Speakers

Lucy Bond is principal lecturer in English at the University of Westminster and a partner of the international Mnemonic network. Her research focuses on American environmental memory and trauma. Lucy is the author of Frames of Memory after 9/11 (Palgrave 2015) and, with Stef Craps, the Routledge New Critical Idiom volume, Trauma (2020). She is co-editor of The Transcultural Turn (de Gruyter 2014, with Jessica Rapson), Memory Unbound (Berghahn 2016, with Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen), and Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge 2018, with Ben de Bruyn and Jessica Rapson). Funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, Lucy’s current research, “Processing Memory: Heritage, Industry, and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States”, examines how the heritage industry is implicated in negating past and present forms of environmental racism in the Deep South. In collaboration with Jessica Rapson, this project examines the commemorative processes through which sites romanticise histories of human and natural exploitation; critiques their economic and symbolic ties to the petrochemical industry; and documents alternative tourist practices that render social injustice culturally visible.

Dr. Rick Crownshaw is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), as well as numerous articles on American literature, memory studies, and trauma studies. He is the editor of Transcultural Memory (Routledge 2014), and co-editor of The Future of Memory (Berghahn 2010, 2013). He is currently working on a monograph, Remembering the Anthropocene in Contemporary American Fiction, which focuses on, among other things, the potential of cultural memory and trauma studies in analyzing literary narratives of climate change, extinction, pollution and toxicity, the resourcing of war, American petrocultures, and post-oil imaginaries. He is the co-editor, with Stef Craps, of a 2018 special edition of Studies in the Novel on climate change fiction. 

Ben De Bruyn teaches English Literature at UCLouvain, Belgium. He is the author of The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape (Palgrave, 2020) and co-editor of Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge, 2018) and Literature Now: Key Terms and Methods for Literary History (Edinburgh UP, 2016). He has also published several articles on climate fiction and animal narratives in journals such as Studies in the Novel and Oxford Literary Review.

Lars Eckstein is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Among his publications are Re-Membering the Black Atlantic (Brill 2006), Reading Song Lyrics (Brill 2010), Postcolonial Literatures in English (co-authored, Metzler 2019) and a range of co-edited works, more recently Postcolonial Piracy (Bloomsbury 2014), Postcolonial Justice (Brill 2017) and Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements (Routledge 2020). His main research over the past few years has focussed on Tupaia, a Polynesian master navigator who joined the crew of Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the South Seas ('The Making of Tupaia's Map', JPH  2019).

Timo Müller is Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research interests include modernism, ecocriticism, and African American studies. His work has appeared in journals such as American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He has edited several textbooks and written two monographs, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction (2010) and The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018), which is now available in paperback from the University of Mississippi Press.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (PhD 2002, Aarhus University) is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures(2008), The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson of Literature and the World (2019), and the editor of several books, including World Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges(2012), Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020). He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. Thomsen has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University (combined eight months on four stays), taught at Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature (Harvard 2013; Copenhagen 2017; online 2020) and has given invited lectures in more than twenty countries. He is director of the Digital Arts Initiative (2017-) and of the faculty research focus area Human Futures (2016-22), both at Aarhus University. Thomsen was co-director of the research project Posthuman Aesthetics (2014-18), and he is the PI of the VELUX FONDEN funded project Fabula-NET (2021-25). He is co-editor of Orbis Litterarum, an advisory board member of the book series Literatures as World Literature, and a member of the editorial board of Journal of World Literature. Thomsen is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010-), the advisory board of The Institute for World Literature (2010-13, 2018-22), and the executive committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (2016-22).

Jessica Rapson is a Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London. Her monograph Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice (Berghahn, 2015) examined the environmental dynamics of Holocaust commemorative landscapes. She has edited collections on the Transcultural Turn in Memory Studies (de Gruyter, 2014, with Lucy Bond) and Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (Textual Practice, 2017, with Lucy Bond and Ben de Bruyn) and published a range of chapters and articles on the political and environmental issues pertaining to commemoration and difficult heritage. She is a partner in the London Consortium for Cultural Memory Studies and the Mnemonics network for Memory Studies. She is currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme sponsored project entitled ‘Processing Memory: Heritage, Industry, and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States’ with Lucy Bond (University of Westminster).

Jan Rupp is currently interim professor at the University of Wuppertal and has served as visiting professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and Heidelberg University. He is the author of Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature (2010) and a second monograph on representations of ritual in modernist Pageant Fictions (2016). His research interests include the contemporary novel, cultural memory studies, narrative criticism, and (neo-)Victorianism. He has recently been interested in the intersection of environmental memory and world writing in literatures of the Global South.

Katja Sarkowsky holds the Chair of American Studies at Augsburg University, Germany. She has published widely on literary citizenship studies, life writing, and minoritized literatures in Canada and the United States. In the context of the interdisciplinary project “The Antigonistic Conflict,” she currently explores – in collaboration with political theorist Marcus Llanque – how tragedy and the dead challenge liberal notions of society. Her publications include the monographs AlterNative Spaces. Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations Literatures (2007) and Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature (2018) as well as the co-edited volumes Nachexil/Post-Exile (2020, with Bettina Bannasch), Storied Citizenship (2021, with Ina Batzke), and Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts (2021, with Mark Stein).

Pieter Vermeulen is an associate professor of American and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Romanticism After the Holocaust (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Literature and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2020), and a co-editor of, most recently, Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets (with Stefan Helgesson; Routledge, 2015), Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (with Lucy Bond and Stef Craps, 2017), and a double special issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory on contemporary literature and/as archive (with Tom Chadwick, 2019-20). His current writing project investigates the relation between the "Americanization" of world literature and the notion of world literary value.

Jennifer Wenzel is a scholar of postcolonial studies and environmental and energy humanities at Columbia University, where she is jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Her new book, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham 2020), was shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham 2017). Her first book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009), was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Her current research examines the fossil-fueled imagination, in literature, visual culture, and public life.