Conference Speakers
They include scholars from all over the world!
Keynote Speakers
Nivedita Majumdar
Nivedita Majumdar is Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxist theory and cultural studies; she has published widely in these areas. She is author of The World in a Grain of Sand: Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism (Verso, 2021), and The Other Side of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2012/2009).
She sits on the national council of the AAUP, is member of the Higher Education Programs and Policy Committee of the AFT, and has served as Secretary of PSC-CUNY from 2015 to 2021. She currently serves as Academic Director of CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program.
Lecture (Thurday, 17:00): Capital Matters – Culture, History, Politics
Ericka Beckman
Ericka Beckman is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses primarily on narratives of capitalist modernity and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America. Her book, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minnesota, 2013), studied how literature represented the incorporation of the region’s economies into world commodity markets at the end of the nineteenth century. She is currently finishing a book project titled Agrarian Questions: The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism, which examines how, over the course of the twentieth century, the novel became a privileged vehicle for evoking uneven but at the same time momentous historical transitions to capitalism in agriculture.
Her research interests include 19th- and 20th- century Latin American literature and culture; literature and economics; Marxism and critical theory; rural modernity and modernization; colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Lecture (Saturday, 11:00): Agrarian Questions – The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism
Uhuru Portia Phalafala
Uhuru Portia Phalafala is a senior lecturer at the Stellenbosch University of South Africa where she teaches about African and Black Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on Critical Race Studies, Material and Expressive Cultures, Literatures of the Revolution, Anticolonial Social Movements, Black Geographies and Ecologies.
She will read from her book Mine, Mine, Mine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), which is a personal narration of Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s family’s experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, Phalafala follows the death of her grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018, when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favor of the miners.
Phalafala ties the catastrophic effects of gold mining on the miners and the environment in Johannesburg to the destruction of Black lives, the institution of the Black family, and Black sociality. Her epic poem addresses racial capitalism, bringing together histories of the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trades, of plantation economies, and of mining and prison-industrial complexes. As inheritor of the migrant labor lineage, she uses her experience to explore how Black women carry intergenerational trauma of racial capitalism in their bodies and intersects the personal and national, continental and diasporic narration of this history within a critical race framework.
Reading (Saturday, 12:30) of Mine Mine Mine and in conversation with Hanneke Stuit
Hanneke Stuit
Hanneke Stuit is an Associate Professor in the Departments Literary Sciences and the Humanities at Amsterdam University. Keywords concerning her research are carceral, rural, domestic colonisation, South Africa, The Netherlands, literature, affect & genre, metaphoricity & space.
Her current project is provisionally entitled Reimaging the Rural: Pastoral Entrapment and Dis-Enclosure in South Africa (Bloomsbury Academic). The book examines South African literature and film to glean new registers for thinking the rural beyond the trap of dominant and idyllic imaginaries about the countryside that are rooted in devastating colonial habits of thought about enclosure, cultivation and extraction.
In conversation (Saturday, 12:30) with Uhuru Portia Phalafala
Panel Speakers
Sebastian Berg
Sebastian Berg, apl. Professor of Social and Cultural Studies, English and American Studies Department, Ruhr University Bochum, works somewhere in between political theory, political sociology, and cultural studies.
Speaker at Panel “Migration, Movement, Transnationalism” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: ‘Stop the Boats’: Migration, Capitalism, and Cultural Political Economy
Michael Boog
Michael Boog is a PhD student at the University of Bern, Switzerland, whose research is informed by contemporary world literary theory. His SNSF Doc.CH-funded project investigates the role of irrealism in contemporary Anglophone novels in contexts as diverse as Abu Dhabi and Zambia. He has an MA from the University of Bern
Speaker at Panel “Capitalist Realism and Beyond” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: (Anti-)Capitalist Irrealism?
Louis Breitsohl
Louis Breitsohl, studied media cultural studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and film studies at Free University Berlin. They are currently doing a PhD at Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich with the title: ‘Fabulated Differences – Historiographic Constructions of Alternative Minoritarian Identities and Community Form in Contemporary Queer Cinema’. Their scientific and artistic work is interested in mental images and agential scenes, queer-feminist and intersectional theories of affect, psychoanalytic theory and historiographical, film aesthetics.
