PROFILES

Michael P. Bibler is Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Manchester. His work focuses mainly on the constructions of gender, race, and sexuality in the literature of the American South. He is author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 (2009), and co-editor of the collection Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (2007). His current research investigates the relationship between sexuality, slavery, and property in the South and the Caribbean in the mid-1800s.

María del Pilar Blanco is Lecturer in Latin American Literature and Culture at University College London. She is currently working on a project that explores the intersections of science and literature in the work of the Spanish American modernistas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Ghost-watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape and the Hemispheric Imagination,’ explores the literary and cinematic representations of haunting in the diverse topographies of Latin America and the United States. Stemming out of her work on haunting and space, she is co-editing, with Dr. Esther Peeren of the University of Amsterdam, a collection entitled Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. A forthcoming article looks at Martí’s chronicles about the American inventor Thomas Edison and his phonograph.

Boundaries and Contact Zones in the French Caribbean: Towards a Discourse-Oriented Approach to Space in Literature

Liesbeth De Bleeker's doctoral thesis explored the narrative category of space in the contemporary French Caribbean novel. She is currently a Postdoctoral Assistant in the Department of Translation Studies at University College Ghent.

From Zona tórrida to Tristes tropiques: the structuralist revision of the Roman paradigm and what it implies

Gordon Brotherston is Emeritus Professor in the Department of LiFTS, University of Essex. His interests include the Mexican codices, native American literature, literary translation, and tropical American culture. His many publications include Image of the New World (1979), and Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Literature (1992). 

Sugar’s Sequels: Inventing Traditions in the Plantation Saga Novels of Brazil and Martinique

Danielle Carlotti-Smith is a doctoral candidate and graduate instructor in French and New World Studies at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines the novels of Martinican author Raphaël Confiant in the broader cultural, geographic, and literary context of the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Brazil. Her article, ‘La novela de la caña: Insular or International Phenomenon,’ appeared in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (2008).

The Caribbean Connection of Mme de Duras’s Ourika

Susan Castillo is Professor of American Studies at Kings College London. She is known for her interdisciplinary work on race, gender and ethnicity. Her research interests include the Southern Gothic, and Native American writing. She is the author of Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1787: Performing America (2005) and editor of collections such as Native American Women in Literature and Culture and the Blackwell anthology The Literatures of Colonial America (2001).  She is currently working on a project on the Gothic of the Caribbean South.

The Seduction of "Sable Venus" and of "Vénus des Mornes": Colonization and Recolonization of Space in the Tropics

Jacqueline Couti is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at McDaniel College in Maryland. Specializing in Francophone Caribbean, African, and New World literatures and cultures, she examines how the notion of local knowledge in the colonial and post-colonial eras has shaped the literatures and awareness of self in former colonies through what she terms a ‘Sexual  Edge’—a sharp violent representation of sexuality as a societal construction. Recent publications include ‘Tambour-Ka, Cyclones, and Awakenings of Body and Spirit in Pineau’s Macadam Dreams’ in New Mango Season (2007) as well as ‘Seduction and Power: Battle of the Sexes in Ken Bugul’s Riwan ou Le chemin de sable, Calixthe Beyala’s Comment cuisiner son mari à l’africaine, and Mongo Beti’s Le pauvre Christ de Bomba,’ in Emergent Perspectives on Ken Bugul (2009).

Tim Craker, Mercer University

The Five Directions

Tim Craker is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the College of Continuing and Professional Studies, Mercer University.

The Contestation of Power and Place in Césaire’s Caribbean plays

Philip Crispin is Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Music at the University of Hull. He was literary manager of the Gate Theatre in London from 1998-9 and his translation of Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête was performed there for the first time in Britain. His annotated translation is published by Oberon Books and is used widely on university theatre courses. The play, the translation, and the Gate production are discussed in ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels (2000) and, among his other publications, he has written about Une tempête in African Theatre: Playwrights and Politics (Oxford, 2001).

