Contributors

1 Melissa Adams is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University studying eighteenth-century British and American literature. Her dissertation, Emotional Anthropology: Documenting Feeling in Others, traces the strange phenomenon of ‘collecting feelings’ in both fictional and non-fictional ethnographic writings about Native Americans and African American slaves. She is a visiting lecturer at Knox College (Galesburg, Illinois) for 2006-2007.

2 Isabel Alonso-Breto is a lecturer at the University of Barcelona, where she obtained a PhD in English. She has published articles on postcolonial literature, particularly on Indian literature and on Caribbean and Canadian writing by women. Her PhD dissertation was a study of the writing of Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writer and cultural critic Marlene Nourbese Philip framed in postmodern theories, entitled How Many Identities Can Dance on a Maple Leaf? La escritura de Marlene Nourbese Philip en el contexto de la postmodernidad. Presently, her research still centres round Caribbean-Canadian writing and Black Canadian literature, particularly on women writers. Also a fiction writer, she has published several short stories and travel articles.

3 Susan Barrett was born in England of Australian parents. She completed a BA in French and Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia and then moved to France where she passed the Agrégation exam. She completed her doctoral thesis on White South African women novelists in 2001 and is currently working as a senior lecturer in the English department of Bordeaux University. She has given papers on South African and Australian fiction at conferences both in France and abroad and has published a number of articles.

4 Wolfgang Binder is Professor (Akademischer Direktor) of North American and Caribbean Studies at the university of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen. His publications include Die Rezeption des amerikanischen Dramas in der nordamerikanischen Kritik, 1890-1914 (1974), ‘Die Hälfte der Nacht wiegt schwerer als ihr Schweigen’ (Essays and Reviews of US, Caribbean and Latin American Literatures) (1998), more than 180 articles on US Latino, African-American and Caribbean literatures and cultures. He is editor-in-chief of the scholarly series ‘Studien zur Neuen Welt’ (Würzburg), in which he edited, among others, the volume Slavery in the Americas (1993). He is the founder of the Franco-German Americanist Colloquium. He has so far translated thirteen books (Spanish and English) from Caribbean literatures into German and hosted more than 200 authors from the USA, Canada, the UK, and the Caribbean in Erlangen.

5Rita Christian is a Senior Lecturer in Caribbean Literature at the London Metropolitan University. She obtained her degrees from the Middlesex University and Kings College, London University. Her main area of research is the Francophone Caribbean. Her forthcoming book on Vincent Placoly, the late Martiniquan writer and political activist, titled: The Life & Death of a Creole American: Vincent Placoly and the Passion for Independence will be published next year. Other areas of interest and research are the Indian Community in Guadeloupe and Martinique and Caribbean Popular Culture.

6 Guillaume Cingal, a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), lectures in 19th and 20th English and postcolonial literatures at the Université François-Rabelais (Tours). After dedicating his PhD to the study of Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah’s two trilogies and writing many articles on East African fiction, he has extended his field of study to Southern Africa and India. He is currently working on an essay whose tentative title is Postcolonial Transgressions.

7 Florence D’Souza, of Indian origin, is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Lille 3 in France. Her thesis on 18th century French travel-writers in India was published as Quand la France découvrit l’Inde, 1757-1818, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. Since then, she has been working on the British presence in India and on contemporary Indian writers in English like Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Hanif Kureishi, Farrukh Dhondy and Arundhati Roy.

8Teresa 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 American and Canadian literature. She has written extensively on twentieth-century British, American and Canadian literature. She is the author of American Literature to 1900 (Madrid: CERA, 2001), and Literatura Canadiense en Lengua Inglesa (Madrid: UNED, 2004). Her publications on Canadian literature include: ‘Unity in Diversity: Coming to Terms with a Plural National Identity in Canadian Literature’ (1996), ‘Multiculturalism Revisited: Canadian Literary Deconstructions‘ (1999), ‘From Obasan to Itsuka: The Power of Silence in Joy Kogawa’s Rewriting of History’ (2000), ‘Narrative Strategies in Thomas King’s Short Stories’ (2001), and ‘The Aesthetics of Ageing in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction’ (2005).

9 Nelly Gillet defended her PhD thesis on ‘Patricia Ledyard, American-born Writer in Tonga’ in 2004 at the Sorbonne University. From 2001 to 2005, she was an ATER at the English Department of Bordeaux 3 University. The previous year, she had taught French at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is currently studying Tongan writer E. Hau’ofa and Sri Lankan novelists, P. Wijenaike and C. Lokugé. She also takes an active part in the Group of British Studies (G.E.R.B.) at Bordeaux 3. She is now PRAG (IUT of Angoulême).

10 Evelyne Hanquart-Turner read English at the Sorbonne and then went to Cambridge as a graduate to study the works of E.M. Forster for her doctorat d’Etat. She has published extensively on Forster, Kipling, several aspects of colonial India and on Indo-English novelists, both in French and English. She recently edited Marianne Thornton for the Abinger Edition (London: André Deutsch, 2000). After teaching at the Sorbonne and Cambridge for some years, she is now Professor of English at the University of Paris XII.

11 Louise Harrington read English Literature and German at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland for her BA and focused in particular on Indian Literature in her final year, writing a dissertation on Hinduism and the novels of R.K. Narayan. She has since completed her MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London concentrating on the Anglophone Literature of Africa and South Asia. She is currently spending time in South Asia.

12 Barbara Helly is teaching in Le Havre (Transport Department, le Havre University). She has written articles and papers on two different topics: the history of South Africa and James A. Michener’s popular historical novels.

