Academic Programme

We are designing a rich, exciting academic programme that includes the participation of renowned scholars, writers, performers and artists whose work relates to the conference theme in myriad ways, thus offering multiple angles from which to reflect on what the urban means as a lived and imagined space in today’s post-colonial world.

The final version of the programme and book of abstracts are now available and can be downloaded here:

Conference programme - Final Version (Updated March 27, 2017) >

Book of Abstracts >

Keynote Speakers and Invited Writers and Performers

Silvia Albert Sopale Playwright, Performer Silvia Albert Sopale was born in San Sebastián, Spain. She holds a degree in Drama from Murcia and a postgraduate degree in Expressive Arts directed by Consuelo Trujillo. She is also a gestalt therapist.

She has participated in productions such as "Memories", "La veu secreta dels ocells", "Pallasas power", "Mara Truth", "Three friends", as well as the TV series "The Cathedral of the Sea" and the film "Inside", and worked as casting director and stage manager for different festivals and theaters, inlcuding the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona.

Co-creator and actor of the play “No Country for Black Women,” her new collective performance is "Hotspot: I will migrate, you will migrate, they will migrate", co-produced with the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo in Colombia, winner of a drama award in Colombia and an Iberescena grant.

She has created the afrodescendant theatre company "We are not Woopi Goldberg" to investigate and create performances around black feminism and blackness.

Website address:
http://noespaisparanegras.es
http://noespaisparanegras.wixsite.com/no-es-pais-xa-negras

Ien Ang Western Sydney University Ien Ang is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies at Western Sydney University, where she was Founding Director of the Institute for Culture and Society. Her innovating, transdisciplinary research has been influential in a variety of fields across the humanities and social sciences. Author of Watching Dallas (1985); Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991) and Living Room Wars, (1996), as well as her classic On Not Speaking Chinese (2001), The SBS Story (2008) and The art of engagement: culture, collaboration, innovation (coedited, 2011). She is currently engaged in an ARC research project entitled Sydney's Chinatown in the Asian Century: From Ethnic Enclave to Global Hub (which inspires her lecture at the conference).

Website address: www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics

Anita Badami Anita Badami is a writer and visual artist of Indian descent, now based in Canada, where she has lived since 1991. She has published four novels: Tamarind Mem (1997), The Hero's Walk (2001), Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006) and Tell it to the Trees (2011). Her work has explored women’s changing roles in Indian cultures and history and often addresses the complexities of in-between and transnational identities. Her novel The Hero’s Walk won the Commonwealth Best Book Prize in Canada/Caribbean region and was shortlisted for CBC Canada Reads in 2016; Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also received the Marian Engel Award and is currently chair of the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Josefina Báez Born in the Dominican Republic, Josefina Báez is now based in New York, where she works as an artist, actress, writer and director. Her artistic production combines dance, music, poetry, theatre and performance, among other disciplines. She is founder and director of the Ay Ombe Theatre Company, which has celebrated its 30 anniversary this year. Her career emphasizes artistic dialogue and transdisciplinary methodologies in the teaching of drama and performance. She has published several texts/performances, among which are Dominicanish (2000), Levente No.yo Layorkdominicanyork (2011), or Canto de Plenitud (2013). She has performed and given theatre workshops internationally, and her work has been translated to various languages.

Javier Bauluz Photojournalist Javier Bauluz is a journalist and photographer with a long-standing involvement in humanitarian causes. His coverage of the Rwanda crisis in the Associated Press team gained him the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. He has also received the Freedom Press Award (2002) and the Journalism and Human Rights Award (2008), among others. Bauluz has worked for international agencies and magazines such as Reuters, Time or Geo, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, The Independent, El País, La Vanguardia and other international and Spanish newspapers. He covered the wars in Central America in the 80s, the final years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the first Palestinian uprising and the Bosnian war, and has been documenting migration waves into Spain and Europe since 1996. His most recent work, Buscando refugio para mis hijos followed Syrian refugees across Europe. He is at present following the migration route between Mexico and the USA.

Javier Bauluz is founder and director of Periodismo Humano: http://periodismohumano.com/

More at: http://huelladigital.univisionnoticias.com...