Tacarigua and the Cradling of the Caribbean Intellectual/Activist: The Case of Sylvester Williams, C.L.R. James and George Padmore

Selwyn R. Cudjoe is Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. He is the author of many books on the Caribbean, including Resistance and Caribbean Literature (1980), V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (1988), and Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago in the Nineteenth Century (2003). He has just published Caribbean Visionary: A. R. F. Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation (2008).

http://www.trinicenter.com/Cudjoe/

Surekha Davies, Birkbeck, University of London

The Brazilian Peoples in the European Cartographic Imagination: A Comparative Analysis of Portuguese, Norman, German and Dutch Representations on Illustrated Maps

Surekha Davies will be a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London (2009-2012). She was formerly a Sessional Lecturer in the same department and a Curator in the British Library Map Collections. She completed her PhD on Representations of Amerindians on European Maps and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge, 1506-1624 at the Warburg Institute, University of London in 2008, and trained in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her new research project is entitled Ethnographic Observations and European Ethnology: Genres, Practices and the Construction of Knowledge, 1550-1700. Her publications include articles in Imago Mundi and Terrae Incognitae.

James Davis, Brooklyn College, CUNY

"Success Story": Writing Brooklyn from Black Britain

James Davis is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College of CUNY. He is author of Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature (2007), and is a 2008-2009 Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for the Study of Biography in Manhattan. His current project is a biographical study of the Caribbean-born writer Eric Walrond.

Heavy Waters, Metallic Seas

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2006) and co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005).

R. J. Ellis, University of Birmingham
Why Guantánamo?: Handling Messy Comparativism

R J Ellis is Professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has published over sixty books and articles, including, recently, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: A Cultural Biography, and an edition of A Chronicle of Small Beer, the memoirs of Nan Green. He has spent much of this academic year (2008-09) organising the display of Jack Kerouac's 1951 scroll typescript version of On the Road at the Barber Institute (December and January) and writing a pocket biography and an exhibition catalogue to go along with the display.

Markham – The Place Within a Place

Sam Ellis graduated from the University of Essex in 2006 with a BA in English Literature. He has interests in Caribbean literature and British poetry, especially Philip Larkin. He has published articles in local magazines on a variety of topics including Black History month.

‘Submerged Eldorados’: Retracing the Journey Upriver in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences

Lucy Evans is a PhD student at the University of Leeds. Her thesis explores constructions of community in texts which mediate the genres of novel and short story collection, focusing on Caribbean writing since 1990. She has published an interview with Opal Palmer Adisa, and has articles on Paul Gilroy and E. A. Markham forthcoming in July and September 2009. She is also currently co-editing a collection of critical essays on Caribbean short stories, due to be published by Peepal Tree Press in Winter 2009/10.

Lowell Fiet (PhD, Wisconsin 1973) has taught at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras since 1978. Widely published in the field of Caribbean theatre, drama, and performance, he is also the founding editor of Sargasso (since 1983) and the author of El teatro puertorriqueño reimaginado (2004) and Caballeros, vejigantes, locas y viejos: Santiago Apóstol y los performeros afropuertorriqueños (2007). He directed the experimental group Taller de Imágenes (1987-1995), the Caribbean 2000 Research Center (1955-1999), writes theatre criticism (since 1992) for the weekly newspaper Claridad, and currently leads the independent theatre-in-education project mástaller (mas[k] Worshop).

Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Her many publications include the monograph The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001). She is also editor of Agenda: Special Issue on Derek Walcott (2002-2003) which includes more than sixty contributors and whose centre-piece is Epitaph for the Young, an extraordinary but forgotten poem in twelve cantos that Walcott privately published when he was a teenager.

Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Tufts University

Nina Gerassi-Navarro is Associate Professor of Latin American literature at Tufts University. Her research focuses primarily on nineteenth-century Latin American literature and visual culture. She has worked on outlaws, travel narratives and popular culture.  She is the author of Pirate Novels: Metaphors of Nation Building (1999) and a forthcoming volume for Revista Iberoamericana, Otros estudios transatlánticos: Lecturas desde lo latinoamericano. She is currently working on the circulation of knowledge between the United States and Latin America.

Susan Gillman is Professor of Literature and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her publications include Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (1989) and Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003). Her book Incomparably Yours: Adaptation, Translation, Americas Studies is forthcoming.

Kristian Van Haesendonck has taught Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture in the United States (Princeton; Villanova) and is currently researcher in comparative Latin American, Spanish and Caribbean literatures at the University of Lisbon. Most recently he published ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (2008), a comparative study of contemporary Puerto Rican novels.

