Contributors

Dr Sarah Olive is Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York, where she is Programme Leader for the B.A. English in Education. Sarah is also Visiting Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, leading a module on the MA Shakespeare and Education. Sarah is editor of the journal Teaching Shakespeare, a new publication of the British Shakespeare Association, of which she is a trustee. Sarah is currently working as part of the AHRC-funded "Shakespeare's global communities" research network, which examines the role Shakespeare plays in contemporary global theatrical and literary culture, and which takes the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival (WSF) as a core case study. Sarah's immediate research interests lie in Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) in English education and popular culture and she is an active member of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at York.

Website: http://www.york.ac.uk/education/our-staff/academic/sarah-olive/

Twitter: @DrSarahOlive

Dr Michael J. Collins is Lecturer in American Literature at The University of Kent. He has published essays on Melville and the British theatre, Poe and Freemasonry, and Washington Irving and the performance cultures of American Federalism. Michael is currently completing his first monograph as well as starting a new Leverhulme-funded research project, “Reluctant Cosmopolitans: Solidarity and Realism in the Gilded Age,” which explores the intersections between ideas of cultural difference and class solidarity in Franz Boas, Stephen Crane, WD Howells and Henry Adams. As a Fulbright Commission Awardee, Michael participated in the NYU American Studies Summer Institute in 2010. He is also a book reviewer for Year’s Work in English Studies and serves on the Executive Committee of The British Association for American Studies.

Website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/people/profiles/mcollins.html

Twitter: @collinsactually

Sarah Chihaya is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently completing her dissertation, "Dark Arts: Narrative Diabolism in the Contemporary Novel." She specializes in the novel and film in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in English, French, and German, and convenes UC Berkeley's postcolonial Anglophone working group, Anglophonia. Sarah has a review forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies in 2013.

Daniel O'Gorman is completing a PhD in post-9/11 fiction and critical theory in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London and has taught English Literature, Creative Writing, and Visual and Material Culture at Buckinghamshire New University. He has recently published a book chapter on Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, and has two more pieces on Rushdie currently in press (one on his novel, Shalimar the Clown, and one on his non-fiction). Daniel is also a co-convenor of the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and has been on the organising board of three Royal Holloway graduate conferences: "Postcolonial Memory" (2009), "Uncertainty: Theory in the 21st Century" (2011), and "The Future of Arts Research" (2011).

Website: http://royalholloway.academia.edu/DanielOGorman

Twitter: @danog85

Deborah Lilley is a final year PhD Candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London working in the field of contemporary literature and theory. Deborah's thesis examines the intersection of pastoral and ecology in contemporary British writing. She also co-convenes the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar series at the Institute of English Studies, University of London and is a member of the Editorial Board for Royal Holloway's new ejournal Exegesis.

Website: http://royalholloway.academia.edu/DeborahLilley

Twitter: @Deborah_Lilley

Christopher Daley is a final year PhD student and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster. His PhD thesis examinines the influence of the Cold War on British science fiction between 1945 and 1969. His research focuses specifically on the socio-political events that shaped Britain’s role during the Cold War and considers the development of a distinctive national response through science fiction texts. Beyond his research project, Christopher is also interested in post-apocalyptic fiction, literary reactions to suburbia and the cultural history of Britain during the 1950s. Christopher was previously co-organiser of the international conference "The Apocalypse and Its Discontents" which was held at the University of Westminster in December 2010, whilst he is currently joint organiser of the research seminar series held within the department.

Website:http://westminster.ac.uk/schools/humanities/english/people/phd-students/daley,-christopher

Twitter: @cr_daley

Zara Dinnen is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, researching representations of the digital in contemporary American culture. She has articles and reviews published or forthcoming in the Journal of Narrative Theory, ImageText, the Journal of American Studies, Textual Practice and the Comics Forum. Zara is Co-Organiser of the Contemporary Fiction Seminar at the Institute of English Studies and Reviews Editor for the AHRC-funded journal Dandelion.

