Current and past participant bios
Dr Gurminder K Bhambra is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick, UK, where she has taught since 2007. She is author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Palgrave, 2007) which won the 2008 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize awarded by the British Sociological Association for the best first book in sociology. She is co-editor of three volumes: Silencing Human Rights: Critical Engagements with a Contested Project (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1968 in Retrospect: History, Theory, Alterity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her second monograph, Connected Sociologies, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.
Dr. Moha Ennaji is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles on language, culture, education, migration, civil society and gender. His most recent books are: Gender and Violence in the Middle East (co-edited with Fatima Sadiqi, Routledge 2011), Women in the Middle East and North Africa (co-edited with Fatima Sadiqi, Routledge 2010), Women Writing Africa, the Northern Region (co-edited with Sadiqi, Nowaira and Elkholy, Feminist Press 2009), Migration and Gender in Morocco (co-authored with Fatima Sadiqi), Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco (Springer, 2005), Le Substrat Amazigh de la Culture Marocaine (Ed. 2006), Société Civile, Genre et Développement (2004, Editor). Dr Ennaji lectures and writes in three languages (Arabic, French and English). He is the Vice-President of the Fes-Saiss Association, and founding member of the Center for Studies and Research on Women, and board member of the Moroccan Fulbright Alumni Association.
Website: www.mohaennaji.on.ma Sanjay Kumar is an associate professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. His current research interests include modern American novel, translation studies, and comparative literary and culture studies. He is convener of Inter-Cultural Studies Research Group, a multidisciplinary research initiative of Banaras Hindu University engaged in a comparative study of South Asian vernacular and folk literary and cultural traditions as sites of articulation of alternative modernities. He is co-editing a volume of essays on a 16th century Odiya vernacular text, Lakshmi Purana and a related Bhojpuri folksong based on the story of Lakshmi Purana, and two volumes on Alternative Modernities based on conferences organized at Banaras Hindu University in 2010 and 2011.
Lucienne Loh
is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She
has previously taught at Brunel University and Royal
Holloway-University of London as well as at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book, Postcolonial Dislocations: Politics
of the Country in Contemporary Literature is forthcoming from Palgrave
Macmillan. She has previously published on contemporary postcolonial
writing in Wasafiri and Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and has
forthcoming articles in Interventions as well as in a special issue of
Textual Practice on “Postcolonial Literature and Challenges of the New
Millennium,” which she is also co-editing with Malcolm Sen. She
helped to establish the Postcolonial Studies Association in 2008 and
served on its Executive Committee till 2011. She is an Associate
Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and is currently
embarking on a research project on Black British heritage, funded in
part by the British Academy.
Duncan McEachern Yoon has an MA from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea in 2004. His research interests include Africa and China relations, Third World solidarity movements, the Cold War, postcolonialism, and world literature.
Tilottoma Misra is an Assamese novelist and critic. She has researched and published widely on nineteenth century Assamese literature and the nationality question in north-east India. She has authored Literature and Society in Assam; A Study of the Assamese Renaissance 1826-1926 (1987) and edited the two-volume Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India (2011). She has translated and edited nineteenth century Assamese literary texts. Amongst these is Gunabhiram Barua’s Ramnabami-Natak (OUP 2007). She was formerly a Professor of English at Dibrugarh University.
Satya P. Mohanty is Professor of English at Cornell University. He was born in Orissa, India, and was educated in India and the United States. His work in literary criticism and theory has focused on issues that are shaped by his bi-cultural background and his commitment to a vision of culture as “a field of moral inquiry” (on this view of culture, see chapter 7 of Literary Theory and the Claims of History). Succinct statements of his current and past research projects can be found in the following interviews: “Thinking Across Cultures” (2008) and “From Indian Literature to World Literature” (2012).
Wanjiku wa Ngugi a writer and political analyst graduated in Sociology and Political Science from New York University is currently the director of the Helsinki African Film Festival (HAFF) in Finland. Wanjiku is also a member of the editorial board of Matatu: Journal for African Literature and Culture and Society and a jury member of the CinemAfrica Film Festival, Sweden. For the past three years she was a columnist for Maailman Kuvalehti, a Finnish development magazine, writing about political and cultural issues. Her writing has also been published in The Herald, Zimbabwe, The Daily Nation & Business Daily, Pambazuka News and Chimurenga amongst others. Her first novel is forthcoming from EAEP Kenya, 2013.
