1Vicki Briault-Manus is Lecturer in English Linguistics and Postcolonial Studies at the University Stendhal-Grenoble 3 (France). After a doctoral thesis on the phonology of SiSwati, she turned back to textual linguistics and semiotics in the mid-nineties. Her research areas are postcolonial discourse and Southern African literature. Her work has focused on a number of South African writers, especially J. M. Coetzee and Bessie Head, and she has published more recently on two Zimbabwean writers, Dambudzo Marechera and Tsitsi Dangarembga and on several post-apartheid works of fiction. In an extra-curricular capacity, she translates vulgarised works of political economy for the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (Brussels).

2Sheila 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 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. She has published articles on Raymond Carver, J. M. Coetzee, David Malouf, Katherine Mansfield, Sally Morgan, William Styron, and Patrick White. Her most recent publication is a collection of essays entitled The Pain of Unbelonging: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature that she edited for Rodopi. For the last several years she has concentrated on the field of Australian literature and its representation of Aborigines and, more generally, on the role of scientific discourse in the othering of indigenous peoples.

3Basuli Deb holds a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in USA. She defended her dissertation Women and Militancy: Narratives from Guatemala, India, and South Africa in March 2007. In August 2007 she joined Quinnipiac University in Connecticut as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the English Department–as their specialist in postcolonial, ethnic/minority, and African-American literature/theory. Among her published essays are ‘Convict Narratives from Postcolonial India: The Criminalized Woman in Phoolan Devi’s Stories’ and ‘The British Raj, Modernization, and India: Women, Transgression, and the Communism-Casteism Dyad in The God of Small Things.’ She is currently editing an anthology Writing Violence: The Ethics and Politics of Representation as Human Rights Praxis. She has co-edited the journal Directions: Discussions of Pedagogy, Gender, and Language. In April 2007 she co-organized a seminar on ‘The Politics of Representation: Human Rights Violations, Witnessing and Transnational Readership’ at the American Comparative Literature Association Convention in Mexico.

4Siphiwe Ignatius Dube is PhD Candidate (ABD) at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. He is currently in the dissertation editing/writing stage, expected to graduate in the Summer of 2007. His primary area of research is Religion and Literature, with a focus on post-colonial African literature and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. His cognate areas of competence include Method and Theory in Religion, Feminist Theory, and Post-colonial Theory broadly. He is also a member in good standing of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion (CSSR), and the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR).

5Stephen Gish is Professor of History at Auburn University at Montgomery (Alabama, USA) and specializes in the history of South Africa. He is the author of Cultures of the World—Ethiopia (New York: Marshall Cavendish and Singapore: Times Editions, 1996); Alfred B. Xuma: African, American, South African (New York: New York University Press and London: Macmillan, 2000); and Desmond Tutu: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004). His current project focuses on Amy Biehl, the young American researcher killed in Cape Town in 1993. He is particularly interested in exploring reactions to her death, and what those reactions reveal about South Africa during a critical period in its history. His article ‘Reacting to Amy Biehl: Perspectives from South Africa and the United States’ was published in South Africa and the United States Compared: The Best of Safundi, 2003-2004 (Phoenix: Safundi, 2005).

6Elwyn Jenkins is Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. He is a former member of the South African National Place Names Committee and its successor, the South African Geographical Names Council. He is immediate Past President of the South African Institute of Race Relations and a Past President of the English Academy of Southern Africa. He is the author of three books on South African children’s literature and two on South African place names. His latest book, Falling into Place: Modern South African Place Names, was published by David Philip (Cape Town) in April 2007. In June 2007 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the English Academy of Southern Africa for distinguished service to English.

7Mélanie Joseph-Vilain is Senior Lecturer at the University of Dijon (Université de Bourgogne). She read English at Aix-Marseille I, where she defended a doctoral thesis on ‘ (Af)filiation and Writing in Five Novels by André Brink: Looking on Darkness, Rumours of Rain, An Act of Terror, Imaginings of Sand and Devil’s Valley’ in 2003. Her main fields of interest are African literature (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria), contemporary British literature and translation.

8Elaine Kennedy-Dubourdieu is Senior Lecturer at the University of Nantes. Her research interests are in the field of ‘race relations’ as well as British and South African history and civilisation. Her latest book Race and Inequality: World Perspectives on Affir- mative Action contains a chapter on South Africa as well as a foreword by Justice Albie Sachs. She has sought to foster links with South Africa and has set up exchanges with Johannesburg and Durban which enable students from Nantes to work and study there.

