Keynote speakers 2023
Juan Ignacio Oliva (Universidad de La Laguna)
Juan Ignacio Oliva is Full Professor at Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife, Canaries, SPAIN), where he teaches Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures with an interest in environmentally aware texts. He has recently co-edited Revolving Around India(s) (CSP 2019) and four monographs on “Indian Ocean Imaginaries,” “Indian Representations on Screen” & “Ecocriticism in English Studies” (RCEI 64/77/82/83), and edited The Painful Chrysalis. Essays on Contemporary Cultural and Literary Identity (Peter Lang 2011), and Realidad y simbología de la montaña (UAH 2012). He is presently head of the La Laguna Center for Canadian Studies and current editor of RCEI (Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses). He was appointed president of EASLCE (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment) in the period 2014-16; president of AEEII (Spanish Association of Interdisciplinary Studies about India), 2014-2019, and is currently president of the Spanish James Joyce Association, 2019- and vicepresident of SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies). He forms part of GIECO (Grupo de Investigación en Ecocrítica-Franklin Institute-UAH) and Ratnakara (Indian Ocean-UAB) research groups.
https://institutofranklin.net/juan-ignacio-oliva-cruz
“Material Ecologies: Dismantling the Anthropomorphic Fallacy in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi»
November 16th, 2023 – 13:00 (CET), Aula Magna & online (Zoom)
Susana Onega (Universidad de Zaragoza)
Susana Onega (University of Zaragoza) is a member of the Research Institute of Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability. She was granted the Miguel Servet Award for Research Excellence by the Government of Aragón in 2021. She has written extensively on contemporary fiction, narrative theory, ethics and trauma and the transition from postmodernism to transmodernism. Her monographs include Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (1989), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (1999), and Jeanette Winterson (2006). She is currently coediting with Jean-Michel Ganteau the Brill Handbook of Literary Criticism and Ethics.
https://cne.literatureresearch.net/susana-onega-jaen
“Introduction to Postmodernist British Fiction”
November 22nd, 2023 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).
Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University)
Before her retirement, Marjorie Perloff was Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. She is also Florence Scott Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. She has taught courses and writes on twentieth—and now twenty-first—century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts and, more recently, on Austrian literature between the two World Wars, especially on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her first three books dealt with individual poets—Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara; she then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994, available in Spanish translation), and subsequent books (15 in all), the most recent of which are Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2011), which appeared in Portuguese translation in 2013, and Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (2016, 2018 paper). Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992) has been used in classrooms studying the “new” digital poetics (and in Chinese translation won an award for best criticism), and 21st Century Modernism (Blackwell 2002) is a manifesto of Modernist Survival. Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996) brought philosophy into the mix; it has recently been translated into Portuguese (Sao Paulo), Spanish (Mexico), and Slovenian. In 2019, the U of New Mexico Press will publish Circling the Canon: The Selected Book Reviews of Marjorie Perloff, 2 Volumes: Vol. 1-1969-96, Vol. 2, 1997-2016.
Marjorie Perloff has also published a cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has recently appeared in German translation in Vienna (Paradoxien einer Emigration, Praesens Verlag) and has been translated into Portuguese in Brazil. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, co-edited with Craig Dworkin was published by Chicago in 2009. A collection of interviews, Poetics in a New Key was published by Chicago in the fall of 2014.
Perloff has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from the TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and she has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. In 2009, she was the Weidenfeld Professor of European Literature at Oxford University and in 2016, the first Wittgenstein Distinguished Professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. She is currently Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.
Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and was President of the Modern Language Association in 2006. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and recently was named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University. She received an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters, from Bard College in May 2008, from Chapman University in 2015, and the University of Innsbruck. In 2012, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania honored her with a special symposium; a varied set of the individual contributions to that symposium appeared in the online journal Jacket 2.
Marjorie Perloff recently participated in a film called “The Class of 1938: Exile and Excellence,” in which sixteen distinguished emigrés from Hitler’s Vienna are interviewed about their experience. The two films—the whole group and Perloff interview—are available on You Tube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECoADwIBVXo&t=35s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Perloff
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marjorie-perloff
https://english.stanford.edu/people/marjorie-perloff
“’For Love’: Motive and Method in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl»
December 5th, 2023 – 18:00 (CET), online (Zoom).
