Speakers 

Masturah Alatas is the author of The Life in the Writing (Gerakbudaya, 2024), the first biography of Malaysian sociologist, Syed Hussein Alatas (1928-2007). She is also the author of the fable, The Girl Who Made It Snow In Singapore (Singapore: Ethos Books 2008), and is one of several writers around the world along with Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh and Susan Abulhawa to be included in the anthology Will The Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change (LeftWord Books, 2017). Masturah teaches English at the University of Macerata, in Italy, where she has been living since 1992. She has also published essays and short fiction in Italian, making her the first Malaysian to write and publish in that language. One of her stories was longlisted for the 2006 edition of the Lingua Madre literary Prize. In 2021, Masturah won Singapore Unbound’s first flash fiction prize. 

Madeline Becker is a researcher at the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Rostock. She studied English Literature and Culture and European History at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Germany) and at Bath Spa University (England). She has recently submitted her dissertation at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg. The dissertation explores mediations of endangered environments and species in nature, wildlife, and environmental documentaries. She has further published on the zombie as a mediator of pandemics and epidemics, animal attacks on humans as a way to confront humans with their materiality, and reproductive technologies in the Anthropocene.

Alessandro Brunazzo is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Olso, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS), where he is conducting a two-year project entitled: "That Sinking Feeling": Ecocritical Approach to Land Subsidence in Italy's Po Delta region (Earthsea). He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University and was previously adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University in Florence and at the University of Virginia in Siena (CET). Alessandro's main research interests lie at the intersection between the environmental humanities and film studies. He adopts multidisciplinary and transnational approaches to world cinema, Italian, English, French literature, and ecocriticism. 

Stefano Maria Casella has taught English and Anglo-American Literature at IULM University-Milan (1986-2023) Publications: essays and book chapters on T.S. Eliot; Ezra Pound; Modernism; comparative literature; environmental literature and eco-criticism, with a ground-breaking series of essays on Henry Beston’s poetics, philosophy, economics, spirituality. Translations of American and British poets. For decades member of, and speaker at, the “Ezra Pound International Conference”, the “International T.S. Eliot Society” and several other Conferences in English, Anglo-American, comparative, environmental literature/ecocriticism, and animal studies. Member of IAWIS-AIERTI; AISNA; Power of the Word Conference, etc. Awarded Visting Fellowships at Clare Hall College (Cambridge Univ.); Heythrop College (London Univ.); The Bogliasco Foundation. Invited peer reviewer for Oxford University Press, Peter Lang Verlag and A-class literary journals; member of the Fellowship Advisory Committee of The Bogliasco Foundation; elected Life Member of Clare Hall College-Cambridge. Just nominated for the Advisory Board, Italian Americana.

Carmen Concilio is Full professor of English and postcolonial Literature at the University of Torino. She is recipient of the Canada-Italy Innovation Award 2021, she is former President of the Italian Association of Postcolonial Studies, and former Director of the BA course in Modern Languages and Literatures. She is part of the Scientific Board of the Centre for research in Digital Humanties DISH at UniTo. Her research concerns postcolonial studies, migration and diaspora studies, environmental studies and ecocriticism, digital humanities, and Alzheimer’s and ageing studies. Author of Imagining Ageing, Representation of Age and Ageing in Anglophone Literature (Transcript 2018); curator of Covid-19 & Us. Seniors’ Letters to the Future (Nuova Trauben 2019) in cooperation with AICW Canada; guest editor of Italian Canadiana vol. 37.1 (spring 2023).

Rocio G. Davis is Professor of American Literature at the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain). Her areas of interest include transnational literature, autobiography, and popular culture. She has published Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs (University of Hawaii Press, 2011) and Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (University of Hawaii Press, 2007). She is also co-editor of the journal Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

Georgiana (Georgi) de Rham is a Master’s student in McGill University’s English Department. Her interests lie with the environmental humanities, where she is particularly drawn to the relationship between humans and their environments, nonhuman and material agency, and the more than human world in literature and performance. In addition to pursuing her Master’s degree in the English Department, Georgiana is involved in McGill University’s Bieler School of Environment as a Teaching Assistant for Environmental Thought, an undergraduate course on critical theory, systems interventions, and applied theories of change. Before coming to McGill, Georgi worked with horses and small-scale agriculture for several years. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University. 

