UK Participants
Joan Anim-Addo (Principal Investigator, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
Joan Anim-Addo is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies. Her publications include the libretto, Imoinda; the poetry collections: Haunted by History and Janie Cricketing Lady; and the literary history, Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writing. She is co-editor of I Am Black, White, Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europeand Interculturality and Gender(2009).
Viv Golding (Co-Investigator, University of Leidester, UK)
Viv Golding is Programme Director of Ph.D. Research Studies and Lecturer at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, which she joined in 2002. Previously Dr. Golding had more than 20 years experience organizing formal education provision at the Horniman Museum and further education arts activities in London. She has published widely in the field of creative learning from anthropology collections, notably her 2009 monograph Learning at the Museum Frontier: Identity Race and Power, and is currently working on an edited volume for Berg, Collaborative Museums. Dr. Golding has also gained awards to present her research themes around the world, including Mombusho and Daiwa scholarships to investigate “Museum Literacy” in Japan (2010) and the AHRC “Mapping Faith and Place in Leicester” (2010). Further details at http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/contactus/vivgolding.html and http://www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies.
Marl’ene Edwin (Project Manager, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
Marl’ene Edwin is a PhD student in the Centre for Caribbean Studies, Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She completed her Masters in Caribbean Literature and Creole Poetics at Goldsmiths and her Dissertation entitled ‘Kawayib Kwéyol’ consisted of the construction of a website which she intends to develop further as an interactive resource for learners of the languages of the Caribbean. She is a Churchill Fellow 2006 and in 2009 was awarded an AHRC student-led initiative for a project entitled ‘Words from Other Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Imoinda’. This project, completed in July 2010, led to the publication of an edited journal (Imoinda: Criticism and Response, 3:3, London: Mango Publishing, 2010) and a DVD (Imoinda: Trans-global Conversations).
Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University, UK)
Suzanne Scafe is a Senior Lecturer in English Studies at London South Bank University. She is a co-author of The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) and Teaching Black Literature (1989). Her other publications include Quiet As It’s Kept: Reading Black Women’s Writing (1991), as well as several articles on Caribbean fiction and on the fiction of Chinua Achebe. She is the co-editor, with Joan Anim-Addo, of the collection of essays I Am Black/White/Yellow: an Introduction to the Black Body in Europe (2007). Her published work on black British/Caribbean writers includes essays on Grace Nichols, Roy Williams, Caryl Phillips (forthcoming) and Courttia Newland: she has also published articles on black British women’s autobiographical writing and is currently co-editing a special double-issue of the journal Life Writing, which focuses on Women’s Life-Writing and Diaspora. Articles on contemporary black and Caribbean women’s autobiography have appeared in the journals Women: A Cultural Review (2009) and Changing English (2010). She has written several articles on contemporary Caribbean women writers such as Merle Collins, Brenda Flanagan and Zee Edgell and has published chapters on the Caribbean short story, the most recent of which are ‘ “The Lesser Names Beneath the Peaks”: Jamaican Short Fiction and its Contexts 1938-60’ in The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, published by Peepal Tree Press (April 2011) and ‘”Gruesome and Yet Fascinating”: Hidden, Disgraced and Disregarded Cultural Forms in Jamaican Short Fiction 1938-50’ (Journal of Caribbean Literatures Summer 2011).
European Participants
Giovanna Covi (University of Trento, Italy)
Giovanna Covi teaches American Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Trento; she is a founding member of the Societa Italiana delle Letterate. She has co-ordinated national and international research projects focused on gender and Caribbean literature. She has published on American and Caribbean literature, translation studies and gender theory among which as editor and contributor: Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject (Universita di Trento, 1998), Voci femminili caraibiche e interculturalità (Universita di Trento, 2003), Modernist Women Race Nation (Mango Publishing,2005), Caribbean-Scottish Relations (Mango Publishing, 2007), Interculturality and Gender (Mango Publishing, 2009); and as author, the essay “La Dividua—a Gendered Figuration for a Planetary Humanism” in Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid (Cambridge SP, 2008) and the volume Jamaica Kincaid’s Prismatic Subjects: Making Sense of Being in the World (Mango Publishing, 2003).