Website: http://birkbeck.academia.edu/ZaraDinnen/About

Twitter: @zara_dinnen and @contemporaryfic

Dr Lewis Ward has taught modern and contemporary literature at the University of Exeter, the University of Plymouth and the University of the West of England. His PhD (Exeter 2009) was on Holocaust representation, trauma, memory and empathy, focusing on works by W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anne Michaels and ‘Binjamin Wilkomirski’. His article on Sebald will appear in Journal of Modern Literature in December 2012, and his essays on Aleksandar Hemon and Philip Roth are under consideration elsewhere. He is working on a book provisionally titled Voices of Empathy in Contemporary Narratives of War, Genocide and Exile, which will investigate intersections between ethics and narrative voice in recent transnational fiction. Lewis has also worked as a BBC web producer and freelance editor.

Website: http://independent.academia.edu/WardLewis

Twitter: @lewis591

Dr Churnjeet Mahn is Lecturer in English at the University of Surrey. Churnjeet is currently completing a book project entitled Travels in the Palimpsest: British Women's Travel to Greece 1840-1914 (Ashgate 2012), which leads into a new project on politicised critiques of Hellenism as a commonsense standard for culture in the period 1890-1950. She is interested in women's writing from Romanticism to Modernism, has a special interest in Queer literature and culture from the Victorian period to the present day, and has published work on ethnography by British women travelling to sites of antiquity in the nineteenth century in Victorian Studies, Women Writing Greece: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Efterpi Mitsi (Rodopi, 2008), Re-visioning Scotland: New Readings of the Cultural Canon, ed. Lyndsay Lunan, Kirsty A. Macdonald and Carla Sassi (Peter Lang, 2008), and the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Website: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/staff/churnjeet_kaur_mahn/index.htm

Twitter: @churnjeet

Dr Mark P. Williams is a political journalist and independent researcher residing in Wellington, New Zealand. Mark received his PhD from the University of East Anglia for a thesis entitled "Radical Fantasy: A Study of Left Radical Politics in the Fantasy Writing of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville," 
and has worked as a Tutor at Victoria University of Wellington and is a political reporter for Scoop Media. A member of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies (UKNMFS), Mark’s primary research interests are in the intersections of genre fiction, avant-garde literature and politics, particularly in the relationships of fantasy and science fiction to ideology. 
Mark’s reviews and articles have appeared in The Literary London Journal, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and Critical Engagements: Journal of the UKNMFS, and he has forthcoming chapters on David Conway’s Gothic science fiction, London in the writing of China Miéville, and a study of experimental 1990s British fiction. Mark is a regular contributor to the New Zealand online culture magazine Werewolf.co.nz.

Website: http://independent.academia.edu/MarkPWilliams/About

Twitter: @MPW_scp

Bianca Leggett is a PhD Candidate in the School of English & Humanities at Birkbeck College, The University of London.  She is currently working on her thesis, entitled Englishness Elsewhere: Negotiating English Identity in the Contemporary Travel Novel.  She has published on the subject of metanarrative in the fiction of Julian Barnes, self-fashioning and cosmopolitanism in Black British travel narrativess, the role of "Brits Abroad" in the All Hail the New Puritans and ideas of transcendence in the work of Geoff Dyer.  She is the co-convener (with Tony Venezia) of the symposium Twenty-First Century British Fiction.

Twitter: @C21st_symposium

Dr Adam Stock completed his PhD, 'Mid-Twentieth Century Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought,' in December 2011. He teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University. He is currently engaged in a number of projects seeded from his PhD research, including an article on apocalypse and dystopia, and another on the fiction of John Wyndham. He has a forthcoming book chapter on the politics of Orwell’s concept of nature in Orwell Today, ed. Richard Keeble (Arima). He has also published on imagery in Enlightenment political philosophy. Adam is additionally interested in the inter-relations between visual arts and literature, and has an upcoming collaborative commission for the arts company Red Nile, which is backed by Arts Council England and the Northern Rock Foundation. He recently wrote an essay on Cleveland for Red Nile’s ‘Factory Nights’ programme.

Website: http://durham.academia.edu/adamstock/About

Dr Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of St Andrews. Lorna’s research interests lie in the relationship between postcolonial literatures, especially Caribbean, and contemporary critical theory. She is author of Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-continental Philosophy (Continuum, 2012) and Co-Editor of Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In 2010, Lorna was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Lorna has published articles in such journals as Journal of West Indian Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Deleuze Studies, Textual Practice and Postcolonial Text and is co-editor (with Birgit M. Kaiser) of Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Lorna is also Conference Co-ordinator for the Society for Caribbean Studies (UK).