Kate Hames is a PhD candidate in English at Cornell University, where she is a Mellon Graduate Fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities. Her dissertation, ‘Troubled Waters: Narrating the Thames to the Amazon, 1899-1939,’ examines the role of the Amazon and South America in the development of British modernist aesthetics. She argues that modernist writers used the Amazon as a geographical and textual space to formulate an aesthetics of disorientation and disillusion and to articulate a critique of the decline of Empire as a 'failure' of historical progress.

Leanne Haynes is a PhD Student in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Her research on St Lucia is part of the ‘American Tropics’ project.

Hsinya Huang is a Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University. Her many publications include (De)Colonizing the Body: Disease, Empire, and (Alter)Native Medicine in Contemporary Native American Women’s Writings (2004) and Lesbigay Literature in Modern English Tradition (2008). Her article "Native American Life Narratives: Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World and Anita Endrezze’s Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon" is forthcoming.

Peter Hulme is Professor of Literature in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. His research interests centre on the relationships between literature, travel writing, anthropology, and colonialism, especially in the Caribbean, and on postcolonial studies in its widest sense. He is the author of Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986, paperback 1992) and Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877-1998 (2000), and joint editor of Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (1992), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (1994), Cannibalism and the Colonial World (1998), 'The Tempest' and Its Travels (2000), and The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002).

Ben Jefferson is a PhD student in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. His thesis examines the poetry, plays, and essays of Derek Walcott, particularly his engagements with travel writing on the Caribbean and the tourist industry and his notions of Caribbean historicity and mythology.

Joanna Johnson, University of Miami

Joanna Johnson is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Miami, while also pursuing her PhD in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex.  Her research examines literary representations of the English rural landscape by Caribbean writers, including Rhys, Naipaul, and Walcott.

Eva-Jo Jylhä is a PhD student at the University of Oulu. She is primarily working on the development of cultural imagology, which she is applying to Alice Hoffman’s novels set in Massachusetts. She is interested in combining the image studies of imagology with ideas of place and belongingness taken from cultural geography.

Mirja Kuurola is a PhD student at the University of Oulu where she is working on contemporary literature by Caribbean migrant writers in Britain. She has recently published an article on Caryl Phillips's Cambridge.

Oneka LaBennett is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Fordham University. She is also Research Director of Fordham's Bronx African American History Project. Her research interests include popular youth culture, race, gender, West Indian migration, and transnationalism.  Her research focuses on the urban US and on the Crown Heights and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn. She is currently working on a book about West Indian adolescent girls’ consumer culture.

Gesa Mackenthun teaches American Studies at Rostock University, Germany. Her research centres on the analysis of colonial discourse in the Americas and postcolonial theory. Her publications include Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637 (1997) and Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (2004). Her current research deals with nineteenth-century travel writing in the Americas and the concurrent scientific discourses about antiquity.

Bill Marshall is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Stirling. He has written widely on French and Francophone cultures, notably film. His books include Quebec National Cinema (2001), and The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (2009). He has also edited the three-volume encyclopedia France and the Americas (2005).

Laura Martin, University of California, Santa Cruz

The Strange Career of “A Once Lamented Pair”: “Racial” Disorientation and Barbadian Persistence in the Inkle and Yarico Legend

Luciana Martins is Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a specialist in visual culture, cultural history, and the history and philosophy of geography. She is author of O Rio de Janeiro dos Viajantes: O Olhar Britânico, 1800-1850 (2001) and has recently co-edited Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (2005). Her current research is on Brazilian expedition photography and documentary film in the early twentieth century.

Russell McDougall, University of New England, Australia

Russell McDougall is Associate Professor in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the University of New England. His research interests include postcolonial subjectivities, the relationship between anthropology and travel writing, and literary studies of Sudan. His publications include the edited collection (with Peter Hulme) Writing, Travel and Empire: Colonial Narratives of Other Cultures (2007).

Wendy McMahon is currently an associate tutor in American Studies at the University of East Anglia. She completed her PhD in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex in 2008 on the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. Her thesis, entitled Dislocated Identities: Exile and the Self as (M)other, is a  revision of Reinaldo Arenas’s main works exploring the autobiographical construction of the literary subject in relation to the exilic condition.