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Lisa Marchi (University of Trento, Italy)
Lisa Marchi holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Trento, Italy. As the recipient of the Canadian Studies Doctoral Student Research Award for 2009-2010, she conducted research at the Institute for Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. In 2009, she undertook three months of research at the Department of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. Her research interests include contemporary Arab multilingual literature, migration history and literature, Arab diaspora studies, interculturality and gender studies. She has published various articles on Arab-American literature and has co-authored an essay in the collection Interculturality and Gender (Joan Anim-Addo, Giovanna Covi & Mina Karavanta, eds.; London: Mango Press: 2009). She is currently conducting independent research at the University of Toronto, Canada.
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Mina Karavanta (University of Athens, Greece)
Mina Karavanta, a member of “Traveling Concepts” of the ATHENA European Network and a coordinator of its subgroup “Interculturality,” is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of English Studies at the University of Athens, Greece. Some of her recent essays have appeared in Journal of Caribbean Studies, Journal of Contemporary Theory, Women in French Studies,mosaic, The Journal of Contemporary Thought, and European Journal of English Studies, and various collections of essays. She has co-edited Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid (with Nina Morgan) and Gender and Interculturality (with Joan Anim-Addo and Giovanna Covi. She is currently working on her monograph The Postnational Novel: Literary Configurations of Community in the Anglophone Novel of the Twentieth-first Century.
US Participants
Victoria Arana (Howard University, USA)
R. Victoria Arana is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Howard University, where she teaches British literature—including twenty-first-century texts, contemporary “black” British writing, and postcolonial theory. Her most recent publications include Black British Writing, ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, World Poetry from 1900 to the Present, W. H. Auden’s Poetry: Mythos, Theory and Practice, and theDictionary of Literary Biography [Vol. 347]: Twenty-First-Century ‘Black’ British Writers, which she edited and to which she contributed at length. Her chapter “Fresh ‘Cultural Critiques’: The Ethnographic Fabulations of Adichie and Oyeyemi” in Emerging African Voices (ed. Walter Collins III) represents a new direction in her current research. Most recently, “Intimations of William Blake in On Beauty (2005): Zadie Smith’s Trans-Atlantic Homage to and Critique of Boston Intellectuals” appears in Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry (Spring 2012). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK).
Maria Helena Lima (SUNY, Geneseo, USA)
Maria Helena Lima is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at SUNY-Geneseo. Her research and teaching focus on the Caribbean, the African diaspora, and Black British writing. Her publications include “The Politics of Teaching Black and British” in Black British Writing (Palgrave 2004) and entries on Andrea Levy, Dorothea Smartt, and Meera Syal in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Vol. 347, 2009). With Miriam Alves, she translated and co-edited a bilingual anthology of fiction by Afro-Brazilian women, Women Righting/Mulheres Escrevendo (Mango 2005). Forthcoming in a special issue of Entertext is her essay “A Written Song: Andrea Levy’s Neo-slave Narrative.”
Caribbean Participants
Antonia MacDonald (St George’s University, Grenada)
Antonia MacDonald was born and grew up in St. Lucia. She now lives in Grenada, where she is a professor in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, Coordinator for regional Program development in the Office of the Provost and Associate Dean in the Graduate Studies Program. She writes on contemporary Caribbean women writers and, more recently, on Derek Walcott and St. Lucian literary studies. She has published articles in Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL), Callaloo and MaComere and is the author ofMaking Homes in the West/Indies.
Peter Roberts (U.W.I., Barbados)
Peter A. Roberts is Professor Emeritus (Linguistics) of the University of the West Indies. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) and the University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras) and was Senior Fulbright Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. A former President of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics, Prof. Roberts is the author of West Indians and Their Language (1988), CXC English (1994), From Oral to Literate Culture—Colonial Experience in the English West Indies (2000), Roots of Caribbean Identity (2008), and co-author of Writing in English (1997).