9Manfred Loimeier studied German literature, history of the arts and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen, Vienna, Basel and Berlin. He works as a journalist on African literatures in European languages. He studied comparative literatures at Bayreuth university, and wrote his dissertation Die Macht des Wortes (2005) about Wole Soyinka and Ousmane Sembène. He is a lecturer at the University of Mannheim in cultural studies, at the University of Heidelberg in English Literature and is the author of Ken Saro-Wiwa (1996), Afrikanische Literatur (1997), Sudan (1998), and Wortwechsel (2002), a collection of interviews with authors from Africa. He is also editor of Yizo Yizo (2006), an anthology of South-African short-stories. He has just published a monograph on the South-African Nobel-prize winner J. M. Coetzee.

10Lydia Martin est docteur en littérature britannique. Elle enseigne à l’université de Provence au département d’Études du monde anglophone. Dix-huitiémiste et spécialiste de la question de l’adaptation à l’écran d’œuvres littéraires, elle a publié deux monographies et plusieurs articles en littérature comme en cinéma, notamment sur celui du Commonwealth (Afrique du Sud, Nouvelle-Zélande, Inde).

11Cécile Perrot began writing a PhD in 2004 on the transformation of higher education in South Africa since the end of apartheid (Director: Gilles Teulié/Aix-Marseille Université) In 2005, thanks to a grant from the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), she was able to travel to Cape Town and Johannesburg for a two-month research stay. While writing her PhD, C. Perrot is also teaching at Nanterre University/Paris X.

12Richard Samin is Professor of English and Commonwealth Literature at the University of Nancy 2. He obtained a Doctorat d’État on the works of Alex La Guma and Es’kia Mphahlele. His research interests include South African Literature in English, South African History, and Postcolonial Studies. As a member of several research groups, his articles have been published in numerous journals in France and abroad.

13Sandra Saayman read English at the Universities of Stellenbosch (South Africa) and Poitiers. She is currently lecturer in the English Department of the University of Reunion Island. Her thesis on the role of the visual arts in Breyten Breytenbach’s prison literature (completed in 2003) was directed by Liliane Louvel. She lectures on Ivan Vladislavic, Zakes Mda and South African prison literature. She has published articles on the work of Breyten Breytenbach and J. M. Coetzee.

14Jeanette Schmid is a social worker with more than 25 years of experience. She has practiced in South Africa, Switzerland and Canada. Her experience crosses a range of fields including developmental delay, crime prevention, restorative justice, mediation and conflict resolution, political and other trauma, refugees, early childhood intervention, child welfare and Family Group Conferencing. She is currently a PhD candidate, her research focusing on a genealogy of South African child welfare.

15Carol Serrurier-Zucker was born in South Africa, leaving at the age of twenty-four, at the height of apartheid, to eventually settle in France. She continued her studies at the University of Toulouse, finally completing a PhD at the University of Nancy. Her thesis, directed by Prof. Richard Samin, is entitled ‘Chronique d’une Impossible Transition’. It examines the changes and resistance to change in South African society through the prism of Nadine Gordimer’s writings between 1980 and 1995. She has been a Maître de Conférences at the IUFM Midi-Pyrénées since Septembre 2002, training primary school students and teachers, as well as preparing students for the high school teaching competitive examinations.

16Gilles Teulié is Professor of British and Commonwealth Studies at the University of Aix-Marseille. He has written extensively on South African history and the Victorian period. He published a book on the Afrikaners and the South African War (Montpellier University Press, 2000). He was the editor of several volumes of essays: ‘Writing History in South Africa’, (University of Bayreuth Press, 2003), ‘Religious Writings and War’ (Montpellier University Press, 2006), ‘Victorian Representations of War’ (international journal Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens no 66 October 2007), and a forthcoming one on War Sermons.

17Wessel Visser is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. His research interests are South African labour, socialist, communist and trade union history, as well as Afrikaner history, all on which he has published a number of articles in academic journals. He has also contributed chapters to books on international strike comparisons and on African urban spaces. His research project on the history of the South African Mine Workers’ Union will be published in 2008.

18Marita Wenzel is Associate Professor of English at North-West University (formerly Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education) in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Her main fields of interest relate to comparative literature in Postcolonial, Feminist and Translation studies. She has published several articles on postcolonial topics with particular focus on Latin American and South African novels. She is also an accredited translator (from Afrikaans, German and Spanish into English) for the South African Translator’s Institute.