary theory, and critical race studies at Western University. Recent publications have appeared in Interventions, Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge 2020), and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Henghameh Saroukhani (St. Mary's U) Henghameh Saroukhani is Associate Professor in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic at Saint Mary’s University. She has published widely on twentieth and twenty-first-century black British and black Atlantic literature. She is co-editor of a recently published special issue on Andrea Levy (ARIEL 2022) and a forthcoming special issue on the Windrush scandal (Wasafiri 2023). She is currently finishing a monograph on the cosmopolitics of contemporary black British writing.

Alexander Sarra-Davis (U Toronto) Alexander Sarra-Davis is a 6th-year PhD candidate at the University of Toronto who is interested in the intersection of agency within fiction and the ethics of literary representation. His dissertation investigates the role of self-representation in novels, and specifically what postcolonial authors have to gain from including versions of themselves as characters in their own work. He has previously presented on topics including parallels between authorship and surveillance as well as the responsibility of author in contemporary, postcolonial fiction.

Vandana Shankar Saxena (U Malaya) Vandana Saxena teaches English literature at Universiti Malaya. She has taught in Universities in India, Malaysia and Vietnam. Her major research interests are South and Southeast Asian literature, popular culture, new media and creative writing. These interests are reflected in her numerous publications and presentations. She published her book Memory and Nation-building: WWII in Malaysian literature' in 2021.

Asma Sayed (Kwantlen Polytechnical U) Dr. Asma Sayed is Canada Research Chair in South Asian Literary and Cultural Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Indian Ocean Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and South Asian diaspora in Canada.

Owen Seda (Tshwane U Technology) Owen Seda is Associate Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa. He has taught at the University of Zimbabwe, Africa University, the University of Botswana and the University of Pretoria and has been a Commonwealth Scholar and a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the Department of Theatre at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Owen has co-edited three books and published numerous academic journal articles and book chapters.

Ishaan Selby (McMaster U) Ishaan is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He is interested in critical theory, animal studies, abolition and Marxism. He is dissertation project seeks to think together animal studies and Black studies as engagements with the critique of property. When not reading and writing theory, he can be found thinking way too much about Batman and the X-Men.

Tara Senanayake (U Peradeniya) Tara Senanayake is a Lecturer in English at the University of Peradeniya, where she teaches literature and theory as well as English as a Second Language. Her work interrogates the construction of identities, nostalgia and memory. Her research interests include areas of Discourse Analysis, Sri Lankan English, Pedagogy of Teaching English as a Second Language, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. A contributor to the Literary Encyclopedia, Tara’s latest research was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in Gendered Ways of Transnational Un-Belonging from a Comparative Literature Perspective (2019). An Executive Committee Member of the Sri Lankan ACLALS, Tara is currently reading for her PhD at King’s College in London.

Manvi Sharma (National IT Uttarkhand) Manvi Sharma is a Research Scholar (English) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand, India. Currently working on the representation of Climate Change in Popular Culture, she has a Research paper entitled Climate Change in India: A Wakeup Call from Bollywood to her credit.  Her areas of interests include Environmental Humanities, Popular Culture, Film Studies and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, and Literature of the Indian Diaspora, etc.

Humaira Shoaib (U Waterloo) Ms. Humaira Shoaib is currently enrolled in the PhD English program at the University of Waterloo. Her critical essays have been published in peer-reviewed journals and she has presented in many conferences. Before joining the PhD program at the University of Waterloo, she had been teaching English Studies at the University of the Punjab, Pakistan. Her research interests include Critical Muslim Studies with a focus on Islamophobia, Diaspora Studies and Post-colonial studies.

Sifiso Sibanda (North-West U) Dr Sifiso Sibanda, English Lecturer at North-West University, South Africa.

Hyacinth Simpson (Toronto Metropolitan U) Dr. Hyacinth Simpson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Dimensions Faculty Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. She specializes in Caribbean, Caribbean diaspora, postcolonial and Black studies in both her teaching and publications. From 2005-2014, she was Editor of MaComère, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars, which won the Horizon Award (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) in 2010. Her community-oriented teaching includes the digital humanities initiative Gardening in the Tropics, and her current research centres on the multi-tiered Black Canada and the Great War project.

Geraldine Skeete (U West Indies) Dr Geraldine Skeete teaches Literatures in English in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.  Among her publications are those in journals such as the Caribbean Review of Gender StudiesCaribbean Teaching ScholarCaribbean Journal of EducationInterviewing the CaribbeanThe Year's Work in English Studies and Short Fiction in Theory & Practice. She is co-editor of The Child and the Caribbean Imagination and Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies.  Her areas of interest are Caribbean literature, the short story form, literary linguistics, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Ruta Šlapkauskaité (Vilnius U) I am an Associate Professor of English literature at Vilnius University, Lithuania, where I teach several courses on literary theory, postcolonial, and (neo-)Victorian literature. My research interests include Canadian and Australian literature, memory and material visuality, animal studies, and material ecocriticism. My recent publications include “Precariousness, kinship and care: Becoming human in Clare Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal” in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and “An Arc of Itinerant Tropes: Beyond Kin and Kind in André Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs” in The Anglo-Canadian Novel in the Twenty-first Century edited by Maria and Martin Loschnigg.

Susan Spearey (Brock U) Sue Spearey teaches in the Department of English, and is affiliated with the interdisciplinary MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies, and the PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities, at Brock University in St Catharines, ON, Canada. Her teaching and research focus on South African literature and culture, the role of the arts in “post-conflict” settings, transitional justice, pedagogies of witnessing, trauma studies, trauma-informed collective healing, and decolonial pedagogies and approaches to (inter)disciplinary practices and institutional transformations.