Photo: Hayley Madden for The Poetry Society

Vahni Capildeo Writer, artist Vahni Capildeo was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and moved to the UK in 1991. At Oxford she obtained a DPhil in Old Norse and translation theory. She later worked as a lexicographer for the OED, and has held a number of academic posts, including the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is the most recent winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, awarded to Measures of Expatriation (2016). Earlier books include No Traveller Returns (2003), Undraining Sea (2009), Dark & Unaccustomed Words (2012), Utter (2013) and Simple Complex Shapes (2015). She also engages in performance and installation art and has collaborated on urban projects such as 'All Your Houses', with artist and writer Andre Bagoo in Trinidad, http://aliceyard.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/all-your-houses-reading-by-vahni.html

More at: http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=1167

Amanda Coogan Performer Amanda Coogan is one of the most exciting contemporary Visual Artists practicing in the arena of Performance Art. Her extraordinary work is challenging, provocative and always visually stimulating. Her recent exhibition in the Dublin's Royal Hibernian Academy was described by Artforum as 'performance art at its best'. Using gesture and context she makes allegorical and poetic works that are multi-faceted, and challenge expected contexts. The long durational aspect of her live presentations invites elements of chaos with the unknown and unpredicted erupting dynamically through her live artworks. Her work often begins with her own body presenting both solo works and group performances.She was awarded the Allied Irish Bank’s Art prize in 2004. She has performed and exhibited her work extensively including The Venice Biennale, Liverpool, Biennial, PS1, New York, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, and the Niemeyer Cultural Centre in Avilés.

Angie Cruz Writer, University of Pittsburgh Angie Cruz is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of two novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee. She has published short fiction and essays in magazines and journals, including Callaloo, The New York Times, Kweli, Phatitude, and South Central Review. She has received numerous grants for her teaching and writing, including the Barbara Deming Award, New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, Camargo Fellowship, Van Lier Literary Fellowship, and NALAC Fund for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Editor of Aster(ix), a literary/arts journal and is at work on her third novel, Dominicana.

Her personal website is: http://www.writing.pitt.edu/people/faculty/angie-cruz

Inua Ellams Poet, playwright, performer, graphic artist & designer Born in Nigeria, he now lives and works from London, where, among his varied creative projects, he founded the Midnight Run, a nocturnal urban excursion, later exported to other European cities. His poetry has appeared in the pamphlets Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales and The Wire-Headed Heathen. His first play, The 14th Tale (a one-man show which he performed) was awarded a Fringe First at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival. His third, Black T-Shirt Collection ran at England’s National Theatre. Identity, displacement & destiny are recurring themes in his work, in which he tries mixing the old with the new, the traditional with the contemporary.

Helen Gilbert Royal Holloway University Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London and author/editor of several books on postcolonial topics, including an upcoming essay collection, In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization. Her research interests concentrate on issues relating to race and representation, indigeneity, cultural identity, nationalism, democracy, diplomacy and the politics and aesthetics of cross-cultural engagement. In 2015, she won a Humboldt Prize for career excellence in International Theatre and Performance Studies.

Learn more on her personal website: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/helen-...

Xiaolu Guo Novelist, essayist and filmmaker XIAOLU GUO is a British Chinese novelist, essayist and filmmaker. Her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was nominated for Orange Prize for Fiction.

"I am China" was longlisted for Baileys Women’s Prize in 2015. She was named a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist in 2013. Her memoir "Once Upon a Time in the East" is published by Penguin 2017 and is featured for BBC 3 Book of the Week. She Also wrote and directed feature films such as "She, a Chinese", which received the Golden Leopard award at Locarno film festival 2009, and the documentary "Late At Night - Voices of Ordinary Madness"

She lives in Berlin and London.

Tendai Huchu Tendai Huchu was born in Bindura, Zimbawe. His first novel The Hairdresser of Harare was released in 2010 to critical acclaim, and has been translated into several languages including Spanish. He has also published short stories, one of them shortlisted for the 2014 Caine prize, and nonfiction in various international magazines. Between projects, he translates fiction between the Shona and English languages. His new novel is The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician.

Find him @TendaiHuchu or on www.tendaihuchu.com

Kevin Ireland Kevin Ireland was born in New Zealand where he now lives on Auckland’s North Shore, though he travels to the UK and Europe frequently. He has published two memoirs, six novels, a book of short stories, another on growing old and a discursive book on How to Catch a Fish.

He is best known as a poet and his Selected poems 1963-2013 was published in 2013. A twenty-third volume of poems, Humphrey Bogart’s great sacrifice, was published in December 2016. Among several prizes and awards, in 2000 he received a DLitt from Massey University, New Zealand.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir King’s College London Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir is a literary and cultural historian at the Department of English, King’s College London. She works at the intersection of embodiment, affect, memory, and post-trauma in the global South, so as to re-examine the regimes and pleasures of modernity. She is the author, most recently, of Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (2013). Currently, she directs Modern Moves, a five-year research project funded by an ERC Advanced Grant. Modern Moves examines the resilience and global popularity of Afro-diasporic music and dance created through colonialism and the slave trade. Professor Kabir is fluent in English, Hindi, Bengali, and Spanish, is comfortable in French, Portuguese, and German-speaking environments, and dances several Afro-Latin, African, and Brazilian social dances.

Simone Lazaroo Writer, Murdoch University Simone Lazaroo is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Murdoch University, Australia. Author of novels The World Waiting to be Made (1994), The Australian Fiancé (2000), The Travel Writer (2006), Sustenance (2010) and Lost River: Four Albums (2014), as well as short stories. Her fiction and academic research often focuses on migration experiences, and on the contexts of tourism and travel in relation to practices of consumerism, photography and the memorialization of urban space. She has recently been focusing on the impact of financial inequality upon interactions between locals and tourists in urban sites.

Alecia McKenzie Writer, performer Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican writer, artist and journalist now based in Paris, France. She is the author of five books, two of which have won Commonwealth literary awards (Satellite City, Sweetheart), and she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2015. Her novel Sweetheart (Peepal Tree Press) was recently translated into French and published with the title Trésor (Editions Envolume, Paris).

More at: http://editionsenvolume.com/tresor-de-alecia-mckenzie/ or http://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/alecia-mckenzie

Belén Martín Lucas University of Vigo Belén Martín-Lucas is Associate Professor at the University of Vigo (Spain) in the fields of Gender, Postcolonial, and Globalization Studies. Her research focuses on TransCanadian feminist fiction. She has coauthored the volumes The Transnational Story Hub: Between Self and Other (2016) and Transnational Poetics. Asian Canadian Women’s Fiction of the 90s (2011), and contributed to numerous journals and edited collections. She is co-founder of Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies (http://www.canada-and-beyond.com) and co-organizer of its biannual conferences. She is currently directing the research project “Bodies in Transit: Making Difference in Globalized Cultures”.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a leading scholar of Latino studies, groundbreaking filmmaker and professor at Columbia University.

Her scholarship and artistry span a wide range of forms, such as film, essay, and poetry, with a focus on the Caribbean, the African diaspora, and Latinos in the United States.

Her publications include, Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism (1997), Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (2004), The Latino Media Gap: The State of Latinos in US Media (2014), and many articles in academic journals. Among her films are: AIDS in the Barrio (1989), Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1997), Small City, Big Change (2013), and Life Outside (2016). Negrón-Muntaner has also founded transformative programs and institutions, including the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, and the Latino Arts and Activism Collection at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which aims to preserve and make accessible materials about the Latino experience.

http://www.francesnegronmuntaner.com

Gillian Slovo Gillian Slovo was born in South Africa and has lived in the UK since 1964. She has written poignantly on both places, as well as on broader international contexts, in her wide-ranging career as journalist, novelist and playwright. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (1997), explored her South African childhood with her parents, major anti-Apartheid activists. Her Truth and Reconciliation themed fiction Red Dust (2000) was turned into a film in 2004. Other novels include the crime fiction series featuring detective Kate Baeier, the Orange Prize shortlisted Ice Road (2004) and Black Orchids (2008). She has recently used verbatim drama to deal with human rights in Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom (2005) and with urban unrest in The Riots (2011), a London episode which she returns to in the novel Ten days (2016). Her latest play Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State, for the National Theatre, explores the reasons which might move young Europeans to join IS.

Aritha van Herk Writer, University of Calgary (Anna Rutherford Lecture) Aritha van Herk is a Canadian writer and critic. Author of five novels Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address, Places Far from Ellesmere and Restlessness. Her non-fiction and criticism includes A Frozen Tongue, In Visible Ink, and Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, which inspired a permanent exhibition at the Glenbow Museum. With photographer George Webber she has published In This Place: Calgary 2004-2011, and Prairie Gothic. Her latest book is Stampede and the Westness of West. She lives in Calgary and teaches at the University of Calgary.

http://www.arithavanherk.com/about/