13 Julian Hine is Full Professor of Transport Studies at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. His research is in the area of social change and transport provision. He has written extensively on transport policy social exclusion and planning. He is a Chartered Town Planner, a Member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, a Member of the Institute of Highways and Transport in the UK.

14 Lloyd Johnson is associate professor of history at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina. He is the author of The Frontier in the Colonial South: South Carolina Backcountry, 1736-1800 (Greenwood Press). He also appeared in a BBC documentary, ‘Roots in Wales’, that was transmitted by Welsh Public Television in July 2001. He has also published book reviews for several scholarly academic journals, as well as over seventy articles dealing with Colonial American history for various academic encyclopedias. He has presented academic papers for the British Association of American Studies Conference in Wales in 2000, the North American Conference on Welsh Studies in 2002 and 2004, and the Fourth Symbiosis Transatlantic Conference held in Scotland in 2003. He currently serves on the editorial committee and the executive board of the North American Welsh Studies Association.

15 Matt Kimmich is an assistant at the English Department at the University of Berne, where he defended his PhD thesis on Offspring Fictions: Family Romances in Salman Rushdie’s Novels, covering the novels from Midnight’s Children to The Moor’s Last Sigh, in October 2005. Other research and teaching interests beyond postcolonial literature include drama in text and performance, and genre, pop culture and post-modernism.

16 Patricia Krus specializes in Caribbean literature. Her research focuses on issues of historical remembering and national identity in contemporary fiction from the Dutch, English and French Caribbean. She holds a PhD from the University of Leiden (Netherlands) and was a Fulbright fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies, University of Virginia (USA). She has edited with Theo D’haen a collected volume of essays entitled Colonizer and Colonized (Rodopi 2000). She is currently reworking her dissertation for publication. She is now teaching at the University of Stirling, in the UK.

17 Florence Labaune-Demeule is Maître de Conférences (Senior Lecturer) at Jean Moulin University in Lyon, France, where she teaches English and Commonwealth literature. She has written a doctoral thesis and several articles about V.S. Naipaul’s fiction (mostly about A House for Mr Biswas, The Enigma of Arrival, and Half a Life). She has also written articles about Jean Rhys and Arundhati Roy. Her fields of interest are V. S. Naipaul’s work, Caribbean and Indian literature.

18 Benaouda Lebdai is a specialist in African literature written in English. He obtained a Ph. D in 1987 (University of Essex) and has a French doctorate on the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah. He has published articles on Chinua Achebe, Peter Abrahams, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Winnie Mandela, Ngugi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Samkange, Rachid Boudjedra. His critical studies deal with the relations between literature and history, gender, post-colonial theory through the works of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha or Rimmon-Kenan. He has published: Signes et symbolique de la révolte existentielle à travers les personnages des romans d’Ayi Kwei Armah (Lille: Septentrion, 2000), 474 pages; and Post-Independence African Literature: Boudjedra/Ngugi (1992. Alger: Office des Publications Universitaires, 1995).

19 Cécile Leonard writes her doctoral thesis about Salman Rushdie’s writing at the Université de Paris-VII and teaches English at the Université d’Angers. She is a graduate of Sciences-Po Paris and her interests include postcolonial writing and theory, contemporary literature and journalism.

20 Stephen Little is Head of the Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise within the Open University Business School (OUBS). He previously worked in Australia at Griffith University, Brisbane, and the University of Wollongong NSW. He is also Chairman of the Asia Pacific Technology Network (www.aptn.org.uk/) and has written about the Asian economies in the twenty-first century, intelligent urban development and meta-governance. Currently he is researching new forms of mobility and regional development in the knowledge economy with colleagues from OUBS and other institutions in the U.K., Europe and Asia.

21 John McLeod is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester University Press, 2000) and Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), and has co-edited (with David Rogers) The Revision of Englishness (Manchester University Press, 2000). He has published a number of essays in journals such as Moving Worlds, Wasafiri, Kunapipi and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. His forthcoming publications include J. G. Farrell (Northcote House, 2006) and the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Routledge, 2007).

22 Olivette Otele holds a PhD in cultural history from La Sorbonne University. She has written on the contribution of museums in Bristol, and grass-root minority ethnic communities (Somali, Bangladeshi and Pakistani groups) in Newport in building a collective memory and on the collective memory of the slave trade in France and Britain. Her recent work explores the interplay of politics, identity and carnivals in Black Welsh communities. She is also currently co-organising a series of sessions on collective memory for the International Association for Cultural Studies Conference: Crossroads in Cultural Studies.

23 Bruce Smith is a former Railway Engineer, MA (1999) in Anthropology (workplace culture in NZ Railways in the 1980s), studying towards a PhD in History (which will be submitted towards the middle of this year) on the changes of Management structure and the political reasons for this in the New Zealand Government Railways in the period 1889 to 1895.

24 Candace Ward teaches Eighteenth-century novel studies at Florida State University. Her interest in early Anglo-Caribbean fiction was fostered during a semester’s research leave at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, where previously she had spent seven months as a Fulbright lecturer/researcher in 2002-03. Her earlier work on early Caribbean fiction has appeared in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition (Palgrave 2004), in an essay entitled ‘Sensibility, Tropical Disease, and the Eighteenth-century Sentimental Novel.’ This essay forms the basis of a chapter in Desire and Disorder: Fevers, Fictions, and Feeling in English Georgian Culture, forthcoming from Bucknell University Press. The paper she proposed for the Transport (s) in the British Empire and Commonwealth conference was drawn from an early chapter of a new project, tentatively entitled Crossing the Line: Early Anglo-Caribbean Novels, 1800-1842. Her work on sentimental fiction has appeared in Studies in the Novel and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.