About the Contributors

Eduardo Barros Grela is associate professor in the Department of English at A Coruna University (Spain), where he teaches American studies and cultural studies. He is a graduate of the State University of New York (MA and PhD). In 2002–2003 he worked as a Funded Research Fellow at the Humanities Institute (New York) and then was hired as a professor at California State University (2003–2007). His academic interests include cultural studies, posthuman aesthetics, inorganic bodies and spaces, visual studies, and the dialectics of representation and performance, and he has published extensively on all these topics in various journals and anthologies.

 

Logie Barrow is senior lecturer in history at the University of Bremen (Germany) where he has taught courses in British Social, Cultural and Political History, including “Sexualities in Britain from c. 1500,” “Science and Religion c. 1550-1950,” “Anglo-British Slavery,” “South-African History,” and “The British and the Middle-East.” He has also taught at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He has published numerous articles in journals and contributed with chapters to different anthologies on the social and political history of the English working-classes. His most outstanding publications are A [Very] Short History of the British Labour Movement, (1969), Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, c. 1850–1910 (1986), and Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880-1914 (1996, jointly with Dr. Ian Bullock).

 

Mariam Bazi is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Department of English Studies of the Faculty of Art, University of Málaga, Spain. Her research and PhD thesis focus on Muslim women in diaspora and the new Muslim sexualities in England. She has graduated from the University of UAE in Teotuan-Morocco with a BA in English philology in 2007, and an MA in English language and literature in 2007–2009. Her second master’s degree was in English studies and intercultural and multilingual communication in 2009–2010. She has worked in direct collaboration with IBM Smart City Challenge project 2012 (http://www.smartcities.es) and Global Commercialization Group’s visits to Malaga City Council.

 

Rocío Carrasco is a PhD at the Department of English, University of Huelva, Spain. Her fields of research are gender in contemporary U.S. science fiction cinema and U.S. cultural studies. She has published articles on gender representation in contemporary U.S. science fiction films such as Dune, The Matrix, and Blade Runner. Her book New Heroes on Screen. Prototypes of Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema was published in 2006.

 

Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego is lecturer of English and North American literature and culture at the University of Málaga (Spain). She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington during the academic year 1995–1996 and a lecturer at the JFK Institute in Berlin (Germany) in the summer of 2003. She has published articles on African American literature and the literature of the African diaspora. Among these are “Motherlands as Gendered Spaces: Julie Dash’s Film and Novel Daughters of the Dust” in Family in Africa and The African Diaspora (Salamanca, 2004), “There is more to it than meets the eye: Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, a Narrative of the Diaspora,” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos (Seville, 2003), “Double Consciousness” Encyclopedia of American Studies (New York, 2001). In 2008 she co-organized the I International Conference on Identity, Migration and Women’s Bodies at the University of Málaga. She is the co-editor of the book Identity, Migration and Women’s Bodies as Sites of Knowledge and Transgression (2009), an interdisciplinary study of migration and diaspora from a postcolonial and gender perspective. Her most recent publications include the volume Cultural Migrations and Gendered Subjects: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations of the Female Body, co-edited with María Isabel Romero Ruiz (2011) and the edited volume The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in African American Literature (2011) and “Re(claiming) Subjectivity and Transforming the Politics of Silence through the Search for Wholeness in Push,” in Atlantis (Oviedo, 2014).

 

María José Coperías Aguilar is senior lecturer at the University of Valencia, where she teaches in the Department of English and German Philology. She has a PhD in English literature. Her main teaching areas are cultural studies and English for specific purposes, especially for the media. She has participated in many international conferences and published widely on several fields of English Studies both in books and journals. Her main areas of research are cultural studies, intercultural communicative competence, media in English, and literature by women. She has published several critical editions in Spanish of the works of authors such as the Brontë sisters, Jean Rhys, and Aphra Behn for the Series “Letras Universales” in Editorial Cátedra, one the most prestigious and wide-ranging publishing houses in Spanish. A critical edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is due to be published in 2014.

 

Lucia Garcia Magaldi is a graduate in modern foreign languages from the University of London and holds a PhD in applied linguistics from The University of Cordoba. She is currently associate professor of English at the University of Cordoba, Spain, where she teaches medieval, Renaissance, and postcolonial English literature as well as English language, phonetics, and phonology. She also lectures on epistemological aspects of language teaching methods on postgraduate courses for secondary school educators (masters). She has co-authored a book on the transition from Chaucer and Shakespeare, and various articles on pedagogical aspects of teaching literature to international learners of English, and on learning strategies and strategies-based instruction.

 

Lura Gillman is professor of women’s and gender studies at Virginia Tech. Her articles on migratory identities and practices, African and Latina diasporic feminisms, epistemologies of ignorance, and pedagogies of race have appeared in such journals as Feminist Formations, Hypatia, Journal of International Women’s Studies, Journal of Black Studies and Meridians. Her essay, “Inter-American Encounters in the Travel and Migration Narratives of Mayra Montero and Cristina García: Toward a Decolonial Hemispheric Feminism” is forthcoming in Signs. Her most recent book is Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics (2010).

 

María Elena Jaime de Pablos is the general editor of Revista AUDEM, a gender studies journal, and senior lecturer at the University of Almeria, Spain, where she teaches feminist literary criticism and English literature. She is the author of two studies on the representation of women in Moore’s narrative, and the editor of different books on Irish literature. She has recently edited Epistemologia Feminista: Mujeres e identidades (2011) and co-edited George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature (2013). She is currently working on the fiction of Mary O’Donnell.

 

Kate Joseph is a deconstructionalist thinker, particularly interested in the fields of Queer Studies, language/discourse, and the politics of representation. She has taught and worked in academia for the past three years, and is currently employed at a publicity agency in the arts and culture sector in Johannesburg. She obtained a BA in English literature and art history and visual culture from Rhodes University. Her postgraduate research focused on nationhood, politics of remembrance, and gender. She has a master’s degree in political studies from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her previous publications include: “Mixing soccer and sexually ‘subversive’ identities: issuing a form of representational counter-culture able to challenge hegemonic gender relations in contemporary South Africa?” Postamble Vol 8, No 1, December 2012; and “I am What I am . . . The Nature of Sexual Difference,” Amandla! No: 11/12 Dec 2009/Jan 2010 (with M. Ramphile).

 

Cynthia Lytle is a PhD candidate at the Department of English and German Philology at the Universitat de Barcelona in Spain. Her research is on multiracial identities and postcolonial literature with a current focus on South African author and critic Zoë Wicomb. She has published chapters, “The Power of Language in Mixed-Race Identities in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Fox Girl” in American Multicultural Studies Diversity of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality (2012) and “(Re)presenting ‘Coloured’ Identity through Figures and Folklore in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story” in Weaving New Perspectives Together: Some Reflections on Literary Studies (2012). She is working on her dissertation entitled “DeraciNation: Reading the Borderlands in the Fiction of Zoë Wicomb (1945-)”.

 

Conchi Parrondo, a native of Málaga, Spain, is an academic scholar whose focus of research centers on Contemporary African American Literature, an area in which she explores the theory of difference from an intersectional perspective. Ms. Parrondo lived for twenty-seven years in the United States, where she taught Spanish and Latin to high school students. Upon returning to her native country, she has obtained a degree in English philology and pursued a master’s in advanced English studies with an interest in North American literature. Since 2008, she has been actively participating as a speaker and moderator in several international conferences regarding African American studies. Ms. Parrondo is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Málaga, Spain, where she continues working as a secondary school teacher. She is deeply involved in the development and implementation of bilingualism for secondary schools in the area.

 

Inmaculada Pineda, PhD junior professor at the University of Málaga, English Department. She received her doctoral degree for a dissertation on Gloria Naylor’s fiction. Her research has later turned to focus on contemporary African American drama. Inmaculada Pineda has published several articles both on Gloria Naylor and on several black women playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks, Kia Cothron, Pearl Cleage, or Cheryl L. West. She is a member of the HUM-302 project, a Spanish research group that focuses on contemporary American drama by women.

 

Angelita D. Reyes, of American and Honduran background, completed her doctorate at the University of Iowa in comparative literature and anthropology. Currently a professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Dr. Reyes is the author of Mothering across Cultures: Postcolonial Representations and other publications that investigate and offer innovative approaches to salient issues of women and gender across cultures. Her essays and co-edited books cover topics such as women’s autobiographical writings, marriage matters, women and sexuality, visualizing slavery, vernacular architecture and public history material culture. Angelita is the recipient of an abundance of civic honors, humanitarian awards, and collaborative scholarly grants. For example, with Maria Cruz-Torres, she co-chaired the ASU Institute for the Humanities (IHR) Research faculty seminar that focused on “Narrative Prisms of Women and Sustainability.” This research cluster was the first to receive the IHR Jenny Norton award for a research project that focuses on women. She also received distinguished Fulbright, Rockefeller, Virginia Historical Society, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Dr. Reyes has worked as a consultant with the U.S. Department of State’s program in public diplomacy in West Africa and Kazakhstan, Central Asia. As a lifetime member of the U.S. Fulbright Association, she currently serves on the Fulbright Arizona Chapter Board of Directors.

 

Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (MA, University of Southampton; PhD, University of Granada) is currently a lecturer in social history and cultural studies at the University of Málaga (Spain). She has specialized in the social and cultural history of deviant women and children in Victorian England and in contemporary Britain, although her research interests have since expanded to gender and sexual identity issues in Neo-Victorian fiction. Her publications include several chapters of books and articles in journals, and she has co-edited the volumes Identity, Migration and Women’s Bodies as Sites of Knowledge and Transgression (2009), and Cultural Migrations and Gendered Subjects: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations of the Female Body (2011). She has edited the volume Women’s Identities and Bodies in Colonial and Postcolonial History and Literature (2012) and is also the author of an entry for the Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration entitled “Trafficking, Sex-work and Migration” (2013). Her most recent publication is a monograph entitled The London Lock Hospital in the Nineteenth Century: Gender, Sexuality and Social Reform (2014).

 

Antje Schuhmann holds a PhD in postcolonial studies (University of Munich, Germany) and works as senior lecturer in the Political Studies Department at Witwatersrand University. The intersections of power with body politics and historic legacies within today’s systems of violence and domination are one of the main foci of her intellectual and activist work. How do gender, race, sexuality, and class manifest in everyday experiences and politics of representation? How are the ways we memorize past violence subverting or reinforcing contemporary forms of oppression? She is active in international feminist and anti-racist and anti-fascist networks and initiatives, has produced film and audio features, and is published widely internationally.

 

David Walton is senior lecturer and coordinator of cultural studies at the University of Murcia (Spain) and has taught courses on popular cultures, postmodern cultures, the history of thought, and literary and cultural theory. He currently teaches courses on cultural theory and cultural practice at undergraduate level, and comparative postmodern literatures and cultures at master’s level. He is a founding member, and currently president, of the Iberian Association of Cultural Studies (IBACS), which is dedicated to the promotion of the area on the Iberian Peninsula. He has published widely in cultural theory, cultural studies, and visual cultures. His books include Critical Approaches to Literature in English (1997), Four Fragments of British Culture (1997) and Culture and Power: Ac(unofficial)knowledging Cultural Studies in Spain (2002). His two most recent books are Introducing Cultural Studies: Learning Through Practice (2008) and Doing Cultural Theory (2012). He has recently published chapters on new sexualities, the satire of Chris Morris, graffiti culture, and the interfaces between philosophy and cultural studies.