Mathilde Mergeai is a PhD student at the Université de Liège, Belgium. She is working on the notion of space and its various representations in contemporary Black Canadian literature. Her review essay ‘Atlantic Connections: Metaphors of the Black Diaspora in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon’, will be published in a forthcoming volume of New Mango Season.

Therese Meyer is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Her PhD was on authorial identity in Canadian and Australian literary hoaxes, published as Where Fiction Ends: Four Scandals of Literary Identity Construction (2006). She has published on Australian and contemporary British literature and her research interests include early modern writings of empire.

Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. She works mainly on the US South and is author, for example, of a book on southern women's friendship, Advancing Sisterhood? (2000) and American Culture in the 1960s (2008) which takes the South as its starting point, as well as co-editor of collections including Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (1999 and 2004) and South to A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (2002). She is a member of the Advisory Board for the new journal The Global South (Indiana) and is currently writing a book on civil rights in the melodramatic imagination.

Martha Nadell, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Martha Jane Nadell is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She is the author of Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (2004), as well as essays about race and modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and African American history. She is currently at work on a literary and cultural history of Brooklyn.

Supriya Nair is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University. She has published on Caribbean and African literatures including the book Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (1996), and the collection Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (2005). She is currently completing a book on Anglophone Caribbean literature.

Michael Niblett teaches in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, as well as in the Comparative American Studies Department, at the University of Warwick. His research has focused on Caribbean literature and, more broadly, the concept and literature of the ‘Other America’. He is currently co-editing a book entitled Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, and preparing a monograph to be called Re-locating the Body: Cultural Practice, Nation, and Form in the Caribbean Novel.

Patricia Noxolo is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University. Her research lies at the intersection of the sub-disciplines of development, cultural and postcolonial geography. In particular, she explores questions of cultural difference in relation to global poverty and inequality, insecurity and theorisations of space and place, and is particularly interested in how there can be meaningful global dialogue and radical change in the long shadow of the sometimes traumatic legacies of European colonialism. Publications include ‘My paper, my paper: reflections on the embodied production of postcolonial geographical responsibility in academic writing’, in Geoforum (2009).

Marika Preziuso is Associate Fellow at the Caribbean Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University. She is in the final stages of her PhD thesis at the School of English, Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis is entitled Mapping the ‘Lived-Imagined’ Caribbean: women writers from the Caribbean Diaspora and visions of ‘hybridity’. Marika is also Research Associate of the project 'Space and Place in Translation: Postcolonial Geographies in the work of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé' with Patricia Noxolo. Her publications include ‘Do I belong here? Images of – female – Belonging and Cultural Hybridity in Erna Brodber’s Myal, Velma Pollard’s Homestretch and Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge’ in the Journal of Caribbean Literatures (2005).

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a Professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Program in Africana Studies at Vassar College, where she holds the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. She is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (2003, with Margarite Fernández Olmos), and most recently, Literatures of the Caribbean (2008). Her biography of Cuban patriot José Martí (José Martí: A Life) will be published in 2009.

Polly Pattullo is an independent writer and journalist specialising in the Caribbean.  She is the author of Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (1996) and Fire from the Mountain: The Story of the Montserrat Volcano (2000).  She also runs Papillote Press, which has just published Elma Napier's remarkable 1932 Black and White Sands: A Bohemian Life in the Colonial Caribbean, copies of which will be for sale at the conference.

Jak Peake is a PhD student in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. His thesis on literature from western Trinidad is part of the ‘American Tropics’ project. An article of his is to be published in a forthcoming book on the Caribbean Short Story published by Peepal Tree in 2009/10. He has also had articles and short stories published in national newspapers and one anthology.

Alasdair Pettinger is an independent scholar based in Glasgow. He is the editor of Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic (1998), and has published a number of essays reflecting his (overlapping) interests in travel literature, the cultures of slavery and abolitionism, and representations of Haiti. His current projects include a study of Frederick Douglass' visit to Scotland in the 1840s and a history of the word 'voodoo' in English.

Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger is an independent scholar who is resident in Berlin. She specializes in cultural history from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa in Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Dutch-speaking regions. She has held teaching positions in Europe and America. Her recent books include La Belle Caraïbe. The Art of José Maria Capricorne (2005), and The’ Air of Liberty.’ Narratives of the South Atlantic Past (2008), as well as the collections, Memorias de la fragmentación. Tierra de libertad y paisajes del Caribe (2005), and (with Tiago de Oliveira Pinto) AfricAmericas: Itineraries, Dialogues, and Sounds (2008).

