Charles I. ARMSTRONG is a professor of British poetry at the University of Bergen. He is the author of Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (2003) and Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space, and the Past (2009), both published with Palgrave Macmillan. He is also the co-editor of Postcolonial Dislocation: Travel, History and the Ironies of Narrative (Novus, 2006) and Crisis and Contemporary Poetry (forthcoming). He has published articles on authors such as Derrida, de Man, Nancy, Spivak, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Hopkins, Tennyson, Yeats, Woolf, Beckett, Heaney, and Muldoon, as well as the Norwegian authors Obstfelder, Einan, and Jansson. A board member of the Nordic Irish Studies Network and the Norwegian Study Centre in York, he has been a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and the Irish Studies Centre at the National University of Ireland, Galway. In 2005, he was among the lecturers at the W. B. Yeats International Summer School. His main research interests are in modern literary theory, Irish Studies, and British poetry from Wordsworth to the present, and his current projects address ekphrasis in Irish poetry and the question of form in the writings of W. B. Yeats.

Anamaria ENESCU is teaching assistant at Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu and a doctoral student of Bucharest University. Her research interests cover migrant literature, the history of migration, visual arts. She works in the Department of French and Francophone Studies and teaches practical courses in French language to 1^st and 2^nd year students.

Eric GILDER is a University Professor and Fellow of the “C. Peter Magrath” Center at Lucian Blaga University (Sibiu, Romania), holding a Ph.D. in Communication (rhetorical emphasis) form The Ohio State University (USA). Before coming to the University of Sibiu in 2000, he has served as a Visiting Lecturer with the Civic Education Project in Romania (1992-1994), as an Associate Professor in the Faculties of Sociology and Foreign Languages at the University of Bucharest (1994-2000), and as a Visiting Lecturer (and then Professor) at Kyonggi University in South Korea (1998-2000). In link with his academic appointment, Dr. Gilder currently serves as an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church of the USA serving in the Anglican Diocese in Europe. In these capacities, he also serves as a periodic Visiting Professor to Cuttington University (Liberia, West Africa) and as Book Reviews Editor of the international UNESCO-CEPES publication, Higher Education in Europe. Author of three books and multiple studies, he has published extensively in Romanian, American and international journals and books on topics of communication (rhetoric, mass media and theory), cultural studies, and international higher educational policy and practice. He is a member of the Society for Research into Higher Education (UK), The World Association of Christian Communication (Canada), the World Futures Studies Federation (USA), and the Liberian Studies Association (USA).

Asbjørn GRØNSTAD is professor of visual culture and director of the research project/center Nomadikon: New Ecologies of the Image in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen. His latest publication is Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema (Amsterdam University Press 2008).

Jeremy Allan HAWKINS was born in New York City, received a BA from Kenyon College, and is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama. He is also a current US Fulbright Grantee in Romania, where he teaches English Composition and 20th Century American Literature at Universitatea Transilvania din Brasov. He has work forthcoming in Dislocate.

Mihaela IRIMIA is Professor of British Studies at Bucharest University. She teaches Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature and Culture, Cultural Theory, History of Ideas, and Cultural Studies at UG, MA and doctoral level. She is Director of Studies at the British Cultural Studies Centre (BCSC), Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity, and senior member of the Doctoral School of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. She has held Visiting Professor and Research Fellow positions at universities throughout the world; of these: Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale University, Baylor University, the Bodleian Library, the Taylor Institution Oxford, Sheffield University, University of Wales at Cardiff, Nottingham University, University of Ulster Coleraine, Trinity College Dublin, Harvard University, Yale University, Oslo Universitat, Helsinki Universitet, Universität Heidelberg, Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität München, Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Universität Wien, Jagelonska Univerzita, Univerzita Gdańsk, Central European University (CEU) Budapest, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (ELTE) Budapest, Università Gabriele d’Annunzio Pescara, Università La Sapienza Roma, Università di Padova, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Universidad de Zaragoza, Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Université Paris XII, Université Marc Bloch Strasbourg, Université d’Orleans, Université de Franche-Comté Besançon, Aristotelis Panepistimiu Thessaloniki, Boğazici Universitesi Istanbul, Beykent Universitesi Istanbul. She is alumna of New Europe College. She has authored numerous critical articles, reference works, and translations of Romanian literature into English, as well as translations of British and American literature into Romanian, having edited a series of literary and critical studies readers. Her publications include: “The Ineffectual Angel of Political Hijacking: Shelley in Romanian Culture,” in Michael Rossington & Susanne Schmidt (eds), The Reception of Shelley in Europe (2008); The Reception of Byron in Europe (2004); Dicţionarul universului britanic (A Dictionary of Britishness) (2002); The Stimulating Difference: Avatars of a Concept (1999, 2005); The Rise of Modern Evaluation (1999); Postmodern Revaluations (1999); An Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Age (1989) (coeditor), An Anthology of English Literature: The Age of Sentiment and Sensibility (1987) (coeditor).

Christopher (Kit) KELEN is a well-known Australian scholar and poet whose literary works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid seventies. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes Kelen’s work as “typically innovative and intellectually sharp.” Kelen holds degrees in literature and linguistics from the University of Sydney and a doctorate on the teaching of the writing process, from UWS Nepean. Kelen’s most recent volumes of poetry are Dredging the Delta (book of Macao poems and sketches), published in 2007 by Cinnamon Press (UK) and After Meng Jiao: Responses to the Tang Poet, published in 2008 by VAC (Chicago, IL). Kelen has taught Literature and Creative Writing for the last eight years at the University of Macau in south China.