Website: http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/humanities/staff/3003.asp

Twitter: @SocCaribbean

Dr Alexander Beaumont is Lecturer in Film and Literature at the University of York with research interests in post-war British culture, Thatcherism and the British Left, and contemporary representations of the city. His essay “‘New Times Television? Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette” appears in Thatcher and After (eds. Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho, Palgrave Macmillan 2010). Current projects include a monograph entitled Freedom and the City: Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement and essays on Jeanette Winterson’s 1987 novel The Passion and post-devolution representations of the urban North of England.

Website: http://www.york.ac.uk/english/postgraduate/profiles/beaumont/

Twitter: @aibeaumont

Dr Caroline Magennis teaches British literature, culture and history at Harlaxton College, a study abroad campus for US students. She is a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast (BA, MA, PhD). She has held post-doctoral research fellowships at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s and University College Dublin. Caroline publishes in the area of modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture, and is the author of Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel and co-editor of Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture. For full details of Caroline's publications see http://harlaxton.academia.edu/CarolineMagennis.

Website: http://www.ueharlax.ac.uk/academics/CurrentFaculty.cfm

Twitter: @drmagennis

Rob Jones is a third year PhD student at the University of Leicester. His Doctoral research, tentatively titled The Only Complete Man Industry: William S. Burroughs' Cut-Up Philosophy and the Avant-garde, is an intellectual history that also examines Burroughs’ cut-up texts as philosophical instruction manuals. He has written book reviews for the Journal of American Studies and is an occasional contributor to The Poetry Show on KUSP NPR Santa Cruz. 

Website: http://leicester.academia.edu/RobertJonesII

Twitter: @robertwjonesii

Dr Katy Shaw is Senior Lecturer and Subject Leader for English Literature at the University of Brighton. She is Director of C21: Centre for 21st-century Writings and editor of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Her work examines contemporary novelist including two books on David Peace, poetry and social purpose and twenty-first century genre fiction. She is a regular festival host and media presenter and is currently negotiating both a blog and twitter feed.

Website: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/katy-shaw

Twitter: @DrKatyShaw

Dr Richard Martin completed his PhD at Birkbeck’s London Consortium, having previously worked for two years at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). He is currently adapting his doctoral thesis, entitled The Architecture of David Lynch, for publication, and his articles and reviews have been published (or are forthcoming) in the European Journal of American Culture, Journal of American Studies, 49th Parallel, American Studies Today, Critical Quarterly, and The Modernist. He has taught at Birkbeck and Middlesex University, as well as creating a series of multidisciplinary public courses at Tate Modern (where he also organized the 2009 international symposium on Lynch). He is currently based in Berlin.

Jennifer Hodgson is a PhD Candidate at the University of Durham. Her AHRC-funded research focuses on British experimental writing during the mid-twentieth century, including Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin, B. S. Johnson, Alan Burns and Brigid Brophy, amongst others. The project examines the ways in which British experimental writing speculates on an alternative history for the development of the British postwar novel in the context of the "situation of the novel" debates of the time. Jennifer is the UK Editor of Dalkey Archive Press, and in Autumn 2011 was the Everett Helm Visiting Fellow at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. Jennifer is currently co-editing a journal special issue British contemporary fiction with Professor Patricia Waugh (Durham).

Website: http://durham.academia.edu/JenniferHodgson

Twitter: @jenniferhodgson

Dr Martin Paul Eve is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln. His research specialisms include the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace and the philosophy/theory of Foucault, Wittgenstein and the Frankfurt School. He has been published, or has work forthcoming, in Textual Practice, Literature and History, C21 Journal, Insights and Pynchon Notes among others. A strong proponent of Open Access, Martin is a member of the steering committee for JISC's OAPEN-UK project and is chief editor of Orbit, the open-access peer-reviewed e-journal on the writings of Thomas Pynchon. He is also on the Editorial Board for the online peer-reviewed journal Excursions. Finally, Martin is a Microsoft Certified Professional in C# and the .NET Framework and also writes for the Guardian Higher Education Network (see here for his Guardian profile). Martin is Online Editor of Alluvium.

