1 Virginie Barrier-Roiron is a lecturer at the Institut d’études politiques of Strasbourg (University Robert Schuman, Strasbourg 3). She is a doctor of the University Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV, in English Studies, with a post-graduate degree in Political Science (university Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris I). Her main fields of studies include the British Empire and decolonisation, especially in Africa, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, British foreign policy. She also collaborates to Outre-Terre, a French review in geopolitics.

2 Tithi Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of history at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford, 2005). Her essays have appeared in leading scholarly journals such as New Left Review, Journal of Asian Studies and South Asia Research. She is currently working on her second book project tentatively titled Uncanny Histories: Fear, Superstition and Reason in Colonial Bengal. It is an attempt to write a material history of fear and to show how new historical processes— rural to urban migration, English education, new funerary practices—changed the very cultural inflections of fear as a colonial society negotiated its encounter with modernity.

3Maurizio Calbi is Associate Professor of English Literature and History of English Culture at the University of Salerno (Italy). He has previously taught at the University of Essex, Loughborough University and The Open University (Britain). His most recent book is Approximate Bodies. Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). He has also published essays on Shakespeare and early modern culture, post-colonial literature, post-colonial rewritings and filmic re-visions of Shakespeare. He is currently working on two books, Alterity in Shakespeare/Alterations of Shakespeare and The Post-Colonial Ethics of Writing in the Work of Caryl Phillips, Nuruddin Farah, and J.M. Coetzee.

4 Anthony Carrigan is a current PhD student working under the supervision of Professor Graham Huggan at the University of Leeds, UK. He is researching representations of tourism in postcolonial island literatures, with a specific focus on Caribbean and Pacific writers.

5 Sheila Collingwood-Whittick is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Grenoble III where she teaches several courses on postcolonial studies. From 2002 to 2004, she also lectured on postcolonial literatures at the University of Geneva. Since the completion of her PhD thesis on the francophone novel in colonial Algeria, her scholarship has focused on postcolonial fiction in English and her research interests cover all aspects of colonial and postcolonial cultures. Her publications include articles on Raymond Carver, J. M. Coetzee, David Malouf, Katherine Mansfield, Sally Morgan, William Styron, Patrick White and, more recently, on various aspects of Australian culture. She is also the editor of a collection of essays entitled The Pain of Unbelonging: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature (Cross/Cultures; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007). For the past several years, she has concentrated on Australian Aboriginal history and literature and the representation of Aborigines in Australian fiction. She is currently working on the impact of nineteenth century scientific discourse on indigenous peoples.

6 Teresa Gibert is Professor of English at the Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED) in Madrid, Spain, where she is Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and teaches courses on American and Canadian literature. She is the author of American Literature to 1900 (2001), and Literatura Canadiense en Lengua Inglesa (2004). Her publications include the following essays about Thomas King: ‘Narrative Strategies in Thomas King’s Short Stories’, ‘Written Orality in Thomas King’s Short Fiction’, ‘Subverting the Master Narrative of Heroic Conquest: Thomas King’s A Coyote Columbus Story (1992)’, and ‘Stories “are all we are”: Thomas King’s Theory and Practice of Storytelling’. Prof. Gibert has written the chapter ‘ “Ghosts Stories”: Fictions of History and Myth’ for the forthcoming volume Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2009).

7 Dave Gunning completed his PhD at the University of Leeds in 2005, and held a lectureship in postcolonial literature there before moving on to his current post as lecturer in English literature at the University of Birmingham. Among his published writing on various issues in postcolonial literature and culture are articles in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Kunapipi, as well as a paper in Les Carnets du Cerpac on Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory (Revisiting Slave Narratives, 2005).

8 Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère teaches Modern English Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her teaching and research interests include various aspects of colonial and postcolonial fiction, modernism and postmodernism, fairy tale rewritings and translation studies. She is the author of Origin and Originality in Rushdie’s Fiction (1997) and has published a number of articles on issues ranging from the figure of the cannibal in Victorian juvenile fiction to the impact of X-ray technology on Heart of Darkness. She is currently collaborating on various projects related to fairy tales.

9 Prudence Layne is Assistant Professor of English at Elon University in North Carolina in the United States, and Coordinator of the African/African-American Studies program where she teaches courses in African, African-American, Caribbean and South African literatures, postcolonial and women’s and gender studies, and narratives of confinement. In addition to teaching and publishing in these areas, she has been invited to lecture and present her work around South Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where she was Managing Editor for Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, and is currently a member of the journal’s editorial board. She is working on two book manuscripts Towards an Erotics of Hybridity: Bodies at the Crossroads of a Nation and From Martin’s ‘Mountaintop’ to Mandela’s ‘Tabletop’: Will We Ever Realize the Dream?

10 John McLeod is Reader in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures in the School of English, University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Beginning Postcolonialism (2000), Postcolonial London: rewriting the metropolis (2004) and J. G. Farrell (2007), and is the editor of The Revision of Englishness (2004, with David Rogers) and The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007).

11 Esther Peeren is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on twentieth-century literary theory, literature and other media, and popular culture. Currently, she is developing a project on the spectral dimension of gender and postcolonial identities in contemporary literature, television and film. She has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin, queer television, translation theory and the chronotopic dimension of diaspora. Her first book, entitled Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond, appeared with Stanford University Press in 2008.

12 John Potts is Associate Professor in Media at Macquarie University, Sydney. He has published three books, and has recently published on the cultural significance of ghosts. He is co-editor with Edward Scheer of the book Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny (Sydney: Power, 2006).

13 Ashraf H. A. Rushdy is Professor of African American Studies and English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of numerous articles on African American literature and culture, and of three books: The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton (1992), Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (1999), and Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (2001).

