Keynote Speakers

 

RITA FELSKI is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the editor of New Literary History.  After receiving a B.A from Cambridge University in England and a Ph.D from Monash University in Australia, she moved to the U.S in 1994. She is the author of Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, The Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, Literature After Feminism, and the Blackwell Manifesto Uses of Literature,  as well as the editor of  Rethinking Tragedy and the co-editor of Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. She has also published essays in numerous journals, including PMLA, Signs, Poetics Today, Cultural Critique, Theory, Culture, and Society, New Formations, and Modernism/Modernity.  Honors and awards include the William Riley Parker Prize for best essay in PMLA, an Australian Research Council Major Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Her work has been translated into nine languages. She is currently completing a book on the hermeneutics of suspicion called “Schools of Suspicion: Critique and After”.

ANGELA LOCATELLI is Professor of English Literature, and Director of the PhD Program in “EuroAmerican Literatures” at the University of Bergamo, Italy. She is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Faculty member of the International PhD Network established in 2008 by the University of Giessen (Germany) with the Universities of Helsinki, Stockholm, The Catholic University of Lisbon, and Bergamo. In 1999 and 2008 she was awarded a Short-term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. In 2006 she was invited into IAUPE (International Association of University Professors of English). She is on the Editorial Board of several academic journals (Textus, Fogli di Anglistica, Dintorni) and member of the reading panel of the Paris X Nanterre University Journal Tropismes. After serving as one of the General Editors of EJES, The European Journal of English Studies (www.essenglish.org/ejes.html), Angela Locatelli is now on the Editorial board of the journal. Her main research interest is literary theory. She has written extensively on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture and literature. Her publications also include a volume and several articles on Modernist and Postmodern fiction and 20th Century drama.

VERA NUENNING is Professor of English Philology at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) where she has also been vice-rector for international affairs until September 2009. She graduated with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics (Die Ästhetik Virginia Woolfs, 1990); her postdoctoral thesis deals with Catharine Macaulay and the political culture of English radicalism (“A Revolution in Sentiments, Manners, and Moral Opinions”: Catharine Macaulay und die politische Kultur des englischen Radikalismus, 1760-1790, 1998). Among her publications are numerous monographs on Anglo-American history as well as on English literature and culture from the 18th to the 21st century. Her (co-)editions of ten collections of essays mostly concern theoretical matters, such as narratology or cultural studies. Her recent publications (in English) are Cultural Ways of Worldmaking. Media and Narratives (ed., 2010) and The Aesthetics and Politics of Cultural Worldmaking (ed. 2010). She is also associate editor of two book series and the international journal English Studies. Since 2006 she has been responsible for the German plans concerning the development of the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences of the German-Turkish University in Istanbul. From 2011 until 2012 she was Fellow of the Marsilius Kolleg at the University of Heidelberg.