Former Fulbright scholar at the University of Massachusetts and Visiting Professor at Mount Holyoke College, she is currently Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Turin, where she is member of several advisory and executive boards. She has published extensively on environmental humanities, the interconnections of contemporary American literatures and the other arts, theory and practice of literary translation; among others:  ContaminAzioni ecologiche. Cibi, nature e culture (LED, 2015) co-edited with Serenella Iovino; Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie (Il Mulino, 2018) and Trees in Literatures and the Arts. HumanArboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene (Lexington Books, 2021) co-edited with Carmen Concilio. She has been recipient of several scholarships and fellowships, among which CEMS (Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, NYU 2016); The Bogliasco Foundation (2018 and 2021), IASH (The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh 2018). In the Spring Semester 2023, she was Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh, PA.

Dorothea Fischer-Hornung is retired Senior Lecturer in the English Department and member of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She is the author of numerous publications in the field of African and Native American literature and culture, with an emphasis on dance, and performance studies. Among her publications are Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art; Performing Migration, with Rocio Davis and Johanna Kardux (Routledge, UK), Vampires and Zombies: Transcultural Migrations and Transnational Interpretations, with Monika Mueller (University Press of Mississippi), and recently, “Langston Hughes’ Jesse B. Simple Story Cycles in German Translation.” In Langston Hughes in Context (2023), edited by Vera Kutzinski and Anthony Reed.  She was a founding Executive of The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA) and President between 2006 and 2014. She is co-editor of the journal Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Routledge, U.K. 

Stefano Franceschini is a PhD candidate in Anglo-American Literature at Roma Tre University. His work focuses on the meaning of music in the novels of Richard Powers. In 2021 he won AISNA’s “Caterina Gullì” prize for his MA dissertation on H.P. Lovecraft. Earlier this year he also received an “Ernst Mach Grant – Worldwide” scholarship (financed by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research) for a research period at the Center for Intermediality Studies in Graz (Jan-Feb 2023). He has published on horror fiction and adaptations. His academic interests include intermediality, Gothic and weird fiction, semiotics, and philosophy of music.

Teresa Gibert is Professor of English at the UNED (Madrid), where she teaches American and Canadian literature. Her publications on Margaret Atwood include journal articles in Miscelánea. A Journal of English and American Studies, ES Review, and Journal of English Studies together with essays in collected volumes such as Women Ageing through Literature and Experience (Universitat de Lleida, 2005),  Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Rodopi, 2012), Traces of Aging. Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative (Transcript Verlag, 2016), Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present: Fields of Action, Fields of Vision (Brill/Rodopi, 2018), and Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018). Furthermore, she contributed to The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2009) with the chapter “‘Ghost Stories’: Fictions of History and Myth.” More information on Prof. Gibert’s website: https://www.uned.es/universidad/docentes/filologia/maria-teresa-gibert-maceda.html

Andrea Holešová is an assistant professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. She teaches a variety of courses focusing on American studies, history, and literature. Her primary interests are pop culture and contemporary American drama. Andrea’s been part of a research team currently working on a grant project “Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literatures” funded by The Czech Science Foundation. Her contribution lies in studying how water pollution (particularly the Flint Water Crisis) has been reflected on in African American Drama.

Yesmina Khedhir is a senior PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She has a BA and MA in English Language and Literature from the Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Humanities in Manouba, Tunisia and is a former Fulbright scholar (FLTA) at Stanford university. Her research project focuses on studying the multiple aspects of cultural memory and trauma in Jesmyn Ward’s fiction. Yesmina’s academic interests include, but are not limited to, African American literature, history, and culture, Black feminism/womanism, ecocriticism, memory and trauma studies, pop culture. Yesmina has participated in numerous international academic conferences and events and has published articles related to her field of research in international academic journals, books, and conference volumes. Her most recent article “‘Tomorrow, I think, everything will be washed clean’: Water Imagery in Jesmyn Ward’s Post-Katrina Novel, Salvage the Bones” is published in a collection of essays entitled Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Film, and Music (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, June 2023).