Richard Price is Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. His research focuses on Afro-America, particularly the Maroons of Suriname and French Guiana, and ethnographic history. He is the author and co-author of many books, including Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973), The Convict and The Colonel (1998), Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora (with Sally Price, 1999), and Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (2008).

http://www.richandsally.net/

Sally Price, Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests are on Afro-America, particularly in the area of aesthetics and museums. Her many publications include Co-Wives and Calabashes (1984), Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989), Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (with Richard Price, 2006), Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (2007).

http://www.richandsally.net/

Sten Pultz Moslund is finishing a PhD dissertation at the University of Southern Denmark on contemporary migration literature and hybridity discourse. The working title is ‘The Speeds of the Migrant Mongrel. A Critical Re-Engagement with Hybrid Discourses and Becomings in Contemporary Migration Literature and Theory’. His publications include Making Use of History in New South African Fiction: An Analysis of the Purpose of Historical Perspectives in Three Post-Apartheid Novels (2003).

Shalini Puri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh where she works on postcolonial theory and cultural studies of the global south with an emphasis on the Caribbean. Her award-winning book The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality,
Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (2004) explores the relations amongst nationalisms, feminisms, and various theories and histories of cultural hybridity. She continues to be interested in researching the cultural practices, conflicts, and solidarities which have arisen out of the overlapping diasporas set in motion by slavery and indentureship.

Linda Robins works in London as a lecturer in the fields of English as a Second Language and Spanish. She has just completed her doctoral research on cultural production by Chicanas and Mexican women at the University of Westminster. Her current research is on the culture of North-East Brazil.

Owen Robinson is a Lecturer in U.S. Literature in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Specialising in writing of the U.S. South, he is the author of Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction (2006), and several journal articles and book-chapters on William Faulkner, George Washington Cable, and New Orleans. With Richard Gray, he has co-edited A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (2004)

María Cristina Rodríguez is a Professor in the Department of English at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She is co-editor of Sargasso and film critic for the weekly newspaper Claridad. She has published, lectured, and coordinated activities in Caribbean women's writings, ideology in film, migration and diaspora narratives. Recent publications include the book, What Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers.

Leah Rosenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida where she teaches Caribbean, Atlantic, and Postcolonial studies. Her book Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (2007) tells the story of how West Indian literatures emerged from cultural nationalist movements between 1840 and 1940. She is currently at work on Caribbean Tourism and the Transformation of Atlantic Culture, a cultural and political history of Caribbean tourism from 1890 to the present.

William Rowe is Professor of Spanish at Birkbeck, University of London. His interests are Latin American, British, and American contemporary poetry and Andean literature and culture. Recent publications include The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths (2007) and ‘When Was Peru Modern? On Declarations of Modernity in Peru,’ in When Was Latin America Modern (2007), ed. by Stephen Hart and Nichola Miller.

Bill Schwarz is Reader in the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London. He works on postcolonial history, with particular emphasis on the end of the British empire. His recent work has concentrated on twentieth century Caribbean writing and includes the books The Locations of George Lamming (2007), and Caribbean Literature After Independence: the case of Earl Lovelace (2008). He also edited West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (2003). His three-volume Memories of Empire is forthcoming. He is currently writing a short book provisionally called How Britons came to know US Civil Rights and Black Power.

Going Postal: Enslaved Epistolary Culture and the African American Diaspora

Ben Schiller is Temporary Lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He completed his PhD in 2008 at the University of Edinburgh on enslaved correspondence and the construction of epistolary identities. He has published ‘Learning Their Letters: Critical Literacy, Epistolary Culture, and Slavery in the Antebellum South’ in Southern Quarterly. A number of his essays are forthcoming in Slave Life and Culture.

Heidi V. Scott, Aberystwyth University
An American Eden? Geographical Imaginations and Tropicality in the Viceroyalty of Peru

Heidi V. Scott works on landscape, colonialism, and geographical knowledge in Spanish America. Her doctoral and initial postdoctoral work explored the interconnections between colonial relations and landscape in the Viceroyalty of Peru, which is the subject of a forthcoming monograph, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. She has recently conducted British Academy-funded archival research in Spain, Argentina and Bolivia on Franciscan missions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their role in shaping the frontier and colonial perceptions of the tropical lowlands.