Speaker at Panel “Migration, Movement, Transnationalism” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: Lifeworldly Contradictions: Displaced Knowledge, Migrating Bodies, and the Affective Sphere
Nikita Dhawan
Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender studies and in support of the women’s movement and the achievement of gender equality. Selected publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming, Duke University Press). In 2023, she was awarded the Gerda-Henkel-Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and the Thomas Mann Fellowship in Los Angeles.
Speaker at Panel Discussion (Friday, 17:15): “Doing Anglophone Postcolonial Studies in German-Speaking Countries → Abstract
Lakshmi Chithra Dilipkumar
Lakshmi chithra Dilipkumar is a PhD student at Universität Augsburg. She is a part of the International Doctoral Program (IDK)- “(Re)thinking Environment ” /(Um)weltDenken co-hosted by Environmental Science Centre (WZU), Univerisität Augsburg and Rachel Carson Centre, Munich.
Her area of interests includes energy humanities, political ecology, literature of environmental justice and literature of the Global South. Through her doctoral project she attempts to analyze texts, that attempt to reimagine the environment as an active agent that affects and is affected by the capitalist world system and locate the resistance movements against the exploitative forces within a wider political framework of class struggle and unequal distribution. Her research focuses on such contemporary anglophone environmental fiction from the Global South, specifically focusing on South Asia and Africa. It highlights the textuality of environmental violence and environmental justice articulated through them.
Speaker at Panel “Extractive and Cannibal Capitalisms in Literature” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: Jaan Denge, Zamin Nahi Denge: Extractive capitalism and indigenous resistance in Siddharth Sarma’s Year of the Weeds and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were
Aysun Doğmuş
Aysun Doğmuş is a sociologist and holds a doctorate in educational science. She has been a professor at Technische Universität Berlin since June 2023 and heads the Department of Teaching and Learning in the Migration Society at the Institute of Educational Science. She is primarily concerned with structural spaces of opportunity for education, professionalisation processes of (prospective) teachers, school and school development in the context of migration society relations, racism (criticism) and intersectionality. Aysun Doğmuş is a board member of the Rat für Migration (Council for Migration).
Speaker at Panel Discussion (Friday, 17:15): “Doing Anglophone Postcolonial Studies in German-Speaking Countries → Abstract
Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Felipe Espinoza Garrido is Senior Lecturer for English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at the University of Münster. Specializing in popular culture and postcolonial studies, he is author of Reframing Margaret Thatcher: Genre, Form, and the Making of Post-Thatcherism in British Film and TV (Manchester UP, 2025, forth.) and co-editor of Locating African European Studies: Interventions, Intersections, Conversations (Routledge, 2020) and Black Neo-Victoriana (Brill, 2022). He is currently working on his second book on excitability and empire imaginations in Victorian popular women’s writing.
Speaker at Panel “Plantation Capitalism” (Saturday, 9:00) → Abstract: Writing global capitalism in eighteenth century Caribbean Creole testimonies: Imagining ‘the plot’ and the early Plantationocene
Annabell Fender
Annabell Fender is a joint PhD candidate at the DFG-funded Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam and University of Melbourne. She holds a Master of Education from the University of Potsdam in the subjects in English & History. Her PhD thesis, tentatively titled ‘Thinking with Bees: Interspecies Intimacy, Human-Bee Assemblages and the Apis-Industrial Complex in So-Called Australia’, explores human-bee relations by analysing a range of natureculture assemblages consisting of human and more-than-human beings, including settlers and First nations people, honeybees, native bees, mites, and plants.
Speaker at Panel “Plantation Capitalism” (Saturday, 9:00) → Abstract: Past and Present Ideas of Purity, Productivity and Progress: the Introduction of the Italian Honeybee and the Modern Apis-Industrial Complex in So-Called Australia
Sofie Fingado
Sofie Fingado studied Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University of Berlin, and its partner universities in Tel Aviv and Copenhagen. She is currently a PhD candidate with the research training group minor cosmopolitanisms, located at the Universities of Potsdam and Melbourne.