Michelle Stork (Goethe U) Michelle Stork studied English Studies, Moving Cultures, Comparative Literary Studies and History of Art at Goethe University Frankfurt and Universiteit Utrecht. She holds an M.A. in Moving Cultures – Transcultural Encounters and an M.A. in History of Art, both from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her PhD project aims at reading road narratives in fiction and film across the Anglophone world from a transcultural perspective. Since November 2020, Michelle holds a scholarship with the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).

Helene Strauss (U Free State) Helene Strauss teaches in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research and teaching interests span topics such as Southern African, African and African diasporic literature and (audio-visual) culture; feminist and queer aesthetic activisms; protest cultures; mining; documentary film; and Yoga Studies. Recent major publications include the books Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge, 2017, co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola). She is the Vice-Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies.

Sylvia Terzian (St. Jerome’s University) Sylvia Terzian is a Lecturer in the English Department at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. Dr. Terzian’s research interests include Migration and Diaspora Studies, Literatures of the Arab diaspora, and Transnational Feminisms. Her current research explores contemporary Arab diasporic women writers through the axis of transnational feminism and migration, as well as the conceptual links between migration, literature, and hospitality.

Terri Tomsky (U Alberta) Terri Tomsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research examines memory politics and memory economies in postcolonial and post-socialist literatures. She is the co-editor (with Eddy Kent) of Negative Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics of World Citizenship After Globalization(McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017). She has published in the areas of human rights literary studies, life writing, cultural memory and trauma, cosmopolitanism, as well as the Global War on Terror.  She is currently completing a book manuscript on Guantánamo and the many forms of cultural activism inspired by the prison’s injustices.

Ryan Topper (Western Oregon U) Ryan Topper is Assistant Professor of English at Western Oregon University. He is completing a book on trauma and animism in Anglophone African literature. His articles appear in Research in African LiteraturesEnglish Language NotesMoving Worlds, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma.

Sam Erevbenagie Usadolo (Durban U Technology) Dr. Sam Erevbenagie Usadolo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Language and Communication, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa. He majors in Communication skills, Language, and intercultural communication among others. He has to his credits several journal articles both local and international.

Harismita Vaideswaran (U Delhi) Harismita Vaideswaran is an MPhil research scholar and Junior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Delhi University. Her research interests include processes of recollecting and writing wartime trauma, and personal and political resistance in Nigerian civil war fiction; the city-space and affective attachment to place in the literary imagination; and representations of food in fiction.

Paola Della Valle (U Turin) Paola Della Valle is Associate Professor at the University of Turin (Italy). She specializes in New Zealand and Pacific literature, postcolonial and gender studies. Her articles appeared in, The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureTextusNZSA Bulletin of New Zealand StudiesLe SimplegadiRiCognizioniEnglish StudiesSemicerchio and Loxias. She has published the monographs From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature (2010), Stevenson nel Pacifico: una lettura postcoloniale (2013) and Priestley e il tempo, il tempo di Priestley (2016).  She has recently contributed to the collections Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction (2018), Antroposcenari: Storie, paesaggi, ecologie, (2018), and Trees in Literatures and the Arts: HumanArboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene (2021).

Ruth Vanita (U Montana) Ruth Vanita is a professor of English and World Cultures at the University of Montana, where she directs the program in South & South-East Asian Studies. An academic and activist with a focus on gender and sexuality studies, she also teaches and writes on Hindu philosophy. She is the author, editor or translator of more than a dozen academic books. While living in Delhi in 1978, Vanita co-founded Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society, a journal that combined academic research and grassroots activism. She served as the journal's co-editor from 1979 to 1991.  Her first novel, Memory of Light, appeared in 2020 from Penguin.

Asha Varadharajan (Queens U) Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University in Canada.  Her current research focuses on forced migration and involuntary displacement.  Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern in contemporaneity, sexual violence and human rights, decolonizing pedagogies, and the legacy of the Frankfurt School. The most fun she has had lately was while composing her entry on Eric Idle for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The most chuffed she has been lately was when she received the Queen's University 2021 Principal's Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award.

Karina Vernon (U Toronto) Karina Vernon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, Black aesthetics, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2020 and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) she is working on a book project on the politics and aesthetics of relation of Black Canadian cultural achievement, including writing, music, film, and visual art.

Jacqueline Walker (Kwantlen Polytechnical U) Jacqueline Walker is completing her dual major in English and political science at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is interested in social justice, animal rights, gender studies and the intersections between these areas of research.

Alex Wanjala (U Nairobi) Dr. Alex Nelungo Wanjala is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Nairobi. He is the regional editor, East Africa of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde and the Chairman, East African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EAACLALS).

Maloba Wekesa (U Nairobi) Dr. Maloba Wekesa is a lecturer at the University of Nairobi based in the Department of Linguistics and Languages with over 15 years teaching experience. His research interests are in the fields of Discourse Analysis and Applied Communication.

Agnes Woolley (Birbeck U) Dr Agnes Woolley is Lecturer in Transnational Literature and Migration Cultures at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are in contemporary and postcolonial literature, theatre and film, with a focus on concepts of migration and diaspora. She is the author of Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published extensively on asylum, refugee arts, climate change and contemporary literature. Her forthcoming book, Moving Images: Refugees in Contemporary Screen Culture (Bloomsbury, 2022) examines the interrelationship between contemporary screen cultures and geopolitical refugee discourses. She is a regular contributor to openDemocracy, reporting on migration issues and works with grassroots refugee organisations in London.

Shuyin Yu (Calgary U) Shuyin Yu is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Her research interests are East Asian diaspora studies, asexuality studies, children's and young adult literature and media, food studies, and pedagogy. She received her H.B.A. from the University of Toronto and her M.A. from the University of Calgary.