Fatima Sadiqi is a former Fulbright Scholar and recipient of a Harvard Fellowship. She is Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies, author of, among other works, Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Brill, 2003) and co-editor of Women Writing Africa. The Northern Region (The Feminist Press, 2009), Women in the Middle East and North Africa. Agents of Change, and Gender and Violence in the Middle East (Routledge 2010 and 2011). She founded the first Moroccan Centre for Studies and Research on Women in 1998 and the first graduate program on Gender Studies in 2000 at the university of Fez. In 2006, she founded Isis Centre for Women and development (with the aim of bridging the gap between the university and civil society) and in 2009 she was elected President of the National Union of Women’s Associations. In the same year, she co-founded the International Institute for Languages and Cultures (INLAC). Fatima Sadiqi was appointed by Kofi Anan as a member of the UN Council for Development Policy (E.C.O.S.S.O.C.), and was appointed by the king of Morocco as a member of the Administrative Board of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM). From 2007 to 2009, Fatima Sadiqi served as Director General of the Fes Festival of Sacred Music. She is writing a book on Women’s Empowerment in Morocco: Going Beyond Islam. www.fatimasadiqi.on.ma
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Carole Boyce Davies is professor of English and Africana Studies. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce-Davies has also published the following critical anthologies: Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Africa World Press, 1986); Out of the Kumbla. Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World Press, 1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled Moving Beyond Boundaries (New York University Press, 1995): International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (volume 1), and Black Women's Diasporas (volume 2). She is co-editor with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho of The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (Africa World Press, 2003). She is general editor of a three-volume, The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008), and of Claudia Jones. Beyond Containment: Autobiography, Essays, Poetry (Banbury: Ayebia, 2011).
Yan Haiping. University Professor of Cross-cultural Studies at Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU), and the Director of SJTU Institute for Advanced Studies in Media and Society, Yan Haiping holds her BA from Fudan University and MA and Ph.D. from Cornell University in comparative arts and literatures. Formerly Professor and Director of the Graduate Field in Theatre and Performance Studies, and a graduate faculty in the fields of East Asian Literature and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, Yan’s specialties include modern Chinese theatre, literature, cinematic and performance studies, cultural history and critical theories. Her book publications in English include Theatre and Society: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (1998); Other Transnationals: Asian Diaspora in Performance (2005); Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948 (2006 & 2008, the Chinese edition was published by Beijing University Press in 2011), and Amidst Landscapes of Mobility: The Rising of Contemporary Artistic Culture in Urbanizing China (2012): She is currently working on a memoir titled The Class of 77: the Making of Global China, commissioned by the University of Michigan Press.
Yan is an invited mini-seminar leader of 2006 Cornell School of Criticism and Theory and the 2007-2008 Norman Freehling Professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She holds a visiting Zijiang Professorship in Comparative Literature and Cross-cultural Studies at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai since 2003, conducting advanced summer seminars and international scholarly forums, and was the founding director of the Cornell-ECNU Center for Comparative Humanities in 2009. Her accolades include China’s 1980-1981 First Prize for Excellence in Drama for her ten-act historical play titled Li Shimin, Prince of Qin; CNN’s 1999 selection as one of “six most influential Chinese cultural figures” for her scholarly and creative works in English and Chinese, an entry in Shanghai Literary and Artistic History since the 1840s compiled by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in 2009, and the “Global Talents” Award in the Arts and Humanities from the Shanghai Municipal Government in 2011. Pashmina Murthy is an Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. She joined the English department in 2012 after having taught in the department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota for several years. She is currently working on a book project on female infanticide in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Nairobi Heat (Penguin, SA 2009, Melville House Publishing, 2011), an anthology of poetry titled Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine. He was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2009. In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing for his novel manuscript, The First and Second Books of Transition. Editions of Nairobi Heat are forthcoming in Kenya (East African Publishers) and Nigeria (Cassava Republic Press). Finding Sahara, the sequel to Nairobi Heat is forthcoming. Mukoma will be joining Cornell University in the fall of 2012 as an Assistant Professor of English specializing in twentieth-century Anglophone African literature.
Website: www.mukomawangugi.com Toni Pressley-Sanon is an assistant professor in the Department of Transnational Studies and the Program in African and African American Studies at the University at Buffalo. She works on the intersections of history, memory and cultural production in Africa and its diaspora. *All the GSP artwork is by Toni.
Elisa Rizo is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Iowa State University. She is the author of several articles on contemporary Equatorial Guinea drama and narrative. Also, she has edited two literary anthologies, Caminos y veredas: narrativas de Guinea Ecuatorial (2011), and Letras Transversales: obras escogidas de Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (2012). Presently, she is preparing a special issue of Revista Iberoamericana on the literature of Equatorial Guinea (co-edited with Dolores Aponte).
Jerome Teelucksingh: I am a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. I was a part-time lecturer at the Cipriani College of Labour and Cooperative Studies and the University of Trinidad and Tobago. I have published 3 collections of plays and 2 collections of poems. My recent academic publications are- Caribbean-Flavoured Presbyterianism: Education as a Prescription for Socio-Political Development 1868-2008 and The Lost Gospel: Christianity and Blacks in North America. I have published chapters in edited books on CLR James, Carnival, the Caribbean Diaspora in North America and England, and George Padmore.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. He was educated at Kamandura, Manguu and Kinyogori primary schools; Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University College (then a campus of London University), Kampala, Uganda; and the University of Leeds, Britain. He is recipient of seven Honorary Doctorates viz D Litt (Albright); PhD (Roskilde); D Litt (Leeds); D Litt &Ph D (Walter Sisulu University); PhD (Carlstate); D Litt (Dillard) and D Litt (Auckland University). He is also Honorary Member of American Academy of Letters. A many-sided intellectual, he is novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic and social activist.
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