Website: https://www.martineve.com/

Twitter: @martin_eve

Dr Heidi James-Dunbar is a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University. Her novella The Mesmerist's Daughter (published by Apis Books) was launched in July 2007. Her novel Carbon, was published by Blatt in October 2009 and is published in Spanish by El Tercer Nombre. Carbon is currently being made into a film by British film company, Institute for Eyes, with funding from Film 4. She has collaborated with artists including Delaine LeBas, Marisa Carnesky and Tara Darby. Her essays and short stories have appeared in various publications and anthologies including Dazed and Confused, Next Level, Flux, Brand, Another Magazine, The Independent, 3:AM Magazine, Undercurrent, 3:AM London, New York, Paris, Dreams That Money Can Buy, Full Moon Empty Sports Bag and Pulp.net, among others.

Twitter: @heidipearljames and @litweeturefest

Alex Latter teaches at Birkbeck College, where he has recently completed his PhD. He is currently co-editing a book of essays on Peter Riley for Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers Series and has published articles in The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and The Keats-Shelley Review. 

Website: http://birkbeck.academia.edu/AlexLatter

Twitter: @ATHLatter

Dr Courtney Hopf is a part-time lecturer in Brunel University's School of Arts and the acting manager of the university's central learning development unit. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis in December 2011, and is currently preparing a monograph based on her dissertation titled Story Networks: The Politics and Poetics of Mass-Collaboration. Her fascination with collaborative production has led Courtney to research in film and film production, narratology, media, audience reception theory, and print cultures. Publications include 'Story Networks: A Theory of Narrative and Mass Collaboration' in Rhizomes (2010) and 'The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas' in David Mitchell: Critical Essays, ed. Sarah Dillon (Gylphi, 2011).

Xavier Marcó del Pont is currently completing a PhD thesis entitled Titles and Topoi: Narrative Structure, Structural Metaphors, and Organizational Devices in the Works of Thomas Pynchon at Royal Holloway, University of London. Beyond Anglophone literature, his research interests include Film Theory, Literature and Science, Comics Studies, and Argentine Literature. He has presented at conferences in Europe and throughout the UK and co-convenes the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar at the Institute of English Studies (London) and is a member of the Editorial Board for Royal Holloway’s e-journal Exegesis.

Website: http://royalholloway.academia.edu/XavierMarcodelPont/About

Dr Siân Adiseshiah is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln where she is Programme Leader for MA in English Studies and MA in 21st Century Literature and
 Director of Postgraduate Research in English. Siân’s primary research area is post-war British theatre, with emphasis on political playwrights and Caryl Churchill in particular. Siân’s first monograph is Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (Cambridge Scholars, 2009), and she is preparing a second monograph on utopianism and the post-war British stage. Siân is currently co-editing a collection of essays (with Dr Rupert Hildyard) on 21st century British fiction entitled Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (Palgrave, 2013) and has published articles in such journals as C21 Literature, Studies in Musical Theatre, Modern Drama, Utopian Studies and the Times Higher Education Supplement. She is co-organising the second "What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English" conference at the University of Lincoln (July 2012) and is an Editorial Board member on the Journal of Gender Studies as well as C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings.

Website: http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/humanities/staff/1459.asp

Twitter: @sadiseshiah

Dr Martyn James Colebrook submitted his PhD thesis (part-time), focusing on the novels of Iain Banks in relation to British fiction after 1970, in early 2012. He has wider research interests in contemporary American literature, transgression and contemporary culture and apocalypse fictions. He has also published a number of chapters concerning topics such as J.G. Ballard and The Atrocity Exhibition, Paul Auster, The Gothic and Mental Disorder, Don DeLillo and Terorrism, Novelistic Representations of the Yorkshire Ripper and The Troubles Thriller and Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction. Martyn is currently editing a collection of essays focusing on Jeanette Winterson and co-editing a collection of essays focusing on Iain Banks.

Website: http://hull.academia.edu/MartynColebrook/About

Dr Jiaying Cai is a lecturer in the College of English Language and Literature at Shanghai International Studies University, China. Jiaying received her PhD from the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for the research topic Commodification and Crime: A Comparative Study of New York and Shanghai Through Literary Representations since the 1980s. Her research focuses mainly on contemporary American literature, contemporary Chinese literature, and comparative literary studies. She is also interested in contemporary American and Chinese culture studies. Publications include “Urban Crime Across Cultures” in Moving Worlds (forthcoming Spring 2013).

Website: http://nottingham.academia.edu/JiayingCai

Dr Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is preparing a monograph on Translation and the Oulipo (2014). He is editor of the forthcoming Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2012), part of Gylphi's Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series, and Theory of Le Grand Jeu (Atlas, 2013). Dennis's primary research interests lie in modernism and translation, and he has published articles and reviews in Comparative Literature, Comparative Critical Studies, Translation and Literature, PEER English and Dandelion, as well as translations from French and Danish for the London Institute of Pataphysics and Gutfire Magazine.

