Biographical notes (PDF file)
Helen Bain is a PhD research candidate in Creative Writing at King’s College, London, writing a biofiction novel about Sylvia Plath’s life in Devon from 1961 to 1962. She was awarded The Malcolm Bradbury Award for 2021 from the British Association of American Studies and was on the London Library Emerging Writers’ Programme (2020-2021). She was shortlisted for the Genesis Writers’ Programme for 2022. She has been longlisted for the Lightship Memoir prize and shortlisted for the Asham Award. She has Master’s degrees in Creative Writing and Modern & Contemporary Literature, both from Birkbeck, University of London. She was awarded a Chip Bishop Fellowship for the Biographers’ International Organisation Conference 2021.
Tomasz Basiuk is Professor of American Studies at the University of Warsaw. His research interests include contemporary American fiction and life writing, critical theory, and queer studies. He took part in seminars on Holocaust remembrance with Dominick LaCapra, Michał Głowiński, and Jan Tomasz Gross, and has published on Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, a fake memoir of a child Holocaust survivor (with Agnieszka Graff, 2005). His work on life writing includes Exposures: American Gay Men’s Life Writing since Stonewall (2013), as well as Queers in State Socialism: Cruising 1970s Poland (2020, with Jędrzej Burszta), which emerged from the HERA-funded project “Cruising the 1970s,” in which he was the principal investigator (2016-2019). He wrote on the relationship between fiction and the law in William Gaddis’s 1994 novel A Frolic of His Own (Wielki Gaddis, 2003). Basiuk is a founding co-editor ofInterAlia (a queer studies e-journal established in 2006), former president of the Polish Association for American Studies (2013-2020), and a Fulbright alumnus (2004-2005).
Cédric Courtois is Senior Lecturer at the University of Lille. He specialises in Nigerian literature, which was the focus of his PhD dissertation on the contemporary Nigerian rewritings of the Bildungsroman. He has published various articles and book chapters on mobility studies, refugee literature, and LGBTQ studies. His research interests include postcolonial literatures, decoloniality, transnationalism, transculturalism, and gender studies. Among his recent publications are « ‘She was a remarkable woman’ : l’héritage afro-féministe d’Efuru de Flora Nwapa dans Purple Hibiscus de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie et Sky-High Flames d’Unoma Azuah » (2021) (Études littéraires africaines), « ‘Into the Mutation’: Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s ‘More Sea than Tar’ as Climate Fiction » (2021) (in the journal Commonwealth Essays and Studies), and « Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘Black’ British Amazons: Aesthetics and Politics in Girl, Woman, Other » (2021) (Études britanniques contemporaines).
Joseph Darlington is Programme Leader for BA(Hons) Digital Animation with Illustration at Futureworks Media School, Manchester. He is the author of British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s (Palgrave, 2018) and Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Literature (Palgrave, 2021). He was awarded a Harry Ransom Center Fellowship in 2012 and was nominated for the 2019 Dinesh Alirajah Prize for Short Fiction. He is co-editor of the Manchester Review of Books and can be found on Twitter at @Joe_Darlo.
Laura de la Parra Fernández is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Salamanca. Her main research interests include modern and contemporary British and American literature, experimental women’s writing, affect theory and the medical humanities. Her PhD, obtained in 2019 from Complutense University of Madrid, was awarded the Extraordinary Doctoral Award from the School of Philology at Complutense University and the “Félix Martín” Best Thesis in American Studies Award from the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS). She has published several scholarly articles on authors such as Janet Frame, Shirley Jackson, Jean Rhys or Emma Cline, and is currently working on her first monograph on gender and madness in mid-twentieth century narratives.
Wojciech Drąg is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw. He is the author of Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis (Routledge, 2020) and Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (Cambridge Scholars, 2014; Suiseisha, 2020 – Japanese translation), and co-editor of The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction (Vernon, 2019). He has received fellowships from The Kosciuszko Foundation (University of Utah, 2018) and the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (Dartmouth College, 2021). In 2021, he was awarded the Iuvenes Wratislaviae prize for young scholars funded by the local branch of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His academic interests focus on contemporary British and American fiction and non-fiction and on formal experimentation in literature.
Dagmara Drewniak, Ph.D., D. Litt., teaches American and Canadian literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her research interests include literature by immigrants from Poland and Eastern Europe, life-writing, migrant and postcolonial literature. She has recently published Forgetful Recollections: Images of Central and Eastern Europe in Canadian Literature (2014) and, with A. Rzepa and K. Macedulska, The Self and the World: Aspects of the Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary North American Literary Memoir by Women (2018), as well as a number of essays on Kulyk Keefer, Stachniak, Hoffman, Ondaatje, Appignanesi, Zable and others. Currently, she is the principal investigator of a National Science Centre grant devoted to the writings of the Polish diaspora in Canada. In addition, she is Vice-President of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies.