Gillian KINGSLAND has been a freelance journalist and writer for several years. In 2001 she took time out from her life and career to work for the belated BA (Hons) in English Literature. She studied at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and went on to earn an MA in Studies in Fiction. Gill developed an interest in the relationship between myth and identity, both of place and of person, and in the effect of time, cultural change and observation upon the given sense of legend and recognition; it is a concept she calls The Progressive Myth. Her explorations brought her inexorably to examine narrative and oral traditions, interactive textual personalities and a theory she has dubbed The Concept of Minute Movement, in which the importance to both reader, and writer, of a single moment which contains a minute movement, action or reaction that encapsulates character, motive, motif or textual signifier. These interests are reflected and examined in her writing today.

Rebecca NESVET is an award-winning American playwright, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire, Literary Manager of New York’s Origin Theatre Company, and a 2008 graduate of New York University’s MFA program in Dramatic Writing. Rebecca’s research and theatre criticism has appeared in periodicals including the Review of English Studies, Women’s Writing, Shakespearean International Yearbook and The New Welsh Review. She guest-edited ABC 11: Special Volume: International Anglophone Theatre. More information about her plays appears at www.rlnesvet.com.

Brian OLIU is originally from New Jersey but currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His work has been published in Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, The Southeast Review, DIAGRAM, Brevity, and others. He is anthologized in Norton’s Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, and 30 Under 30.

Ana-Karina SCHNEIDER is Associate Professor at Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, holding a PhD in critical theory and Faulkner studies from Lucian Blaga University (2005), as well as a Diploma in American Studies from Smith College, USA (2004). Her teaching expertise covers mainly English literature from the seventeenth century to the present, alongside literary criticism. She has published a book entitled Critical Perspectives in the Late Twentieth Century. William Faulkner: A Case Study, and a volume of lecture notes on the history of Anglo-American literary criticism (Lucian Blaga UP, 2006), as well an assortment of articles on William Faulkner’s novelistic achievement and its critical reception, English prose fiction, literary translation, stereotypes and reading practices in the wake of the globalizing proliferation of media. Dr Schneider has been Manuscript and Review Editor of American, British and Canadian Studies since its inception in 1999, referee of College Literature (USA) since 2008, Director of her Department’s Reading Group since 2002, Treasurer of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania since 2005, and a contributor to the online Literary Encyclopedia (UK) since 2007.

Stuart SILLARS is Professor of English at the University of Bergen, Norway, having previously been a member of the faculty of English at Cambridge. He has written extensively on literature and the visual arts, and his most recent books are Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820 (2006) and The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709-1875 (2008), both from Cambridge University Press. Earlier books have explored visual and literary art in the two world wars, illustration and the Victorian novel, and the special forms of irony involved in English writing of the early twentieth century. He is director of the Bergen Shakespeare and Drama Network, a group of scholars who meet regularly to exchange ideas, and co-ordinator of a research programme on traditional oral cultural forms conducted in collaboration with Makerere University, Uganda. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters, a visiting fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and an honorary research fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.

William STEARNS has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Montana, the University of Michigan and the University of Bucharest. His areas of interest include political theory, globalization studies, media studies and environmental politics. His research focuses on the uses and abuses of political language and the social construction of political and social reality through symbols. He was the first foreign political scientist to teach at the University of Bucharest after the fall of communism and maintains an active interest in the political, cultural and environmental issues facing Central and Eastern Europe.

Cristina ŞANDRU currently teaches part-time at the University of Northampton, and is assistant editor for The Literary Encyclopedia (www.litecyc.com). She previously taught at the University of Sibiu, Romania, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, SSEES, UCL, Goldsmiths’, University of London, and held a postdoctoral research assistantship at the Centre for Contemporary Fiction and Narrative at the University of Northampton. Her main research interests are in comparative literature, postcolonial theory and literature, and East-Central European cultures (her doctoral thesis was entitled ‘The West and the Rest’: Eastern Europe, Postcolonialism and the Fiction of Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera, defended successfully in 2006). She has published articles and reviews in Critique (“A Bakhtinian Poetics of Subversion: the Magical Realist Fiction of the 1980s in East-Central Europe”), Euresis (“Reconfiguring Contemporary ‘Posts’: (Post)Colonialism as (Post)Communism?”), The New Makers of Modern Culture Routledge series (the Milan Kundera profile) and English (several review-articles). She currently co-edits a volume of essays to be published by Routledge in 2009, entitled Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millenium. Since 2007 she acts as academic editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Studies and works as examiner for the Chartered Institute of Linguists and the Foreign Commonwealth Office in London.

Henrieta Anişoara ŞERBAN, who holds a PhD (2006) from the Romanian Academy, is a scientific researcher at the Institute of Political Science and International Relations and the Constantin Rădulescu-Motru Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest. Her research interests include: philosophy of communication, political communication, and (soft) ideologies (feminism, ecologism, ironism). To date, she has authored two books: Limbajul politic în democraţie (The Political Language in Democracy, 2006) and Paradigmele diferenţei în filosofia comunicării. Modernism si postmodernism (The Paradigms of Difference in the Philosophy of Communication: Modernism and Postmodernism, 2007).

BACK