Enrico Mariani is a postdoctoral researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He taught AngloAmerican Literature at the University of Naples Federico II and at Roma Tre University, where he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation about the autobiographical narratives of Louis Adamic, Carlos Bulosan, and John Fante. In 2022 he has been a visiting scholar at the Calandra Italian American Institute (CUNY). He published articles and volume contributions on John Fante, Carlos Bulosan, and John Steinbeck, while his research interests include Italian American Studies, Filipinx American Studies, Californian Literature, and World Literature. He is a member of AISNA.

Hanna Masslich is a PhD student and research assistant at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She completed her master’s degrees in Advanced Anglophone Studies (M.A.) and English and Political Science (M.Ed.) at the Leibniz University Hannover in 2021. In her doctoral thesis, which is tentatively titled “Narrating Water/Water’s Narrativity: Representations of Rising Water in Contemporary Fiction,” she will investigate North American water fiction. Since June 2023, Hanna Masslich is part of the interdisciplinary research cluster “Thüringer Wasser-Innovationscluster” in Jena, where she will expand on her research on water narratives and will specifically focus on the Colorado River. Her research interests include Contemporary Literature, Environmental Humanities, the Anthropocene and Climate Change, New Materialism, Material Ecocriticism, as well as Postcolonial and Indigenous Studies.

Bryan E. Norwood, PhD is a historian and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on architecture and building practices in the United States and Atlantic World in the long 19th century. He is completing a book entitled Architectural Pursuits: Contracts, Complaint, and Historical Faith in the Early Nineteenth-Century United States.

Mary O’Neill is an author, artist and academic. Her work spans diverse practices, including writing, both academic and creative writing, sculpture, photography and film. O’Neill has received international recognition through a number of prestigious awards and residencies; the Banff Art Centre, Canada; Grace Performance Space, New York and The Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, Scotland, among others. Her academic writing covers ephemerality, loss, meaning and mourning, as well as the relationship between the lived experience and the academic, and is often experimental,  to address issues of audience and accessibility of academic writing. O’Neill is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and currently is Associate Head (Education) in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, and Course Leader for Fine Art at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

Elisa Pesce (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her project investigates the reasons underlying the omission of women from models of fictional maximalism by assessing the scope and implications of this narrative style in the framework of contemporary cultural production in the United States. She is therefore interested in the interrelation between standards of genre formation and literary merit and questions of power. Elisa has presented her research outputs at various international conferences and in journals such as European Journal of American Studies and JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy). In April 2022, she organised and chaired the International Panel “Fictional Maximalism and The Americas: New Voices, New Perspectives” for the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies in Glasgow.

Cydney Phillip is a postdoctoral research fellow based at University College London, Institute of Advanced Studies. Her work engages with questions of memory, ecology, and race, and is predominantly concerned with artistic responses to environmental injustice. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Caught in the Crosscurrent: Narratives of the Plantationocene from the U.S. Gulf Coast, which focuses on the ways in which artists and activists from the American Gulf South shape memories of the Plantationocene and prompt us to consider how plantation structures of the past and present are indebted to water. 

Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez is is Professor of American Studies and Minority Studies at Leipzig University, Germany. Recent publications include the coedited volumes Processes of Spatialization in the Americas: Configurations and Narratives (2018) , Hemispheric Encounters: The Early United States in a Transnational Perspective (2016) , as well as the special forum “Archipelagic Spaces and Mobilities (Journal of Transnational American Studies  14:1 (2023). She is the coauthor of Periphere Räume in der Amerikanistik (DeGruyter 2019) and Imaginationen  (DeGruyter 2019), and the author of MexAmerica: Genealogien und Analysen postnationaler Diskurse in der kulturellen Produktion von Chicanos/as  (Winter 2005). Her current research is concerned with spatialization and security.