Dominika Ferens teaches American literature at the University of Wrocław. Much of her research has focused on American minority literatures. In Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (University of Illinois Press, 2002), she examined the paradoxes of Orientalism in the work of two writers of Chinese-English-Canadian descent. Her book Ways of Knowing Small Places: Intersections of American Literature and Ethnography Since the 1960s (University of Wrocław Press, 2011) looked at literature’s quarrels and affinities with ethnography in the age of multiculturalism. Her current project explores the fiction of Sigrid Nunez through affect theory. A co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Group at the University of Wrocław and co-editor of InterAlia, an open-access queer studies journal, she has been instrumental in legitimating gender and queer studies in Poland.
Zuzana Fonioková is Assistant Professor at the Department of Czech Literature at Masaryk University, in Brno, where she teaches literary theory, contemporary world literature and culture, and literary translation. Her research interests include narrative theory, autobiography and autofiction, and contemporary fiction. Her current project explores narrative strategies in life writing, combining classical and postclassical narrative theory, life-writing studies, and narrative psychology. She has published a book called Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration (2015). Her more recent publications include an article on forms of autobiographical self-narration in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly.
Urszula Gołębiowska teaches American literature at the University of Zielona Góra. Her research interests focus on American fiction and the intersections between literature, culture and philosophy. She has written articles on the work of Henry James, Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee and Paul Bowles. She is the author of the monograph The Lesson of the Other: Alterity and Subjectivity in Henry James’s Fiction (2019), and a co-editor of the collection of essays Modernism Re-Visited (2020).
Jarosław Hetman is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of American Literature and Literary Translation, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń. His fields of interest revolve around contemporary American literature and literary theory with a focus on the correspondences between the arts (mainly fiction and conceptual art). He has published extensively on the work of David Foster Wallace, most recently editing and co-authoring the first Polish monograph on Wallace for the University of Warsaw Press. He is also the author of Ekphrastic Conceptualism in Postmodern British and American Novels: Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Tom McCarthy (2015).
Martina Horakova is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University in Brno. In her teaching and research, she focuses on contemporary Australian and Canadian literatures, particularly on Indigenous cultural production and the theories of settler colonialism. She has authored Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and Canada (MUNI Press, 2017) and co-authored Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-language Contexts (MUNI Press, 2011). Among others, she published book chapters in Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (De Gruyter, 2019), A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (Camden House, 2013), Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (Cambria Press, 2010), as well as journal articles in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Life Writing, Antipodes, JEASA or Zeitschrift für Australienstudien/Australian Studies Journal. She is currently working on a project related to Australian memoirs of settler belonging.
Eva C. Karpinski is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, where she teaches feminist theory, life writing, and translation studies. She has published over 40 articles and book chapters. She is the author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation and co-author of Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas and, most recently, of Translation, Semiotics, and Feminism: Selected Writings of Barbara Godard (2022). She is Consulting Editor for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak is Assistant Professor in the Institute of English Studies and the director of the Research Center for Gender Studies at the University of Wrocław. She has published on gender, race, class, and sexuality in contemporary life writing, postmodern fiction, and autobiographical comics in journals such as Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Autobiografia: Literatura, Kultura, Media, Polish Journal of American Studies, Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia and Anglica Wratislaviensia. She co-edited, with Dominika Ferens and Justyna Kociatkiewicz, the volume Traveling Subjects: American Journeys in Space and Time. Her current project focuses on experimental graphic and prose representations of sexual trauma in contemporary Anglophone and Polish life writing.
Héloïse Lecomte has completed a PhD at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon under the supervision of Vanessa Guignery. She is a member of the research unit IHRIM (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités). Her research themes are the narrative and fictional representations of mourning and their articulation with poetic, musical and visual elegies in contemporary novels by Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively, John Banville and Anne Enright. She is the co-organiser of the international and interdisciplinary seminar “Invisible Lives, Silent Voices”, together with Alice Borrego and Guillaume Le Blanc.
Grzegorz Maziarczyk is Associate Professor of English and American Literature in the Institute of Literary Studies at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. His main research interests include digital narrativity, textual materiality, multimodal storytelling, transmediality and dystopia. He is the author of two monographs – The Narratee in Contemporary British Fiction and The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English – as well as a co-editor of five collections of essays, including (Im)perfection Subverted, Reloaded and Networked: Utopian Discourse Across Media and Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction. He has published widely in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals, including Word & Image, Journal of Narrative Theory and Utopian Studies amongst others.
Hiba Moussa is an Assistant Professor in English literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut. After studying there as an undergraduate, she was awarded a scholarship to do postgraduate studies at Lancaster University. She finished her MA with distinction, writing her dissertation about women’s autobiography, and continued her PhD at the same university, specializing in film adaptations of literary classics, specifically Jane Austen’s novels. Her research interests thus combine feminism and postmodernism in a diverse and intertwined way. She has spoken at various conferences on issues related to women’s autobiography, literature and film and published nationally and internationally on these subjects. Currently, she is working on postmodern autobiographical works and how they negotiate the problematics of authorship and authority.