Website: http://birkbeck.academia.edu/DennisDuncan/About

Twitter: @djbduncan

Dr Caroline Edwards is Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. She is author of the forthcoming monograph Fictions of the Not Yet: Time in the Twenty-First-Century British Novel (2015) and co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2013), Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2013) and Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2014) - published as part of Gylphi's Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series edited by Dr Sarah Dillon. Caroline has published articles, interviews and reviews in Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Textual Practice, Telos, Radical Philosophy, Subjectivity, Historical Materialism, Left Lion Magazine and the New Statesman, and is a regular reviewer for the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies. Caroline is Founding and Commissioning Editor of Alluvium.

Website: http://www.drcarolineedwards.com/

Twitter: @the_blochian

Dr Alistair Brown is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, teaching courses on the arts and literature, and a Postdoctoral Teaching Assistant in English at Durham University, where he also edits the impact blog Research in English At Durham. He is currently writing a textbook on Topics in Modernism for the Singapore Institute of Management University, and preparing a monograph on Reading Games: Computer Games and the Limits of Literature. His PhD on Demonic Fictions: Cybernetics and Postmodernism was completed in 2009. Alistair has published several articles and book chapters on topics such as game studies, postmodern literature, and science fiction. His current research and publications list can be found at http://www.thepequod.org.uk/.

Website: http://www.thepequod.org.uk/

Twitter: @alibrown18

Harriet Earle is a first year PhD student at Keele University, under the supervision of Dr James Peacock and Dr Tim Lustig. Her research focuses on traumatic representation and conflict in American comics published since the end of the Vietnam War. She is especially interested in the comics form and artistic techniques – and how the form demands a new way of reading that can assist the author in their recreation of trauma.

Website: http://keele.academia.edu/HarrietEarle

Twitter: @ComicBomb

Dr Sam Knowles is a teacher and lecturer in postcolonial and travel-related literatures and cultures. He has worked at the Universities of Leeds, Newcastle, and Lincoln and has published on subjects ranging from various theories and theorists of cosmopolitanism to the transnational fiction of Michael Ondaatje. Currently at various stages of completion and publication are an article on the travel writing of Vikram Seth, a piece on Amitav Ghosh’s Burmese literature, and a monograph, Travel Writing and the Transnational Author (Palgrave, 2014). He is a peer reviewer and book reviewer for a number of international journals, and is a member of the editorial board of Librasia: The IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship.

Website: http://www.drsamknowles.wordpress.com

Twitter: @life_academic

Christina Scholz is currently writing her PhD thesis on China Miéville’s fiction. Her fields of interest include the further theorisation of Weird Fiction, Hauntology and the Gothic imagination, the interrelation of genre fiction and other forms of art, and depictions of war, violence and trauma in the arts. Her Master’s thesis, Thanateros: (De)Konstruktion von männlichen Heldenbildern im Mainstream-Film, has been published by AV Akademikerverlag in 2012.

Website: https://online.uni-graz.at/kfu_online/visitenkarte.show_vcard?pPersonenId=EA936DBCA1B318A2&pPersonenGruppe=3

Twitter: @weird_prophet

Dr Iain Robert Smith is Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Global Adaptations of American Film and Television (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and editor of Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation (2009). Iain has published articles in such international journals as Velvet Light Trap and Portal. He is a regular contributor to Flow: A Journal of Television and New Media and is currently Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded research network "Media Across Borders."

Website: http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/staff/Iain-Robert-Smith/

Twitter: @iainrobertsmith

Rowena Clarke is a PhD student in the English Department at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of post-war Britain and America. More specifically, her research considers how British and North American fiction responded to post-war political, cultural and social transformation and how changes in the spatial configurations and conceptualizations of post-war life (such as increased suburbanization or post-war dislocation and exile) find expression in popular forms such as science fiction and the detective novel. At Boston College, Rowena co-convenes the Contemporary Literature and Globalization research group, and has served as a teaching assistant and section leader for the undergraduate course The City in Film and Literature. She is currently preparing for her first qualifying exam which reads contemporary transnational fiction through a framework of critical writing on space and place. 