Dr. Aida Rosende-Pérez is Associate Professor in English at the University of Vigo (Spain), and researcher in the Consolidated Research Group BiFeGa (Literary, Cultural, and Translation Studies) at the same university. Her research has focused principally on the politics and poetics of transnational feminism, specializing in transnational women’s literature and cultural production. She has published articles and chapters on these topics and has co-edited the collections The Cultural Politics of In/Difference: Irish Texts and Contexts  (Peter Lang, 2022) with Rubén Jarazo, and Family in Crisis: Crossing Borders, Crossing Narratives (Transcript Verlag, 2020) with Eva-Sabine Zehelein and Andrea Carosso. She is currently involved in the national research project “Communitas/Immunitas: relational ontologies in Atlantic anglophone cultures of the 21st century”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science Education and Universities. Within this framework she develops her most recent research on the ethics and aesthetics of black breath/ing in US literary and audiovisual narratives.

Svetlana Stefanova is Professor of English at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (Spain). She holds a PhD in English. Her doctoral thesis is a comparative study of the fiction of Caryl Phillips and J.M. Coetzee. Her primary research interests include postcolonial and gender studies. She has published articles and book chapters on the fiction of Caryl Phillips, J.M. Coetzee, Zoë Wicomb, Nnedi Okorafor, Namwali Serpell, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others. She is currently working on the representation of space and place in Phillips’s works, with special interest in gendered spaces. 

Dr Olusegun Titus has a PhD in African Musicology from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is one of the leading scholars of African Ecomusicology and the current coordinator African Ecomusicology Forum (AfEF). His research focuses on music and the trajectories of climate change, urban spaces, oil and gas, food security, peace building, transatlantic mobility, blue economy/community, extractivism and protest in Africa. Dr Titus has published in these research areas.  He is a fellow of UNESCO, Ife Institute of Advanced Studies, Ford Foundation, PROSPA, Feminist Africa, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Oxford University, ACLS/AHP, Carson, Rhodes University, A.G. Leventis, NAGEL, IFRA among others. Currently he is an Experienced Scholar of Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation and Visiting Scholar at the Department of Literature, Media and Arts and Centre for Cultural Enquiry, Konstanz University, Germany.

ALESSANDRA VANNUCCI is a researcher, playwright and director, dealing with traveling artists, migrants, refugees; she has written 12 books and several essays, exploring artistic routes between Italy and Latin America. The same subjects she explores in her shows and short films, which concern her as for she was living for twenty years between two continents. She taught Stage Direction and Photography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and directed the Laboratory of Esthetics and Politics with which she produced several social and participatory art projects (theater, video, photography, podcasts). In 2022, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory of Visual Sociology (LSV/DISFOR) at the University of Genoa; in 2023, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University; since July 2023, she’s a Researcher at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures, University of Turin.

Steffen Wöll is a postdoctoral scholar with a background in American Studies, currently working at Leipzig University’s Collaborative Research Center 1199: Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition. His publications and talks explore connections and intersections between spatial imaginations, human geographies and critical cartography, literature, as well as film, game, and horror studies. His ongoing habilitation project explores transoceanic dynamics in imperial and literary discourses of the United States.

Lia Zola is  Associate Professor in Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures, University of Torino. Her research interests include enviromental anthropology, siberian shamanism in contemporary perspectives, local cultures and Alpine anthropology, with a focus on old and new production of folk knowledge. She has recently started to investigate the relationship between humans and non-humans. Her most recent publications include: Paesaggi, spazi e luoghi sacri nello sciamanesimo siberiano (2015), Cunning as...a wolf. Multispecies Relations between humans and wolves in Eastern Siberia, “Lagoonscapes”, 2021 and Bee-coming: Skills, Practices and Volatile Know-How in the Alps (2024, forthcoming).

Scott Zukowski is an Esprit Scholar (FWF) in the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. He serves as associate editor of Amerikastudien / American Studies, was a 2022-23 Teaching with Primary Resources Fellow with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and was a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at the Library of America. His work has appeared in Early American Studies, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Atlantic Studies, New Jersey Studies, and The New Americanist. His current book project, FREEDOM'S JOURNAL and the Intermedial Power of Periodicals explores the content-medium relation in FREEDOM'S JOURNAL, the first Black-owned and Black operated US newspaper.