Jennifer Baldwin is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne in the School of Languages and Linguistics. After extensive experience in tertiary administration and careers counselling, she completed a Masters of Applied Linguistics at Monash University. Her PhD at the University of Melbourne investigated the history of languages other than English in the Australian tertiary curriculum. She has published a book with Springer from her PhD entitled Languages other than English in Australian Higher Education. Her current research follows the beginnings of Italian language teaching at Australian universities and Victorian schools. She is particularly interested in the people involved in the history of Australian tertiary education in such areas as academic teaching and philanthropy.
Ina Batzke is a lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. In 2018, she received her PhD from the University of Münster. She is the author of the monograph Undocumented Migrants in the United States: Life Narratives and Self-Representations (Routledge 2019), which summarizes her research in life writing and critical refugee studies, and co-editor of the volumes Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture (transcript, 2018), Storied Citizenship: Imagining the Citizen in American Literature (special issue of Amerikastudien 65.4, 2020), and Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene (Palgrave, 2021). Her main areas of research and teaching are life writing and autofiction, border studies, and LatinX studies. In connection with her current book project, she has recently become interested in feminist technoscience, ecocriticism/ecofeminism, and how these concepts play out in contemporary speculative fiction.
Lynn Domina is Professor of English at Northern Michigan University. She has written on the work of Nella Larsen, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and other 20th and 21st century writers. She has also recently edited a volume on Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for the MLA's popular Options for Teaching series, scheduled for publication in early 2024.
Alfred Hornung is Research Professor of American Studies and Speaker of the Obama Institute at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He is a specialist in transcultural life writing, narrative medicine, and Transnational American Studies. His recent publications include the Chinese translation of Ecology and Life Writing (2016), a biography of Jack London as a cosmopolitan writer (2016), the co-edited Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies (2019), and a biography of Al Capone: The American Dream and Organized Crime (2021). He is the recipient of the Bode-Pearson Prize of the American Studies Association, a member of Academia Europaea, an Honorary Chair Professor of Shandong University, and an Honorary Citizen of the State of Texas.
Rossitza Ivanova is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she teaches English writing courses and American Indian literature. Previously, she studied and taught in the UK and in her home country Bulgaria. She has published articles on Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich, exploring how both cosmopolitan and tribal-centered approaches contribute to the teaching and interpretation of American Indian literature. Her research interests focus on writing pedagogy, literary analysis, American Indian boarding school narratives, and representations of Indianness in the US and Europe.
Rosanne Kennedy is an interdisciplinary Humanities scholar in Gender, Sexuality and Culture and Literary Studies at the Australian National University. Working at the intersection of cultural memory studies, trauma studies, life writing, and human rights, her research explores mediations of testimony in cultural and legal contexts including trials, memoir, literature, film and visual art. Her research is published in journals including Memory Studies, Biography, Comparative Literature Studies, Studies in the Novel and Australian Feminist Studies. Recent publications include “Guantanamo Diary as World(ly) Testimony” in the Cambridge Companion to the History of World Literature (2021), and “Splitting from Halley: Doing Justice to Race, Unwantedness, and Testimony in Campus Sexual Assault” (with Hannah McCann), Signs 46.1 (2020): 1-24.
Magdalena Maiz-Peña is Williamson H. Williamson Professor of Hispanic Studies and LatinAmerican Studies at Davidson College. She specializes in contemporary Latin American Women Writers, Life-Writing, culture, and the politics of representation, and XXI Latin American Short Narratives. Her teaching interests include Latin American human rights, the Latin American/ Latino city, Latin American life-writing, gender, and narration, and Latin American social horror stories. Coedited with Nora Erro-Peralta, La palabra contra el silencio: Selected critical works about Elena Poniatowska, and with Elizabeth Conrood Martinez, the pedagogical Diálogo issue Teaching the works of Elena Poniatowska. Recent publications include “Life-Writing, Biopics, Gender and Media: Elena Poniatowska’s Tinísima and Leonora,” “Staging Modernity: Reports on the Murder of Delmira Agustini, Cursed Celebrity,” “Geografías interiores, cuerpos-hablantes y texturas visuales de la depresión: El manifiesto corpóreo nepantlista de Laura Aguilar (1959-2018),” “Siluetas entintadas, instalación gráfica, life-writing gráfico y geografías corpóreas: Who is Ana Mendieta?” and the prologue, “Cuerpos-Textos poéticos, memoria enraizada y género,” Poesía reciente de voces en diálogo con la ascendencia hispano-hablante en los Estados Unidos: Antología breve by Claudia Aburto Guzmán. Currently working on “Dislocating Narratives, Nomadic Subjects, Social Horror, and Delirious Readers: XXI Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers.”
