Biographies
Gioia Angeletti (University of Parma, Italy) (gioia.angeletti@unipr.it)
Gioia Angeletti is a Lecturer in English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Parma. Her publications include: as author, Eccentric Scotland: Three Victorian Poets. James Thomson (“B. V.”), John Davidson and James Young Geddes (2004), and Teorie target oriented della traduzione poetica: trans-creazione e riscrittura dell’alterità (2004); as editor, Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760-1830 (2010), and with Valentina Poggi a volume on the Joan Ure (2010). She is presently completing a book on Byron entitled The Discourse of Otherness: Essays on Byron, and an edition of plays by the Scottish dramatist Archibald MacLaren. For further details see: Gioia Angeletti.
Ian Brown (University of Glasgow and University of Glamorgan, UK) (ijmbrown@hotmail.com)
Ian Brown is a playwright, poet and freelance scholar. Formerly ACGB Drama Director (1986-94), he was, until 2002, Professor of Drama and Dean of Arts at Queen Margaret University. Currently he is visiting professor at both Glasgow and Glamorgan Universities and President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. He publishes on theatrical, literary and cultural topics and is General Editor of The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (EUP: 2007) and joint series editor for the Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature for which he has edited volumes on the twentieth century and drama. He was founder Chairman (1973-75) of the Scottish Society of Playwrights and founding Convenor of North West Playwrights Workshop (1982-5).
Liam Connell (University of Winchester, UK) (Liam.Connell@winchester.ac.uk)
Liam Connell is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester. He has published on Scottish literature and postcolonialism and globalization and contemporary literature in including CSSAAME and Interventions and in the collections Globalisation and its Discontents (2006) and Global Babel (2007). He is the co-editor of Literature and Globalization: a Reader (Routledge September 2010).
Giovanna Covi (University of Trento, Italy) (giovanna.covi@lett.unitn.it)
Giovanna Covi, PhD Binghamton University, is a researcher at the University of Trento where she teaches Anglo-American Language and Literature and Gender Studies; she is Section Editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies, and coordinator of the European Thematic Network Athena. Her research focuses on US and Caribbean Literatures of the modernist and contemporary periods. Her recent publications include Jamaica Kincaid’s Prismatic Subjects (2003) and “La Dividua—A Gendered Figuration for a Pkanetary Humanism” in Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism (2008), and as editor and co-author Modernist Women Race Nation (2005), Scottish Caribbean-Scottish Relations (2007), Interculturality and Gender (2009).
Bashabi Fraser (Edinburgh Napier University, UK) (B.Fraser@napier.ac.uk)
Dr Bashabi Fraser is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. She is currently working on the life stories of Scots in India and is in the process of planning the establishment of Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) within the Centre for Literature and Writing at her University. She is interested in Postcolonial Literature and Theory, transculturalism and diasporic studies. Her recent publications include: From the Ganga to the Tay (an epic poem); Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter; A Meeting of Two Minds: the Geddes-Tagore Letters and Tartan & Turban (poetry collection).
Patrick Hart (University of Strathclyde, UK) (scassacocchi@googlemail.com)
Patrick Hart is a Founding Editor of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance. His main research interests are in Renaissance poetry and questions of audience and subjectivity. He is also interested in both Renaissance and contemporary translation, and his co-translation into English of Elsa Morante’s poetry was published in 2008 by Transference. He teaches Romanticism and Modernism at Strathclyde University, where he is currently writing up his doctoral thesis on Petrarch and English and Scottish sonnet sequences of the early seventeenth century. He has also published on blushing in Renaissance literature and representations of female desire in late Middle Scots poetry.
Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen (University of Zaragoza, Spain) (jeskeal@unizar.es)
Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen obtained the Diploma in Advanced Studies (DEA), and a Masters Degree in English Studies in 2006, and decided to further specialise in Scottish Literature. In 2010 she defended her PhD dissertation, entitled The Redefinition of Scottish Identity and the Relation Self-Other(s) in the Fiction of Brian McCabe. She has taught at the University of Zaragoza (2007-2010), and has been a postgraduate worker at the University of Edinburgh (2009). She has published several articles on identity and on contemporary Scottish literature, as well as on the short-story genre, some reviews, and some book chapters. Besides, she is also translating into Spanish some of the works by Brian McCabe.
Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow, UK) (nigel.leask@glasgow.ac.uk)
Nigel Leask holds the Regius Chair in English Language and Literature at Glasgow University. He was previously Reader in Romantic Literature in the English Faculty at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published widely in the area of romantic literature and culture, with a special emphasis on empire, orientalism, and travel writing. His British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge University Press 1992) studied the anxieties and instabilities of Romantic representations of the 'Orient' in the writings of Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, Southey, Moore and others. His Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: 'From an Antique Land' (Oxford University Press, 2002) explores the Romantic obsession with the 'antique lands' of Ethiopia, Egypt, India and Mexico from a post-colonial perspective. He has recently co-edited a collection of essays entitled Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave 2004). For futher details see: .
Graeme MacDonald (University of Warwick, UK) (g.macdonald@warwick.ac.uk)
Graeme Macdonald is associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. He is editor of Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (1999). He has published several journal articles and book chapters on contemporary Scottish literature, most recently on 'Postcolonialism and Scottish Studies' in New Formations and on 'Scottish Extractions: "Race", Racism and Devolutionary Fiction' in Orbis Litterarum. He is currently co-editing the forthcoming collection Scottish and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Readings and Critical Contexts for Edinburgh University Press and completing a monograph, Shifting Territory: Scottish and World Literature since 1968.
Peter MacKay (Queen’s University Belfast, UK) (p.mackay@qub.ac.uk)
Dr Peter MacKay has worked for Queen's University, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. Having completed a PhD on Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth, he has written widely on Scottish and Irish literature. His monograph on Sorley MacLean will be published this year. He currently works as a broadcast journalist for the BBC in Glasgow.
Wilson McLeod (University of Edinburgh, UK) (wmcleod@staffmail.ed.ac.uk)
Wilson McLeod is a Senior Lecturer in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously a Lecturer at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College in the Isle of Skye. He earned his BA from Haverford College, his JD from Harvard Law School, and MSc and PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has published extensively on Irish and Scottish Gaelic literature of various periods from the late Middle Ages to the present, as well as issues of language policy and cultural politics in Scotland and Ireland.
Kei Miller (University of Glasgow, UK) (k.miller@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk)
Kei Miller read English at the University of the West Indies and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His PhD work considers epistolary narratives from the Caribbean. Kei’s first collection of short fiction, The Fear of Stones, was short-listed in 2007 for a Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize. He has written two poetry collections and is also editor of Carcanet's New Caribbean Poetry Anthology. His first novel, The Same Earth, was published in 2008. Kei has been a visiting writer at York University in Canada, a Vera Rubin Fellow at Yaddo, and an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. For further details see: .
Alan Riach (University of Glasgow, UK) (a.riach@scotlit.arts.gla.ac.uk)
Alan Riach is a poet and the Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. General editor of the Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid, former President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and Literature Advisor to the Scottish Arts Council, he is the author of critical books including Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography, and coauthor with the artist Alexander Moffat of Arts of Resistance, Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland. His poetry is collected in five books, This Folding Map, An Open Return, First and Last Songs, Clearances and Homecoming.
Jacqueline Ryder (University of Strathclyde, UK) (j.ryder@strath.ac.uk)
Jacqueline Ryder is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is currently writing up her thesis which focuses on the theme of imperialism in the work of Naomi Mitchison. Her research interests are in the fields of Scottish studies, twentieth-century literature, and postcolonial theory and writing. She co-organised the 2008 AHRC-funded Crosscurrents conference and co-edited a book showcasing some of the conference papers entitled Further From the Frontiers: Cross-Currents in Irish and Scottish Studies (2010), which includes her paper on Mitchison's The Conquered (1923). She also works as Reviews Assistant for the International Journal of Scottish Literature.
Silke Stroh (University of Muenster, Germany) (Silke.Stroh@uni-muenster.de)
Silke Stroh studied at the Universities of Aberdeen and Frankfurt, where she gained her PhD with a thesis entitled (Post)Colonial Scotland? Literature, Gaelicness and the Nation (2006). Having taught at the universities of Frankfurt and Giessen, she is now Assistant Professor at Muenster University. She is the author of Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry and co-editor of Hybrid Cultures – Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World (forthcoming 2010). Other publications cover postcolonial theory; and anglophone Scottish, Asian British, African and Canadian literature. She’s currently preparing a monograph on anglophone (post)colonial Scottish literature, and another on colonial settler cultures. For further details see: Silke Stroh
The sessions are convened by Carla Sassi of the University of Verona and Theo van Heijnsbergen of the University of Glasgow.
carla.sassi@univr.it ; heynsbrg@human.gla.ac.uk