Her research interests include carcerality, as well as abolitionist potentialities of care, (collective) survival, relationality and kinship. In her PhD project, she is working on relations within the U.S. prison complex and global detention after 9/11, centering both the relations between these carceral spaces and the intimate relations surpassing carceral walls.
Speaker at Panel “Capitalist Realism and Beyond” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: Guantánamo Economies: Value Production and Counter-Economies
Sina Isabel Freund
Sina Isabel Freund is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Koblenz. Prior to her work in Koblenz, she was part of the academic staff at the University of Hildesheim, where she taught postcolonial pedagogy, diversity education, and inclusion. Her doctoral thesis analysed discourses about migration and integration regarding the recognition of education. Currently, she is located in the field of education and disability studies, but studied postcolonial culture and global policy at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Speaker at the Roundtable (Saturday, 9:00): “Teaching Postcolonial Studies in the English Classroom”→ Abstract
Cherise Fung
Cherise Fung is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States. Her research interests include Asian diasporic literature, transnational feminism, and queer theory. Her work has been published in Meridians. She is currently exploring literary representations of “Asian women” in the global care chain, and how we might rethink this figure as an object of knowledge.
Speaker at Panel “Care and Repair” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: Reading Silence: A Nonhuman Turn in the Crisis of Care
Leo Grabowski
I’m Leo Grabowski, a PhD candidate at Ruhr-University Bochum, where I previously studied Classical Philology and English/American Studies. I also occasionally teach courses on perspectives from former British colonies. My research focuses on resistance movements against (neo-)colonial and imperialist practices and how such movements (continue to) shape the world we live in. Additionally, I work as a textbook developer at Ernst Klett Verlag, a German schoolbook publisher based in Stuttgart.
Speaker at Panel “Re-Reading Anti- and Postcolonial Theory” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: Locating Frantz Fanon in “Post-Apartheid” South Africa – Towards Post-Racist and Post-Capitalist Alternatives
Wang Yuen Ho
Wang Yuen Ho studies National and Transnational Studies at the University of Münster. He holds an MA in Applied Linguistics and a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include postcolonial narratives, memory politics, and transgenerational trauma. He is particularly interested in how narratives shape collective memory and influence contemporary socio-political landscapes.
Speaker at Panel “Postcolonial and post-handover Hong Kong” (Friday, 16:00) → Abstract: Post-handover Cultural Identity and Political Resistance in Hong Kong: Speaking through Unfree Speech
Amjad Hussain
Amjad Hussain, Scholar at Large at the moment. I teach and pursue interests in early Frankfurt School’s critical social theory. I have over 18 years of teaching experience at undergraduate and graduate levels.
Co-Speaker at a panel with Sajjad Khan “Re-Reading Anti- and Postcolonial Theory” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: Reclaiming the Heritage of Resistance: Philosophical Foundations of Postcolonial Theory
Roger Dale Jones
Roger Dale Jones is a professor for English Subject Pedagogy at University of Klagenfurt in Austria. He has taught foreign languages at the secondary and tertiary level in the USA and Germany, and has taught English as a foreign language (EFL) pedagogy in Germany and Austria. His research interests range from the intersection of culture, foreign language acquisition & learning, and digital media (with focus on digital games) to the teaching of global poverty (as a part of Education for Sustainable Development), and includes critical analysis of the representation of inequality in EFL textbooks.
Speaker at Panel “Critiques of Capitalism in Literary Studies and Teaching” (Friday, 16:00) → Abstract: Freedom for the Pike? Poverty and Capitalism in German EFL Schoolbooks
Speaker at the Roundtable (Saturday, 9:00): “Teaching Postcolonial Studies in the English Classroom”→ Abstract
Isabella Kalte
Isabella Kalte is a PhD candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and a member of the International PhD program “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP). In her doctoral project, entitled “(Re-)Writing Caribbean Femininity: Narrative Negotiations of Femininities and Resistance in Postmillennial Anglo-Caribbean Fiction,” she employs a cultural narratological approach and postcolonial feminist theory to examine how femininity is represented and imagined for a contemporary audience in ways that demonstrate a critical stance towards resistance, indicative of recent Caribbean fiction’s complex engagement with the Caribbean literary canon. Isabella is publications coordinator at the GCSC, an editorial team member of the Open Access scholarled journal On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture as well as executive editor of KULT_online, an interdisciplinary Open Access review journal based at the GCSC.