Website:  http://bc.academia.edu/RowenaClarke

Twitter: @blumenmuskel

Marianne Corrigan is a final year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Nick Bentley at Keele University. Marianne's research examines globalization, discourses of inter-connectivity and narrative migrancy in the later novels of Salman Rushdie. She is also especially interested in the relationship between economic imperialism, neo-liberalism and discourses of postcolonialism: much of her work looks at the tension between the dominant, material discourse of commercial capitalism and the ideological stance of the international writer. Marianne has a forthcoming chapter in Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillian (Continuum, 2013). Marianne is currently looking at the ways in which posthumanism and tropes of trans-national cultural connectivity are registered in 21st Century fiction.

Website: http://keele.academia.edu/MarianneCorrigan/About

Ash Ogden is a postgraduate student in the department of English Studies at Durham University. He is currently in the process of writing a dissertation on interactivity in experimental literature and videogames entitled “Explorations in the Ergodic: The Reader as Game-Player in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates.” Ash’s interests focus on literary innovation in the wake of technological advances but also include literary voyeurism, writing as transgression, as well as the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Bret Easton Ellis. He is also the television editor of The Bubble online magazine.

Website: http://durham.academia.edu/AshOgden/About

Twitter: @luggymccannons

Holly Pester is an AHRC-funded PhD student in the Contemporary Poetic Research Centre at Birkbeck, University of London. Holly is also a sound poet and artist, and her practice-led doctorate is titled ‘Speech Matter: Transpositional Poetry and the Intermedial Field’. Holly regularly performs at text, art and poetry events such as the international Serpentine Poetry Marathon 2009 and Text Festival 2011. She has also shown sound installations in galleries including the Cartel Gallery for the ‘Word of Mouth’ exhibition and a sound piece at St. Andrews poetry festival. Holly teaches English on Birkbeck’s BA programme, and assists on the Voiceworks project aiding collaborating poets, singers and composers. Holly Pester’s first collection of poetry, Hoofs, has recently been released with if p then q press.

Website: http://www.hollypester.com/

Twitter: @hollypesty

Kristian Shaw is a first year AHRC-funded PhD student at Keele University, under the supervision of Dr Nick Bentley and Dr Tim Lustig. His research focuses on the transition from postmodern to cosmopolitan writing in late c20th and c21st transatlantic fiction, including an analysis of time and space in the works of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and David Mitchell, amongst others. He completed his MPhil thesis at Durham University, researching the ‘Construction and Domination of Counter-Spaces in the Late Works of Thomas Pynchon’, an edited version of which is due to appear in 2013. Kristian is currently working towards a critical companion to the fiction of David Mitchell. He is an undergraduate tutor, freelance editor and book reviewer.

Website: http://keele.academia.edu/KristianShaw

Twitter: @KristianShaw3

Dr Zita Farkas is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. She received her PhD from the University of York for a thesis on the reception of Jeanette Winterson’s work. Her current research is on the impact of the Internet and new media upon literature. She studies the manner in which technological advances unsettle the traditional relationality amongst the concepts of author-text-reader and simultaneously create unexpected moments of affinity and unfamiliarity. Thus her main research interests are contemporary British literature and digital humanities. However, she occasionally wanders off and writes articles about contemporary Romanian cinema (Intellect, 2013), Hungarian gender issues (TNTeF, 2012) and Swedish crime fiction. She contributed to the collection of essays entitled Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2013) and wrote several entries for The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World (Sage, 2011) and Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and their Work: Literary Movements (Checkmark Books, 2010).

Website: http://www.kultmed.umu.se/om-institutionen/personal/zita-farkas/

Neil Vallelly is a Commonwealth Scholar and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Otago, New Zealand (Prof. Evelyn Tribble) in conjunction with Shakespeare’s Globe, London (Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper). He completed his BA and MA degrees at Queen’s University Belfast. His doctoral research explores how light was experienced in the 16th and 17th centuries and to what extent these experiences impacted upon theatre in the period. For instance, he investigates how the experience of nighttime in this pre-electric era influenced the portrayal of night on the early modern stage. His work incorporates contemporary philosophy, mainly through existential phenomenology and affect, with historicism. Neil is the postgraduate representative for the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association and is also involved with the Architecture Research Group for the Sam Wanamaker Indoor Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe. 

Website: http://otago.academia.edu/NeilVallelly

Twitter: @NeilVallelly