Francisco Collado (Universidad de Zaragoza)
Francisco Collado-Rodríguez is Professor of English at the Department of English and German Studies of the University of Zaragoza. He teaches courses on 20th and 21st century American literature and on popular culture. He graduated with honors in English at the University of Extremadura, subsequently carrying on his doctoral studies at Extremadura and Edinburgh. He was president of the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS) from March 2007 to March 2011. He has written on the influence of fantasy, myth, and scientific discourse on modernist and postmodernist English and American fiction, as well as on ethics, trauma, and literature and posthumanity. Prof. Collado-Rodríguez has published books and papers on novelists Richard Adams, Thomas Pynchon, Bharati Mukherjee, Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, Bobbie Ann Mason, Eric Kraft, Chuck Palahniuk, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Safran Foer, among others, as well as on poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
https://cne.literatureresearch.net/francisco-collado-rodriguez
“Narratives of the Posthuman: Three American Cases»
December 18th, 2023 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).
Mário Avelar (Universidade Alberta, Lisbon)
Mário Avelar (b. Lisbon, 1956), PhD in American literature, University of Lisbon (1992). He began teaching at the university’s School of Arts and Humanities in 1982, moved to Universidade Aberta in the late 1990s and returned to his alma mater in 2019. A full professor since 2005, he is the director of the English department, of the master’s and of the PhD programmes in Modern Literatures, Arts and Cultures, and of the Cascais Crossroad of the Arts Chair (D. Luís I Foundation). He is a member of the national co-ordination committee of the assessment agency, A3ES, in the area of Humanities. He is a member of the Portuguese Academy of History, of the Portuguese Navy Academy, and of the Lisbon Geographic Society. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Research Center on Theology and Religious Studies of the Portuguese Catholic University. His areas of research are American studies, English studies, inter-arts relations and film studies, in which he has published several essays and some books, most recently O essencial sobre Philip Roth, and Poesia e Artes Visuais – Confessionalismo e écfrase, both published by Imprensa Nacional. This publisher has also published his collected poetry, Coreografando melodias no rumor das imagens. He is the author of two novels, namely Inveja – uma novela académica (Assírio & Alvim). He has translated works by various English-speaking authors.
“Philip Roth’s Indignation and Nemesis, Incursions on Pessimism and Freewill»
January 23, 2024 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).
Cristina Alsina Rísquez (Universitat de Barcelona)
Cristina Alsina Rísquez is an Associate Professor in American Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona (Serra Hunter Fellow) and a researcher at ADHUC—Research Center for Theory, Gender and Sexuality. Her main area of research is Twentieth Century US literature. She is currently the co-P.I., with Rodrigo Andrés, of the research project “(Un)Housing: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature” (2021-2024) funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. Her latest publication is the co-edition, together with Rodrigo Andres of the edited collection American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire (Brill, 2022). She coordinates the Master’s Program on “Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities” at the Universitat de Barcelona.
“Dismantling and Recycling the Domestic: the (Un)housing of the Professor in The Professor’s House by Willa Cather”
February 27th, 2024, 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).
Nathalie Cochoy (Université de Toulouse)
A former fellow of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Fontenay-Saint Cloud, Nathalie Cochoy is Professor of American Literature at the University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. She is the author of Ralph Ellison, La Musique de l’Invisible (Belin, 1998), and of Passante à New York (Bordeaux University Press, 2010). She co-directed The Art of the City (Caliban, 2009), Marcher dans la Ville (Sciences de la Société, 2016), Disappearances (Caliban, 2016), The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2022) and City Ruins in American War Narratives (Transatlantica, 2022). She also directed City Instants (e-rea, 2010) and Coincidences (Miranda, 2014). She wrote numerous articles on the representation of urban and natural spaces in American literature. She was the editor-in-chief of Transatlantica for literature and the arts from 2009 to 2015. She was the chair of the research center “Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes/Center for Anglophone Studies” in Toulouse from
2016 to 2021.
“Loss and Wonder in the American Novel”
March 12th, 2024 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).
Peter Liebregts (University of Leiden)
Peter Liebregts is Professor of Modern Literatures in English at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. He is the author of Centaurs in the Twilight: W.B. Yeats’s Use of the Classical Tradition (1992) and Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (2004), for which he was awarded the Ezra Pound Society Prize in 2005. His most recent publication is Translations of Greek Tragedy in the Work of Ezra Pound. He has co-edited a series of books: Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater R.L. Stevenson and their contemporaries (1994), Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance; with a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity (1998), Configuring Romanticism (2003).
«The Contemporary British and Irish Novel: Major Trends and Names»
Time & date to be announced, online (Zoom).