Speaker at Panel “Debt, Developmentalism and Postcolonial Capitalism” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: Reading The Long Song through the Lens of Postcolonial Capitalism: Entrepreneurship, Gender, and Resistance
Melissa Kennedy
Melissa Kennedy is a Pakeha New Zealander with immigrant experience in Japan, France and now Austria. She is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Pädagogische Hochschule Oberösterreich, and Privatdozentin at the University of Vienna. She has been working in Economic Criticism for ages and her published work includes a monograph Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics (Palgrave 2017), 3 edited collections Uncommonwealths in Postcolonial Literature (with Helga Ramsey Kurz, Brill 2017), Pacific Critiques of Globalization (with Janet Wilson, Interventions 19 2017), Island Narratives of Persistence and Resistance (with Paloma Fresno Calleja, Interventions 25
2023) and various Handbook chapters on economic inequality in postcolonial contexts.
Co-Speaker at a panel & discussion with Christine Lorre “Material Matters and Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: Material matters and environmental justice in a postcolonial world
Speaker at the Roundtable (Saturday, 9:00): “Teaching Postcolonial Studies in the English Classroom”→ Abstract
Sajjed Khan
Sajjad Khan, works as a subject specialist in English in Elementary and Secondary Education Department KPK. I am also pursuing Mphil degree from Qurtuba University in English Literature. My interest lies in Postcolonial and critical social theory.
Co-Speaker at a panel with Amjad Hussain Speaker at Panel “Re-Reading Anti- and Postcolonial Theory” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: Reclaiming the Heritage of Resistance: Philosophical Foundations of Postcolonial Theory
Lotta König
Lotta König is Professor for Teaching Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bielefeld. She has worked as a teacher of English and French and as a researcher of foreign language teaching at Göttingen University where she also completed her PhD on _Gender-Reflexion mit Literatur im Fremdsprachenunterricht_ (Metzler 2018). Her research interests include: Critical cultural learning, language learning beyond the classroom and teaching about diversity in literature.
Speaker at the Roundtable (Saturday, 9:00): “Teaching Postcolonial Studies in the English Classroom” → Abstract
Akshay Kumar
I, Dr. Akshay Kumar, am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, India. I was awarded a PhD in 2023-24 from the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University for my dissertation titled Marginality and Resistance: An Exploration of the ‘Culture’ of the Musahars in Bihar.
My research interests focus on exploring the intersections of caste, class, and gender within subaltern studies, emphasising their interconnectedness in shaping culture and political economy. I critically engage with postcolonial and subaltern studies, addressing their limitations in overlooking these dynamics, which are crucial for understanding institutionalised exploitation.
Speaker at Panel “Re-Reading Anti- and Postcolonial Theory” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: Reimagining Postcolonialism: Ambedkar, Caste, and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Context
Tingxuan Liu
My name is Tingxuan Liu (she/her). I am a Warwick-funded PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. My research focuses on Asian Anglophone Literature, Asian Diasporic Literature, and World Literature, with my PhD thesis examining Asian Anglophone literature in the age of neoliberalism. Alongside my research, I teach Modern World Literature module in my department. From October 2022 to October 2023, I was a visiting fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
Speaker at “Under Construction: PhD Projects” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: Asian Modernity as Neoliberal Dessert: Realism and the Global Gaze in Crazy Rich Asians
Christine Lorre
Christine Lorre is Professor of English Studies at the University of Caen, France. Her research focuses on literature from Canada and New Zealand, with interests in gender and the genre of the short story; she co-edited Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction: “A Book with Maps in It” (with Eleonora Rao, Camden House, 2018), “Unsettling Oceania, 250 Years Later” (with Salhia Ben Messahel, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2018) and “Afterlives of the Bible” (with Mark Williams, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 2018). More recently, she turned to Environmental Humanities and convened the 2023 EACLALS conference at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris on the topic of “Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World.” She is now co-editing with Melissa Kennedy a Special Issue of Interventions on “Material Matters and Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World.” She is the current President of the SEPC (French Society for Postcolonial Studies) and of EACLALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies).
Co-Speaker with Melissa Kennedy Speaker at Panel “Material Matters and Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: Material matters and environmental justice in a postcolonial world
Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem
Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem, alias Wan wo layir, a non-human self-inflicted severe drapetomania patient, a kulturbanausse, a trickster, and a multi-award-winning troublemaker. Amongst his numerous awards and recognitions, he recently received the prestigious ban from the Humboldt Forum, he was the first to receive the prestigious award. He is also a doctoral research fellow at the Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and a visiting scholar at the Ecologies of Knowledges program at Duke University in Durham, NC.
Speaker at Panel “Under Construction: PhD Projects” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: The Political Economy of Restitution
Dorit Neumann
Dorit Neumann is a lecturer and researcher at the Chair of English, Postcolonial, and Media Studies at the University of Münster, where she is completing a PhD on “Black British Hauntology: Hauntings of Empire in Black British Literature.” Her work places in relation hauntological concepts, Blackness, and theories of the oceanic to inquire how their interplay enables new forms of remembrance of transatlantic slavery in contemporary Black British writing. She co-organized the 2023 Postcolonial Narrations Forum “Queering Postcolonial Worlds” and is co-editor of the special issues Envisioning Queer Racialized Self-Representations in the Americas (AmLit) and Queering Postcolonial Worlds (gender forum).
Speaker at Panel “Care and repair” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: “Frenzied, gnashing of teeth, devouring her body”: Cannibal Capitalism and Colonial Hauntings in Danaé Wellington’s Performance Poetry
Michael Niblett
Michael Niblett is Associate Professor (Reader) in Modern World Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. He has written extensively on world literature, postcolonial studies and ecocriticism. His books include The Caribbean Novel since 1945 (2012), World Literature and Ecology (2020), and, most recently, Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, World-Culture (with Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro).
Speaker at Panel “Debt, Developmentalism and Postcolonial Capitalism” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: Caribbean Apocalypses: Debt and Dystopia in Contemporary Caribbean Writing
Rita Nnodim
Rita Nnodim, PhD, is Professor of Interdisciplinary, Global, and Intercultural Studies at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) USA. She holds a PhD in West African Studies from the University of Birmingham, UK, and an MA in African Studies from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her research focuses on anglophone African and South Asian urban fiction. She has authored book chapters and scholarly articles, among them “City Imaginaries from the Margins: Anosh Irani’s Bombay Novels” and “City, Identity and Dystopia: Writing Lagos in Contemporary Nigerian Novels” and regularly presents her work at national and international academic conferences.
Speaker at Panel “Exctractive and Cannibal Capitalisms in Literature” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: Expulsions, Resistance, and Literary Imaginations of the “Other” – Globalization, Mining, and the Africa-China Nexus in Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. Bismarck’s Testament
Tola Ositelu
Tola Ositelu first studied law in the UK, before later completing a MA in Sociocultural Linguistics at London’s Goldsmiths University. Her thesis focused on how multiple identities unconsciously emerge through discourse, as artists narrate the relationship with their diverse crafts.
Tola is currently a PhD fellow and project coordinator at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. Her research project, (Post-)migrant Narratives of Mobility and Care: The ‘Windrush’ Generation and the NHS Experience in Society, Literature and Culture, aims to analyse and make more visible for the first time, in a comprehensive way, the formation of narratives surrounding Afrodescendant migrant women’s experience in/of care, particularly in the British context of the National Health Service (NHS). The research has an analytic focus on how narratives are used to (co-)construct and negotiate identity.
Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Eva Ulrike Pirker, the study is associated with the VUB’s MERLIT research project’s investigation of meritocratic narratives in, through and in this case, beyond literature.
Speaker at Panel “Care and Repair” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: Problematising the Meritocratic ‘Self’ in Post-migrant Narratives of Mobility and Care
Harald Pittel
Dr. Harald Pittel teaches British Cultural Studies at Leipzig University. He has published articles on post-Brexit fiction, working-class literature and decadent theory. From 2018 to 2019, he was a visiting scholar at Delhi University. He wrote his PhD thesis on Romance and Irony: Oscar Wilde and the Political. His second book (in progress) explores to what extent the crises of the present might shape a new understanding of world literature. His other research interests include political affect studies, comparative film studies, genre theories, and materialist theories of culture.
Speaker at Panel “Cultural Studies Approaches to Neoliberal Capitalism” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: Structure of Feeling as a Mode of Resistance? Countering the Capitalist Crisis of Indian Cinema
Nora Pleßke
Nora Pleßke is Assistant Professor for Anglophone Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Magdeburg. Her doctoral thesis The Intelligible Metropolis: Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels (transcript 2014) was awarded the Helene-Richter-Prize by the German Association for the Study of English. Besides urban literary and cultural studies, her main research areas include postcolonial studies, transcultural theory, material culture studies, and economic criticism. She is co-coordinator of the DFG-funded research network Methodologies of Economic Criticism with Ellen Grünkemeier and Joanna Rostek; the network’s Introducing Economic Criticism is forthcoming with Palgrave in 2025. Nora Plesske is also currently preparing a monograph entitled Colonial Objects: Translocation in the Second British Empire for publication.
Speaker at Panel “Cultural Studies Approaches to Neoliberal Capitalism” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: (Post)Colonial Econotopes: Infrastructures of Imperial and Neoliberal Capitalism
Geoff Rodoreda
Geoff Rodoreda is a lecturer in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart. In an earlier life he studied politics, media theory and journalism in Sydney, Australia, and worked as a journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Adelaide and Darwin. He completed his PhD in Stuttgart in 2016. He is the author of The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2018) and the co-editor of Mabo’s Cultural Legacy (Anthem, 2021).
In discussion (Friday, 16:00) with Raja Shehadeh → Abstract
Alexander Rüter
Alexander Rüter is a doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne’s Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH). There, his research focusses on transpacific ecologies in Asian American literature, especially in the work of Karen Tei Yamashita. For his doctoral project, he combines readings of transpacific texts with philosophical works on ontological pluralism, especially the late writings of Bruno Latour. His scholarship has previously appeared in Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies as well as Ecozon@ European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment.
Speaker at Panel “Cultural Studies Approaches to Neoliberal Capitalism” (Friday, 11:00) → Abstract: The View from Space(X): The Planetary, Global Agency, and Start-Up Thinking
Arindam Saha
Arindam Saha is a Ph.D. scholar at the Department of English, Pondicherry University, India. His area of research focuses on new theories of world literature, and he is currently working on writings about coal mining workers in West Bengal, locating them within the logic of regional world literature. He previously received full travel grants twice to attend the international conference on Sustainable Diversity held at Queens College, City University of New York, USA, in 2017 and 2018. He also received a partial travel grant to present a paper on the theme of Postcolonial Insfracture organized by GAPS at the University of Konstanz in 2023.
Speaker at Panel “Extractive capitalisms in Literature” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: Towards a Republic of Local–World Letters: A Decolonial Reading of Coal Miners’ Narratives
Ruvindra Sathsarani
Ruvindra Sathsarani is a doctoral candidate and the teaching and research assistant to the Chair of English Literature and Gender Studies at University of Tübingen. Her doctoral thesis focuses on how literary fiction functions as a source that enables the exploration of the voiceconsciousness of marginalized female workers within post-colonial backgrounds.
Speaker at “Under Construction: PhD Projects” (Friday, 14:00) → Abstract: Reading the Subaltern Worker through her Master: A Deconstructive Reading of the Master-Servant Narrative within Post-Colonial Capitalism
Frank Schulze-Engler
Frank Schulze-Engler was professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt until his retirement in 2023. He has published widely on African, Asian and Indigenous literatures and cultures, postcolonial theory, World Anglophone Studies, World Literature, Indian Ocean Studies, postcolonial Europe, and transculturality in a world of globalized modernity. He is former president of GAPS (then ASNEL) and was joint project leader of “Africa’s Asian Options” (AFRASO), a major collaborative research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. His most recent book publications include the edited volumes Afrasian Transformations: Transregional Perspectives on Development Cooperation, Social Media and Cultural Change (Brill 2020, co-edited with R. Achenbach, J. Beek, J.N. Karugia and R. Mageza-Barthel), Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South (Ibidem 2022, co-edited with A. Gremels, M. Scheurer, and J- Wegner) and Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers (Routledge 2024, co-edited with Pavan Kumar Malreddy).
Speaker at Panel “Critiques of Capitalism in Literary Studies and Teaching” (Friday, 16:00) → Abstract: “It’s the Imagination, Stupid”: Economism, Ethics, and the Labour of World Anglophone Studies
Speaker at Panel Discussion (Friday, 17:15): “Doing Anglophone Postcolonial Studies in German-Speaking Countries → Abstract
Jaya Sharma
Jaya Sharma is a PhD student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, India and is currently pursuing her PhD in German Studies. The title of her dissertation is ‘An Ecocritical Analysis of Selected Contemporary German and Hindi Literature.’ As a scholarship holder of the Erasmus+ programme, she will spend a semester at the University of Konstanz in 2025. Her research interests include Comparative Studies, Environmental Humanities, Post-Colonial Studies and Literary Studies. With her work, she wants to explore and deepen the connection between Indo-German scientific and environmental thought.
Speaker at Panel “Debt, Developmetnalism and Postcolonial Capitalism” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: Reimaging Natureculture: Narratives of Resistance to “Developmentalism” in Contemporary Hindi Literature
Raja Shehadeh
Raja Shehadeh is Palestine’s leading writer, the author of more than 20 books, written mostly in English but also in Arabic and French. He is a lawyer and founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq. He lives in Ramallah. In this live, online discussion on land, place and mobility, Shehadeh will read from his books Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (Profile, 2008) and Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation (Profile, 2019).
A reading and discussion (Friday, 16:00) with Geoff Rodoreda → Abstract
Oluwadunni Talabi
Oluwadunni Talabi (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher and the executive director of Canadian and Québec studies at the University of Bremen, Germany.
Speaker at Panel “Migration, Movement, Transnationalism” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: Fragmented Unity: Tracing Trans-National Black Identities and Class Fractures in Kobby Ben Ben’s No One Dies Yet (2023)
Caitlin Vandertop
Caitlin Vandertop is an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Prior to this, she was a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific’s Laucala campus in Fiji. She is the author of Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth Century Literature (Cambridge UP, 2021) and co-editor (with Sudesh Mishra) of Commodities and Literature (Cambridge UP, Critical Concepts series, in press). She is currently writing a book about island fiction, imperial fertility and agricultural resource frontiers in the nineteenth-century Pacific World.
Speaker at Panel “Plantation Capitalism” (Saturday, 9:00) → Abstract: Body, Island, Plantation: Capitalist Intimacies in the Oceanic Novel
Corina Wieser-Cox
Corina/Cori Wieser–Cox (they/them) was born and raised on the Mexico–US border in Brownsville, Texas and is a Mestize* Mexican American. Their MA thesis titled “Brujeria in the Borderlands: Portrayals of Mexican American Witchcraft in Hollywood Horror Films” won the GAPS Graduate Award in May 2021 and the Bremer Studienpreis in March 2022. It is contracted to be published as a monograph with Peter Lang Verlag in 2025. Cori is currently a PhD candidate and research assistant at U Bremen and their dissertation is titled “We’re Queer and We’re Here: Decolonizing Mexican and Chicanx Queer Cinema.” Cori is currently co–editor of COPAS (Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies) and co–edited The Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Cinema (Nov. 2024) with Kerstin Knopf, WG Pearson and Ernie Blackmore.
Speaker at Panel “Capitalist Realism and Beyond” (Friday, 9:00) → Abstract: a
Julia Wurr
Chair at Panel Discussion (Friday, 17:15): “Doing Anglophone Postcolonial Studies in German-Speaking Countries → Abstract
Simon Yin
After earning my BA degree from Peking University in China, I attained my MA degree in Regional Studies from Harvard University in the USA and my PhD in Asian Studies from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. Now I teach at Hefei University of Technology in China.
Speaker at Panel “Postcolonial and post-handover Hong Kong” (Friday, 16:00) → Abstract: Teaching Liberal Arts in Post-Colonial Hong Kong