Funda BAŞAK BASKAN is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. She graduated from the Department of English Language and Literature, Hacettepe University and holds an MA in Art History and Archaeology from Bilkent University. She teaches courses on modern British fiction, world mythology and modern drama. She is the co-editor of Jeanette Winterson and Her Work, Proceedings of the 14th METU British Novelists Conference (2007) and Angela Carter and Her Work, Proceedings of 15th METU British Novelist Conference (2008). She conducted research as a visiting graduate student at the Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta between 2009 and 2010. Her research interests include feminist theory and literature, memory and identity, myths and fairy-tales and their modern rewritings and adaptations. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on the rewritings of Greek and Biblical myths by contemporary women writers.

Dr Charlotte BEYER is a contemporary literature specialist, whose teaching areas include recent British fiction and poetry; North American literature from the 19th Century to the present day; black British and postcolonial literature; and crime fiction. Dr Beyer has published a number of articles on Margaret Atwood’s fiction and poetry, a book chapter, and a recent article on Willa Cather’s journalism and travel writing. She has also published on crime fiction, as well as on Jackie Kay and Isha McKenzie-Mavinga, and on Doris Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Oana COGEANU is Teaching Assistant at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi. Following a joint Bachelor’s degree in English and Romanian language and literature with a diploma paper on Writing Black Women, she earned a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the same university with a dissertation entitled The African Topos: Alice Walker’s the Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy. She is currently a doctoral candidate of the University of Iaşi and the University of Konstanz, working on a monographic thesis on African-American Travel Literature. Her research interests gravitate around travel writing, African-American literature, individual and collective identity, race and ethnicity, from a textual-cultural approach. She has also specialized in non-literary translation.

Maria-Teodora CREANGA is Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of British and American Studies of the “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu. Over the past several years, she has published a number of articles focusing on the issues of the nature of meaning, meaning transfer and translation teaching at undergraduate level. More recently, she has completed a doctoral program in Philology with the dissertation thesis “Meaning: Transformation or Malformation in the Translation Process” which is an account of translation at the borderline between Semantics and Pragmatics with all its implications.

Fabio Akcelrud DURÃO is Professor of Literary Theory at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). Among other books, he published Modernism and Coherence: Four Chapters of a Negative Aesthetics (2008), co-edited Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship (2008), and organized Culture Industry Today (2010). He also wrote several essays on modernism, the Frankfurt School and Brazilian critical theory.

José Carlos FELIX is Professor of literature at the Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Brazil. His research interests include contemporary Brazilian and American film and literature.

Aaron GIOVANNONE is completing his doctoral degree in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, Canada. He has published articles and book reviews on American and Canadian literature, and his current research focuses on the depiction of travel to Italy in Italian North American writing, film, and television.

David Brian HOWARD is Associate Professor of Art History in the Division of Historical and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on the history and politics of Modernism in the United States and Canada after World War II, and, most recently, has published the article “From the Missile Gap to the Culture Gap: Modernism in the Fallout from Sputnik,” in Michael Ryan (ed.) Cultural Studies: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2008. He is completing a book project entitled Gnawing on Skulls: Allegory in the Age of the American Empire and has begun work on the second of what is projected to be a three volume series.

Anca-Luminita IANCU has been a member of the Department of British and American Studies at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu since 1999. She received her MA in English Literature (2005) and her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition (2009) from the University of Louisville, KY, USA. While pursuing her graduate studies, she has held different administrative positions – Editorial Assistant for the Henry James Review and Writing Center Assistant Director - and has taught classes in American literature and college writing. Dr. Iancu has published articles on American literature and culture, a volume of translations of Kate Chopin’s short-stories (2003), and has been a Manuscript Editor of East-West Cultural Passage since 2007. She is currently working on a book on literacy practices of European-American immigrant women in the nineteenth century. Her research interests include literacy and immigration studies, women’s studies, American literature and culture, second-language writing, and Writing Center theory and pedagogy.

Gill 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 a 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, and the way that story and narrative work. This has led her to investigate popular perceptions and teaching methods of literacy, literature and books in general, which she feels have tendencies towards an accepted conformity, which she is working – in a small way – to dispel.

Suneeti Chhettri LOCK is originally from India and is currently a Lecturer in English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a PhD in English and American Literature, specializing in the American Victorian poet H.W. Longfellow. After completing her PhD she was awarded a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship in 1995 which enabled her to complete a second master’s degree in the Teaching of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her academic and research interests lie in Transatlantic Victorian Literature, Education across continents, World History, and Writing.

Adrian MATHEWS was born in London in 1957 to an English father and a Czech mother. He read English literature at Cambridge University and remained as a Bye-Fellow of his college. A former winner in the UK National Poetry Competition, his poetry has appeared in several publications. He has also published numerous short stories, receiving early encouragement from writer Laurie Lee who awarded him first prize in a BBC short story competition. In 1994 his critical history of 19th-century English literature, Romantics and Victorians, was published in France. His first novel, The Hat of Victor Noir (1996), a mystery set in Paris, has recently been re-issued to critical and popular acclaim in French translation. Vienna Blood (1999) won the Crime Writer’s Association Silver Dagger Award and was published in the UK, the United States, Germany, Spain and Japan. The Apothecary’s House (2005), was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming “Best Thriller of the Year Award” and translated into French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian and Lithuanian. His new novel, Trinity Says, is awaiting publication. He has lived in France for nearly 30 years, in Paris and Touraine. 

Roxana MIHELE is Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Specialized Foreign Languages, the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She has a BA in Philology (English major, French minor), an MA in American Literature and Linguistics, and has recently earned her PhD degree in American literature with a thesis on the Jewish cultural heritage in the work of Saul Bellow. Her academic interest areas comprise: American Literature – especially Jewish American literature, the American Multiculturalism and Ethnicity, Jewish Studies, Literary Theory, ESP (English for Specialized Purposes). She has taught courses in: Techniques of Communication, Grammar Exercises, Translations, Literary Analysis, Essay Writing, English for Tourism. Roxana Mihele is a member of The Romanian Association for American Studies, The Romanian Society for English and American Studies.

Adriana NEAGU is Associate Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She is the author of Sublimating the Postmodern Discourse: toward a Post-Postmodern Fiction in the Writings of Paul Auster and Peter Ackroyd (2001), In the Future Perfect: the Rise and Fall of Postmodernism (2001), and of numerous critical and cultural theory articles. Dr Neagu has been the recipient of several pre- and postdoctoral research awards. Previous academic affiliations include an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and visiting positions at Oxford University, University of Bergen, University of East Anglia, and University of London. Her teaching areas are diverse, combining literary and cultural studies disciplines. Her main specialism is in the poetics of modernist and postmodernist discourse, postcolonial theory and the literatures of identity, and translation theory and practice. At present her research centres on new paradigms of cultural identity in the U.K. Since 1999, Dr Neagu has been Advisory Editor and, since 2004, Editor-in-Chief of American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania.

Charles A. PONTE is Professor of literature at the Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. His research interests include contemporary American film and literature.

Wasfi SHOQAIRAT was awarded his PhD in 2006 for a thesis which researched representations of Arabia and North Africa in twentieth century English novels. His publications include ‘Between Orientalism and Post-modernism: Robert Irwin’s Fantastic Representations in The Arabian Nightmare’ (forthcoming) and ‘Lost Utopias and Traumatic Modernity: Wilfred Thesigrer’s The Marsh Arabs’, ‘Travel and Trauma Colloquium’ (2009). In addition to these he is writing on a wide range of subjects including dialogic exchanges and chronotopes in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (forthcoming).

David SIMMONS was awarded his PhD in 2007 for a thesis which researched the presentation of the anti-hero figure in popular 1960s American fiction. His publications include The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut (2008) and the edited collection New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut (2009). In addition to these he has written on a wide range of subjects including depictions of the cowboy in 1960s American literature (Westerns: paperback Novels and Movies from Hollywood, 2007), the work of H.P. Lovecraft (in the academic journals Critical Engagements, Symbiosis and The Romanian Journal of American, British and Canadian Studies), and the fiction of Chuck Palahniuk (Reading Chuck Palahniuk (2009).

Tauan TINTI holds a Master’s in Literary Theory from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). His research interests include 20th century English literature, Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. He is currently working on a reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame through Walter Benjamin’s concept of Allegory and Sigmund Freud’s works on Metapsychology.

Dorina Daniela VASILOIU has been a teacher of English since 2002 when she graduated from the West University of Timisoara. She completed her MA studies in the 20^th century American and British Literature at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, with a dissertation on Self, Consciousness and Identity in James Joyce’s Portrait and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. She taught EAL and French in an independent school in the UK for an academic year as part of the HMC Projects for Young Teachers in Central and Eastern Europe, and has received various individual mobility grants to the UK and Ireland within the Lifelong Learning Programme. At present, she is a doctoral student at Heidelberg University, Germany. She is doing her research on the new directions in narrative social theory drawing on the interactional and rhetorical functions and aspects of narrative as vehicle for storytelling with the purpose of constructing and performing identity.

Barbara WILL is Professor of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (USA). She is the author of two books: Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011), and Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (2000), as well as many articles on modernism and American literature. Her current project is a study of Jews and Jewishness in the work of right- and left-wing American writers from the 1920s to the 1950s.

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