14 Elsa Sacksick is Maître de conférence at the University of Paris VIII (St Denis). She passed a Ph. D entitled ‘In praise of excess, weaving and hybridizing in the works of S. Rushdie, A. Roy and J. Winterson’ at La Sorbonne Nouvelle University in 2004. She published several articles on these authors and works at the moment on the notions of hybridity, animality, orality and tales. She also is a translator for the laboratory of Environnemental Psychology of Paris V and she works on audiovisual translations of documentaries (52 minutes) for the film company ‘Reservoir Prod’.

15Eleonora Sasso completed a PhD at the ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara in 2004. She is currently Contract Professor of English Literature at the University of Basilicata. She has published articles on Dickens, Collins, D.G. Rossetti, William Morris, C. F. Woolson, Vernon Lee, D’Annunzio, Margaret Laurence, Ken Loach, J.C. Oates, Atwood, McGrath. She recently read papers in the following international conferences: ‘Ford Madox Ford: Visual Arts and Media’ (FMFS— Genoa 2007); ‘Second Annual Conference of the British Society for Literature and Science’ (Birmingham 2007); ‘Victorian Cultures in Conflict’ (BAVS—Liverpool, 2006); ‘Morris in the 21st Century’ (Egham, Surrey, 2005). She has translated into Italian a book on D’Annunzio’s plays, as well as Some Reminiscences by William Michael Rossetti (Carabba, 2006). She collaborates with the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto and she is author of William Morris tra utopia e medievalismo (Aracne, 2007).

16 Colette Selles is a Senior Lecturer at the Université Toulouse-Le Mirail. She wrote her doctoral thesis on two contemporary Australian writers, Murray Bail and Frank Moorhouse and has published several articles on Australian literature. She is interested in postcolonial studies and translation.

17 Myriam Suchet is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Lyon) and passed the ‘agrégation de lettres modernes’. Her PhD deals with stereophonic texts such as Sozaboy (Ken Saro-Wiwa), Traduit de la Nuit (Rabearivelo), Juan sin Tierra (Juan Goytisolo) and Die Niemandsrose (Paul Celan). In these texts, the writing tongue lets other languages be heard. Since the linguistic approach seems to fail in analyzing what is at stake in the literary mixing of different languages, the project is to use enunciative tools not only to describe the way the languages are put in contact within the text but also to analyse the translating process as an act of re-enunciation. The consideration of several translations within a single target language and different target languages shows that these texts modify the theory as well as the practice of translation. A first step of the research, entitled Palimpsestes en traduction, pour une poétique comparée de l’interlangue littéraire, was published by the Nouvelles Archives Contemporaines in 2009.

18 Mélanie Torrent is a lecturer at the Institut Charles V, Université Paris—Diderot. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Fontenay-Saint-Cloud LSH), she holds an M. Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate (‘Cameroon’s admission into the Commonwealth (1995): a question of national unity?’) from the Université Paris Sorbonne. Her research centres on Britain’s foreign affairs and diplomacy and the Commonwealth of Nations, with a particular focus on post-colonial relations, Franco-British relations in Africa, interactions between the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, and the growing importance of democracy and development aid in international relations.

19 Gerry Turcotte, University of Notre Dame, Sydney (Australia). Keynote speaker.

20Gerry Turcotte is Professor of English and Executive Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, Australia.

21He is the author and editor of numerous publications including Jack Davis: The Maker of History (Harper Collins), Writers in Action (Currency), Masks, Tapestries, Journeys (CRITACS), Canada Australia: Towards a Second Century of Partnership with Kate Burridge and Lois Foster (Carleton University Press), Compr(om)ising Post/colonialisms: Challenging Narratives & Practices, with Greg Ratcliffe (Dangaroo) and Canadian Literature & the Postcolonial Gothic with Cynthia Sugars (forthcoming, Wilfrid Laurier Press).

22His creative writing includes three collections of poetry: Neighbourhood of Memory (Dangaroo), Winterlude (Brandl & Schlesinger) and Hauntings: the ‘Varuna’ Poems (Five Islands Press). His novel, Flying in Silence, was published in Canada and in Australia and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year in 2001. His most recent creative work is Border Crossings: Words & Images (Brandl & Schlesinger).

23 Michela Vanon Alliata is Associate Professor of English and Post-Colonial literature at the University of Venice, Ca’Foscari. She has published books and essays on American literature (James, Brown, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott), on English fiction and poetry (Stevenson, Shelley, Wilde, Hardy, Eliot, Yeats) and on postcolonial literature (Trevor, Atwood, Conrad). Her most recent publications include: ‘The Naked Man fom the Sea: Identity and Separation in The Secret Sharer’, ‘Markheim and the Shadow of the Other’, ‘La maledizione del drago e il Tiziano perduto di Christina Rossetti’, ‘In viaggio verso la terra promessa: The Amateur Emigrant di R. L. Stevenson’. She has edited Desiderio e trasgressione nella letteratura fantastica, a book on fantastic literature with an introduction on the fantastic genre and an essay on Stevenson’s ‘The Bottle Imp’ and Nel segno dell’horror. Forme e figure di un genere with an introduction (‘Phenomenology and poetics of horror’) and an essay on ‘Frankenstein and its accursed progeny’.

24 Kerry-Jane Wallart is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm). She has written her PhD dissertation, as well as several articles, on Derek Walcott, and is currently a lecturer at Paris IX-Dauphine.

25 Timothy Weiss is a Professor in the Department of English at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia (University of Toronto Press, 2004), and English and Globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland China (co-edited with Kwok-kan Tam; Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2004). In the USA he has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Maine. He has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Liberia, West Africa (1975-’77), and a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia (1988-’89) and Algeria and Morocco (1993-’94). He is currently writing a chapter on the ‘Windrush Generation’ for The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel and the section on ‘Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora’ for Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction.