Our speakers
Sarah Phillips Casteel is Professor of English at Carleton University, where she is cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Her most recent books are Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination, which won a Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and the co-edited volume Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice. Last spring she was a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and in 2021 she held the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair in Global Modernities at the University of Potsdam. Her book Making History Visible: Black Lives Under Nazism in Literature and Art is under contract with Columbia University Press.
Esther Dischereit was born in Heppenheim, Germany, and lives in Berlin. In its many different forms, her work presents a visceral pathography of post-war continuities, crises, spectres and trauma. She has published fiction, poetry, journalism and essays, and is a prolific writer for the radio, the stage and other artistic media. Between 2012 and 2017 she was Professor of Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She has been a Fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European and Jewish Studies in Potsdam and the DAAD Chair for Contemporary Poetics at New York University, 2019. In 2009 she received Austria`s prestigious Erich Fried Prize for her writing. Her latest collection of poems is Sometimes a Single Leaf, translated and introduced by Iain Galbraith 2020. Blumen für Otello. Über die Verbrechen von Jena (Flowers for Otello. On the Crimes That Came out of Jena, published in English translation in 2022), was nominated as a radio play for the ARD Medienpreis. In 2021 she edited Hab keine Angst, erzähl alles. Das Attentat von Halle und die Stimmen der Überlebenden (Don’t be afraid, tell everything. The assassination of Halle and the voices of the survivors).
Irina Dumitrescu is a writer and the professor for medieval English literature at the University of Bonn. Her monograph, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Recent editorial projects include a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum on “Everyday Arts: Craft, Voice, Performance” with Emma O’Laughlin Berat and an issue of New Literary History entitled “In Brief,” with Bruce Holsinger. She is a columnist at the Times Literary Supplement, co-hosts a podcast at the London Review of Books with Mary Wellesley, and contributes essays, criticism, and memoir to a wide variety of outlets.
Sophie Duvernoy is a translator and writer specializing in the literature of the Weimar Republic. She is a recipient of the 2015 Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators awarded by the Goethe Institut, NY. She has recently submitted a dissertation in German at Yale University entitled The Shape of Things: Reading Culture through Form in the Weimar Republic, which shows how form became an important philosophical and aesthetic category in late nineteenth-century Germany and birthed a genre of cultural criticism among the Weimar Republic avant-garde. In her translation work, she focuses on recuperating the work of forgotten female writers, such as Gabriele Tergit and Emmy Hennings, and is interested in their involvement in the journalism and poetry scenes of their time. She also writes about architecture and art.
Adriana X. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She has published widely on contemporary Hebrew and Israeli poetry and translation and is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, and co-editor, with Claire Williams, of After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century (Legenda, 2022).
Rolf Kailuweit has been Professor of Romance Linguistics (Spanish and French) at HHU Düsseldorf since 2017. Previously, he held the chair of Romance Linguistics and Media Studies at the University of Freiburg (Germany). After studying Romance languages and literatures, philosophy, and law at FU Berlin and the University of Barcelona, he received his PhD from FU Berlin in 1996 with a thesis on the linguistic conflict between Castilian and Catalan in the 18th and 19th centuries. He obtained his habilitation in Heidelberg in 2003 with a study on syntax and semantics of French and Italian verbs of emotion. His research focuses, among other topics, on the linguistic contact between different Romance languages and varieties, and on pluricentric Spanish. In particular, he deals with the history of language, culture, and media in Argentina. Since 2009, he has been a corresponding member of the Academia Porteña del Lunfardo (Buenos Aires). Since May 2023, he has been the spokesperson of the Düsseldorf Working Package within the EU Horizon project Analysis of and Responses to Extremist Narratives (ARENAS).
Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika is a Full Professor at the University of Paris 8 and a member of TransCrit Research Group there. She teaches US literature, Caribbean literature, and translation. Her most recent research has focused on contemporary Caribbean literatures in English and how their intersections with plant studies, science (botany, geometry, geography) and the seemingly ordinary pave the way for innovative forms or patterns to re-enter Caribbean corpuses. She is the author of L’imaginaire de Jamaica Kincaid, variations autour d’une île caraïbe (2016) and has co-edited several other studies of Caribbean and African American literature. Her recent published articles include “Writing Away from the Main: The Traveling Ways of Jamaica Kincaid’s Unruly Prose” in Mobility and Corporeality in Nineteenth-To Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Literature. Bodies in Motion, eds. J. Chemmachery & B. Jain (2021) and “Autobiographical Performance, or what Happens to Lines Deviated” in Writing the Self as Other, eds. Nelly Mok & Claudine Raynaud (2019).
Jessica Kirzane is the assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Her research interests include representations of race, gender and regionalism in American Yiddish fiction, as well as curricular development of Yiddish language pedagogy for specifically academic purposes. She has translated three works by popular Yiddish author Miriam Karpilove: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse UP, 2020), Judith (Farlag, 2022) and A Provincial Newspaper and Other HerStories (Syracuse UP, 2023).
Birgit Neumann is Chair of Anglophone Literatures and Translation Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. She is founder and director of the Centre for Translation Studies. Recent publications include Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literatures (2020, with Gabriele Rippl) as well as the edited and co-edited volumes Anglophone World Literatures (2017), Global Literary Histories (2018), New Approaches to the 21st-century Anglophone Novel (2021), Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures (2021) and Temporalities of Crises in Anglophone Literatures (2023). She is currently completing a monograph on post-monolingual Anglophone novels.
Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan. She is a scholar and translator of Yiddish literature who has written and taught about American Jewish and Yiddish literature and literature of the Holocaust. Her books include: The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish Culture in America During the Holocaust; Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century; and a translation of Kadya Molodovsky’s A Jewish Refugee in America. She is also co-editor of Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature; Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext; Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives.
Christine Richter-Nilsson (PhD) is a lecturer, dramaturg, and professional literary translator. She has taught theater and translation at Vanderbilt University, Syracuse University, and at HHU. She has recently translated works by Teju Cole, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Toni Morrison. She was awarded the Internationaler Literaturpreis Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2013 for the German translation of Cole’s Open City (Suhrkamp, 2012). In 2022 and 2023, she was awarded a Gastdozentur by Deutscher Übersetzerfonds (DÜF) to teach translation at the University of Stuttgart. She has published in German Studies Review (2018) and co-edited the anthology Voices from Undergroundzero, New Plays from NYC (Theater der Zeit, 2008).
Ana Delia Rogobete holds a PhD in contemporary French literature and theory of photography from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include the construction of the notion of the author, conceptual art and authorship, and feminist and gender studies.
Belén Santana holds a PhD in Translation Studies and has been teaching Translation (from German and English into Spanish) at the University of Salamanca since 2003. She is also a professional literary translator from German into Spanish. Her research interests are Humour Translation, Literary Translation Teaching (especially under the impact of technologies), the cooperation between Translation and Library and Information Science and bridging the gap between Translation Theory and Practice.
Suzanne Scafe is a Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton. Her work on African-diasporic writing includes several articles and essays on Caribbean fiction and poetry, the most recent of which is an essay on the fiction of Kei Miller and Marlon James in the anthology, Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World (2021). She has also written extensively on Black British literature and culture. Her monograph, Reading to Resist: Critical Approaches to Black British Women’s Fiction will be published in 2024.
Críspulo Travieso holds a PhD in Library and Information Science (2005) from the University of Salamanca, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research projects and publications belong to the fields of scientific information evaluation, digital content organization and intercultural communication.
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford. He is the author of numerous books, among them the award-winning Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the itineraries of Transnationalism (2014), and, recently, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature which deploys postcolonial literature to explore the links between suffering and ethics in its examination of tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present era.
Layla Zami is an interdisciplinary academic and artist. She is Postdoctoral Researcher in Performance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (SFB 1512 / Institut für Theaterwissenschaft) and Adj. Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Zami is the author of Contemporary PerforMemory (2020), and her work orbits around the nexus of cultural memory, performance, diaspora, language, and spacetime. She obtained her PhD at Humboldt-University, where she also earned a Teaching Award, and was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. As an Interdisciplinary Resident Artist with Oxana Chi Dance & Art, Zami creates and performs music, sounds, spoken words and theater. Born in Paris in 1985, she is rooted in a Jewish-German-Caribbean heritage. www.laylazami.net