Tropical Ills: Disease, Landscape and Environment in the Literature of Caribbean Plantations

Emily Senior is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.  Her thesis is an interdisciplinary study of literature and the history of colonial science and medicine in the British Caribbean, 1764-1837.

"Out of the Ground, Into the Sky": Tropical Bauxite, Space Age Modernization, and the Caribbean Struggle for Resource Sovereignty

Mimi Sheller is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Swarthmore College and Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University in England. She is co-editor of the journal Mobilities and in 2008 was a Fellow of the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (2000), Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (2003); and co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (2003), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (2004), and Mobile Technologies of the City (2006). She is currently completing a book entitled Citizenship from Below: Caribbean Agency and Modern Freedom, and is working on a new book on the divergent material cultures of American/Caribbean modernities traced through the cultural history of aluminium and bauxite.

The Return to Otherness: the Rainforest as Cornucopia of Interpretations

Bruce Swansey is Lecturer in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University. His recent publications include 'From Allegory to Mockery: Baroque Theatrical Representations of the Labyrinth' in Rewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque (ed. Isabel Torres).

Prospects from English Harbour, Antigua: Anne Hart Gilbert, Benevolence and Anti-Slavery, 1816-1834

Sue Thomas is Professor of English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, decolonising literatures, especially Caribbean literature, and nineteenth-century periodicals. She is the author of Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre and The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Her paper for the American Tropics conference is drawn from the project ‘Anglophone Caribbean (auto)biography, plantation slavery, and the traffic of colonial reform and modernisation 1807-1834’, funded by the Australian Research Council from 2009 until 2011.

American Tropics as Problem: The U.S. Canal Zone as Remedial Space

Kellie Warren is a doctoral student in the Department of English at Tulane University. Her dissertation on Pan-American Modernism (including the authors John Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Waldo Frank) requires her to do a lot of travelling, including to the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C and to Diego Rivera’s U.S. murals in San Francisco and Detroit.

Jade Amazons and Golden Kings: Guayana as Cultural Imaginary

Neil L. Whitehead is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He works mainly on South America and the Caribbean, particularly Amazonia. Recent publications include Dark Shamans. Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (2002) and Violence (2004). His book Cannibal Conqueror: Hans Staden and the Spectacle of Anthropophagy in Brazil is forthcoming. Current research interests include ethnopornography, and Fray Ramon Pané.

Geographic Space, Narrative Time, and the Figuration of a Post-National Chronotope in Américo Paredes' George Washington Gómez

Frederick Whiting is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He has published articles on subjectivity, sexuality, and American literature and culture and is currently working on a book entitled The Inner Limits:  Form and Personhood in the Modern American Novel, which examines the literary, legal, and scientific representations of the sexual psychopath produced in the U.S. 1930-1965 as an episode in the conceptual history of human form and the generic history of the novel.

Language Immersion in the Tropics: The Vanguard Quest for Language Origin

Bruce Dean Willis is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has published the monograph Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mário de Andrade (2006), and articles in Brasil/Brazil, Chasqui, Gestos, Hispania, Hispanófila, Luso-Brazilian Review, and South Atlantic Review. Presently he is researching representations of the body in early twentieth-century Latin American literature.

Tunchis, Sachamamas and Yacurunas: Amazonian Identity in Jaime Vásquez Izquierdo’s Rio Putumayo

Lesley Wylie is Senior Research Officer on the ‘American Tropics’ Project. She has been working at Essex since 2006, after completing a PhD in the Department of Spanish at the University of Cambridge, and will take up the post of Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester in September 2009. Her book, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the ‘novela de la selva’ will be published in 2009. She is currently editing a collection of critical essays on Amazonian Literature.

Crafting Shipwrecks in Havana: Reflections on ‘La agonía de la Garza’

Margarita Zamora is a colonial studies scholar and literary critic specializing in Spanish American and Iberian literature and culture. She received her doctorate from Yale University and is currently a full professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Her publications include Reading Columbus (1993; Winner of the Kovacs Prize, 1994), and Cuba; Contrapuntos de cultura, historia y sociedad / Counterpoints on Culture, History, and Society (2007).