Amy Motlagh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East and South Asian Studies and the inaugural Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature at UC Davis. Her first book, Burying the Beloved: Realism and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press, 2012), focused on the connections between civil law, prose fiction, and gender in twentieth-century Iran. Motlagh’s current book project, Invisible Men: A History of Racial Thinking in and about Modern Iran (under advance contract with Stanford University Press) critically examines the cultural history of Blackness in Iran and the Iranian diaspora through literature and cinema. An additional book project in progress is a reconsideration of Persian language and literature in world literary and cultural circuits. She has also published essays on racial discourse in Iran; translation and circulation of Persian literature; and human rights discourse and cinema.
Kimberly A. Nance (PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Professor of Languages, Literature & Cultures at Illinois State University. Her books include Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narrative: Responding to the Pain of Others, Teaching Literature in the Languages, and Can Literature Promote Justice?
Cheryl O’Byrne is a PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer in the School of Literature, Art and Media at the University of Sydney. Her PhD project explores the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Australian matriography.
Sílvia A. Oliveira is Associate Professor of Portuguese and Director of the Institute for Portuguese and Lusophone World Studies at Rhode Island College in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. She has published on the Portuguese short story, on Neo- and Post-Neorealism in Portugal, on Aesthetics and Politics in Portuguese and Brazilian Literatures and on Galician poetics. Her current research and publications focus on Portuguese North American literature and expressive culture, the pedagogy and politics of ethnic studies and immigrant commons.
Eleanor Paynter studies displacement, asylum, and migrant testimony, focusing on Mediterranean migration and migrant rights. Drawing on narrative and ethnographic methods, her research examines how border crossers navigate changing border and asylum regimes, and how public and political discourses about migration reflect broader cultural and political questions in Italy and Europe. Her book-in-process, Emergency in Transit, takes up questions of crisis, migration, racism, witnessing, and colonial memory in Italy, and related work is available in journals including the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies and The Minnesota Review, as well as in venues such as the LA Review of Books and The Conversation. She holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from the Ohio State University and is currently an ACLS Fellow and a Migration Studies Fellow with Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, where she hosts the podcast Migrations: A World on the Move.
Katrina M. Powell is Professor of English and founding director of the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies at Virginia Tech. She is the author of several books, including The Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park (2007), Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement (2015), and Performing Auto/Biography: Narrating a Life as Activism (2021).
Dr. Susan Beth Rottmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Özyeğin University in Istanbul, Turkey. She obtained her B.A. degree in Comparative Religion from Cornell University in 2001, her M.A. degree in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006, and her Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. Rottmann was a Primary Investigator for the EC-funded HORIZON 2020 project, RESPOND - Multilevel Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond between 2017-2021. She is currently a Coordinator for a TÜBİTAK 1001 grant (The Scientific and Technological Research Projects Funding Program of Turkey) for the project: “Food, Homemaking and Social Integration for Syrian Women in Istanbul, Gaziantep and Hatay,” and is a PI on two Horizon Europe projects beginning in 2023 (GAPs and OppAttune). Dr. Rottmann has published in a wide variety of international peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Refugee Studies, Migration Studies and Critical Sociology. Her recent book, In Pursuit of Belonging: Forging an Ethical Life in European-Turkish Spaces (Berghahn Books − 2019) draws on an established tradition of life story writing in anthropology to convey the struggle to forge an ethical life as a Muslim woman in transnational space.
Dr Rosemary Sayer is a former journalist who has written three non-fiction books and a number of articles centred on her dual interests of human rights and creative non-fiction. She has worked as a sessional lecturer, tutor and research assistant in the school of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, and at the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University, Australia. She is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow at Curtin. Rosemary serves on the board of the Edmund Rice Centre, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people from refugee and migrant backgrounds as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. She is also on the board of CARAD, an agency assisting and advocating for asylum seekers.
Zhou Xiaojing is Professor of English and the Laurence Meredith Professor in the Humanities at University of the Pacific. Her recent publications include a monograph, Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers and a co-edited anthology, Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific.