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Chris
was born in Zimbabwe
and grew up in South Africa. He studied
at the Universities of Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal before moving to the UK to do a PhD at Cambridge University where he was a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholar. Chris held a lectureship
at Stellenbosch University in South Africa in 2004 and 2005 and then moved back to the UK
to take up his current post as Lecturer in Postcolonial and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English, Cambridge University. Chris is a fellow of
St John’s College,
where he directs studies in English and in 2008 Chris served as Acting Director of the African Studies Centre. His book, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, will be
published by Palgrave Macmillan in late 2008. Chris is currently working on a study of South African literature in the post-apartheid
period.
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Ranka Primorac was born in 1963 in Zagreb, Croatia, and she has degrees from
the universities of Zagreb, Zimbabwe
and Nottingham Trent. She has taught courses on postcolonialism at a number of institutions of higher learning and is now a teaching fellow at the Department of English, University of Southampton. Ranka has written widely about Zimbabwean literature
and culture: she is the author of The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe (2006) and co-editor
of Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture (2005) and Zimbabwe in Crisis: The International
Response and the Space of Silence (2007). She is currently preparing edited collections on Zimbabwe’s new diasporas and on African city textualities (both forthcoming
in 2009), and is about to embark on a BA-funded research project on contemporary Zambian writing. Ranka’s research interests
are centred on the social and political functioning of literary fictions. She joins PSA in the hope of promoting its agendas
on multi-disciplinarity and comparativism, and helping to include non-UK members and organisations.
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Melanie
Murray has a PhD from the University of Northampton where her thesis explored writing
from the islands of the Caribbean and Sri Lanka.
She has published articles in World Literature Written in English and South Asian Literature in English:
An Encyclopedia, ed. Jaina C. Sanga (2004) and also written several reviews in the Journal
of Postcolonial Writing. Her book Island Paradise, the Myth: An Examination of Contemporary Caribbean and Sri Lankan Writing is being published by Rodopi.
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Robert Spencer
is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester.
He has published articles in numerous journals and edited collections, on subjects such as African fiction, postcolonial theory,
the philosophy of modernism and the work of Edward Said. He is currently working on a book on the relevance of cosmopolitan ideas to debates within postcolonial
theory and literary criticism.
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Dave Gunning studied at the Universities of Manchester and Leeds. He has taught at Leeds, Manchester, Huddersfield,
and Nottingham Trent Universities
and is now lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. His research interests centre on the politics of minority identity and representations
of race and ethnicity. His books Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature and Postcolonial
Literature are being published with Liverpool University Press and Edinburgh University Press respectively.
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Dr. Christine O’Dowd-Smyth is a lecturer in French & Francophone literary and
cultural studies at Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Republic of Ireland. Her research interests, publications, and teaching are primary in the areas
of Francophone & Comparative Postcolonial Studies; Contemporary French culture, society, literature and film; and women's
autobiographical narrative.
She is the Postcolonial Studies Association Representative for Ireland, and
is currently organsing the inaugural conference of the PSA, to be held in WIT in May 2009. She has previously edited and obtained
funding for two books of conference proceedings; had eight articles published in peer-reviewed journals and has organised
two funded international conferences in WIT on Francophone Literatures and on Ireland/Newfoundland/Francophone World and a
Writer in Residence. She also established the WIT School of
Humanities Publications with license to issue ISBN's. She is a founder member of the WIT Center for Newfounfland & Labrador
Studies.
Dr. O’Dowd-Smyth is now in her final year of a degree in Theology &
Vocation, in traning for the non-stipendiary Anglican ministry in the Church
of Ireland, and will be ordained in June 2009.
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Marta Vizcaya
Echano has recently held a Postdoctoral Research Assistantship at the University of Northampton, after completing
a PhD in US Hispanic Women’s Writing at York and teaching at Aston and Bristol. Her research interests include ethnic American narratives, contemporary Hispanic
literatures, and diasporic writing (particularly from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean). Other
related interests are women’s writing, auto/biography, detective fiction and literature for young adults. She has published
several articles and book chapters in these areas. She has also taught Spanish in Higher and Adult Education centres.
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Postgraduate
Officer/ Early Career Representative
Rehana
Ahmed
Rehana Ahmed is Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded project ‘Making Britain:
South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950’ and based in the English Department at the Open University.
She completed her PhD thesis, which explores representations of multicultural Britain in contemporary British Asian fiction, at Nottingham Trent University
in 2006. She is the editor of Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain
(Young Picador, 2004), a collection of stories for teenagers by British Asian writers, and has taught postcolonial writing
at Nottingham Trent University, Roehampton University, and Royal Holloway, University of London.
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Asia Zgadzaj is a postgraduate student at the
University of Southampton. She is currently working on her PhD thesis exploring motherhood and female identity in
contemporary Nigerian and Zimbabwean literature. She is a postgraduate representative in the British Comparative
Literature Association. Her research interests include feminist comparative literature, identity and womanhood in 20th
and 21st Century African women’s writing. Asia teaches English-Polish practical translation at Imperial College London.
She co-organised PSA inaugural conference in Waterford, Ireland in May 2009.
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Nancy Roberts is a part-time PhD student at Birkbeck College, London, working
on the intersections between postcolonial and feminist theory in the novels of Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, and is
generally interested in the cultural politics of dress, particularly the veil. She works in the publishing industry as a Head
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Dr
Gerri Kimber is an Associate Lecturer at The Open University. She is Liaison Editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies,
the peer-reviewed Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society. Her main focus for research has two strands; firstly the field
of modernism, especially Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and the Bloomsbury group; secondly (post)colonial
literature from New Zealand. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). She
was co-editor and contributor to Framed! Essays in French Studies (2007). She has contributed
further chapters/entries in the following books: Translation and Censorship: Arts of Interference (2008),
Companion to the British Short Story and Short Fiction (2007), Encyclopaedia of Popular Fiction (2009) and General
Themes in Literature (2009). Gerri has had articles published in Les Cahiers du CICLaS, British
Review of New Zealand Studies, 2001 Group: Essays in French Studies, and Moveable Type. She is
an on-going contributor for the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies (ABES), specialising in
both modernism and postcolonial literature. She is Deputy-Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-organised
the Katherine Mansfield Centenary Conference held in London in September 2008. She co-organised the Mansfield Symposium
held in Menton, France, in September 2009, to celebrate
the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. Gerri is also on the Executive Committee of the Postcolonial
Studies Association and co-organised their inaugural conference in Waterford, Ireland in May 2009.
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Kaori Nagai teaches at the University of
Kent. She is the author of Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (Cork UP, 2006). She has edited a
journal collection entitled ‘Dream Writing’ (Journal of European Studies, forthcoming 2008), and is currently
co-editing a book of postcolonial essays on Rudyard Kipling. She works mainly on the colonial discourses of the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, and has recently completed a Leverhulme research fellowship on the artificial language movements
in the British Empire.
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Lucienne Loh
received my PhD in English in January 2008 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary areas of research and teaching
are in Postcolonial Literature and twentieth-century literature and she is a part time lecturer for the MA in Contemporary
Literature at Brunel University. Lucienne is interested in
issues of race and imperialism and the urban/rural divide both in the British and postcolonial context. She is currently working
on turning her PhD thesis into a monograph, "Beyond English Fields: Colonial Nostalgia in a Cosmopolitan World."
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Publications Committee
Spokesperson: Alex Tickell alex.tickell@port.ac.uk Amrit Biswas
Michelle
Keown
Patricia Krus
Christine O’Dowd-Smyth
Jayne Poyner
Janet Wilson
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Postcolonial Studies Database
CommitteeSpokesperson:
Patricia Krus patricia.krus@instituteforadvancedstudies.org.uk
Joel Gwynne
Ole Birk Laursen
Marta Vizcaya Echano
Janet Wilson
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Postgraduate Conference Committee
Spokesperson: Brian Rock brian.rock@stir.ac.uk
Rehana Ahmed
OIe Birk Laursen
Bobby
Flora-Bhambra
Laurence Randall
Nancy Roberts
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