Krystian Piotrowski reads English Literature at the Institute of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His main academic pursuits include contemporary experimental prose, affect theory, somatic studies, as well as the poetics and politics of the avant-garde. Piotrowski’s doctoral dissertation focuses on the conceptualisation of the “Affective Vanguard” in twentieth-century British experimental literature.
Ángela Rivera-Izquierdo is a PhD candidate in literature and gender studies at the University of Granada. Her current research focuses on the representation of men and masculinities in contemporary British men’s writing. Her work has been published in Estudios Irlandeses, ES Review or Syracuse University Press. She currently holds a La Caixa fellowship to pursue doctoral studies in Spain. She is also part of the research group “Recepción, modos y géneros de la literatura en lengua inglesa” (Reception, modes and genres of literature in the English language). She is a member of the research project “Democracy, Secrecy and Dissidence in Contemporary Literature in English,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
Kim Schoof is a fully-funded third-year PhD candidate in Literary Studies at Open University in the Netherlands. In her research project, she develops a new perspective on experimentation in influential contemporary autobiographical literature that recounts ways of living that could be called “experimental”, such as queer family life. Experimentation, in this perspective, does not amount to taking distance from traditional literary conventions but to taking them up and turning them inside out. In addition to her research, Schoof frequently publishes about literature and art in Dutch-language weeklies and magazines such as De Groene Amsterdammer.
Lola Serraf, PhD, is a researcher in Second World War Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona/Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. She is a member of the research group “Rewriting War: Paradigms of Contemporary War Fiction in English Literature” at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has published on British women’s fiction of the Blitz and on Holocaust literature. She is particularly interested in the changing paradigms of Holocaust memory.
Maïté Snauwaert is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Alberta. Her current research, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2016-2022), focuses on aging, mourning, and the end of life in 20th and 21st c. literatures of North America and Europe. She is the author of La Douleur, d’Emmanuel Finkiel (Gremese, 2019), Duras et le cinéma (Éditions Place, 2018), Philippe Forest, la littérature à contretemps (Cécile Defaut, 2012), and, with French writer Jane Sautière, of the forthcoming book of interviews: Comment vivre. Essai-conversation (Montreal, Figura, “Photons,” 2021).
Honorata Sroka is a doctoral student of literature at the Doctoral School of the Humanities at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests include visual and literary life-writing practices of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson and the archives of the avant-garde.
Maria Antonietta Struzziero is an independent scholar. She completed a PhD in Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Salerno with a doctoral dissertation on Jeanette Winterson and the love discourses in some of her novels. She has published several articles and book chapters on different topics and authors, and given papers at Italian and international conferences. Her fields of interests include modernism, postmodernism, gender studies, auto/biographical writing, feminist theories and trauma studies. She has co-edited “Voci ed echi: Quaderni di letteratura comparata” and translated two novels. She is currently working on the representations of ‘risk’ and ‘safety’, and the ethics and strategies of survival in the contemporary novel.
Martha Swift is a Commonwealth Scholar studying for a DPhil in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. She has an MSt in World Literatures from the University of Oxford and a BA(Hons) in English and History from the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research investigates theories of ‘world’ and considers the interaction of literature and cosmopolitics in contemporary transnational novels.
Kateřina Valentová holds a PhD in the Territory, Heritage and Culture program of the University de Lleida (2018). Her doctoral thesis focused on the value of nonverbal elements in naturalist texts, a comparative study between Émile Zola and Benito Pérez Galdós. She is an assistant lecturer at the University of Lleida, in the Department of English and Linguistics, where she teaches autobiography, comparative literature, and creative writing. Currently, she participates in a research project on ageing and literary creativity, analysing graphic narratives of English, French and Spanish traditions.
Hannah Van Hove is a writer and researcher based in Brussels. She completed a PhD on the fiction of Anna Kavan, Alexander Trocchi and Ann Quin at the University of Glasgow in 2017 and is currently conducting a postdoctoral research project on the work of British post-war experimental women writers at the Free University Brussels. She has published articles and reviews on British avant-garde fiction as well as translations of Flemish modernist Paul van Ostaijen’s poetry. Her poems and writings have appeared in Adjacent Pineapple, Gutter and MAP Magazine. She is the editor, together with Andrew Radford, of British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975: Slipping Through the Labels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She is Chair of the Anna Kavan Society, sits on the editorial board of the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings and is a member of the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings and the artistic research group Deep Histories Fragile Memories.
Paweł Wojtas is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw. He completed his MLitt degree in English Studies at the University of Stirling, and PhD at the University of Warsaw. He acted as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of York. His research is centred on modern and contemporary English literature, literary and cultural theory, and disability studies. He is currently researching representations of disability in contemporary English and related literature.