2025 Elections: Nominations for the AILC-ICLA Executive Committee
Nominating Committee's nominations for the 2025–2028 term
PRESIDENT (1 will be elected)
Ipshita Chanda (English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India)
Anne Duprat (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France)
VICE-PRESIDENTS (4 will be elected)
Noriko Hiraishi (University of Tsukuba, Japan) [Second term]
Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University, Korea)
Helga Mitterbauer (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
Ato Quayson (Stanford University, USA)
Haun Saussy (University of Chicago, USA) [Second term]
SECRETARIES (2 will be elected)
Oana Fotache (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Zoé Schweitzer (Université Jean-Monnet, St Étienne, France)
TREASURERS (3 will be elected)
Europe-Africa-Middle East: Alexandra Lopes (UCP, Portugal) [Second term]
Asia-Pacific: Yuriko Yamanaka (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan) [Second term]
Americas: Gundela Hachmann (Louisiana State University, USA)
EXECUTIVE COMMITTE MEMBERS (16 will be elected1)
Megumi Arai (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Alexander Beecroft (University of South Carolina, USA)
Raul Calzoni (Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy) [Second term]
Laura Cernat (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Abhishek Chatterjee (RV University, Bangalore, India)
Sung-Won Cho (Seoul Women’s University, Korea)
Vilashini Cooppan (UC Santa Cruz, USA)
Adriana Crolla (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina)
Sayantan Dasgupta (Jadavpur U, Kolkata, India) [Second term]
Neil van Heerden (U of South Africa)
Zhang Hui (Peking University, China) [Second term]
Lobna Ismail (Cairo University, Egypt) [Second term]
Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol, UK)
Rachel Esteves Lima (Bahia Federal U, Brazil)
Maria Esther Maciel (U of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
Kitty Millet (San Francisco State University, USA)
Florian Mussgnug (University College London, UK)
Nicoletta Pireddu (Georgetown University, USA)
Jerónimo Pizarro (University of the Andes, Colombia) [Second term]
Dobrota Pucherová (University of Vienna, Austria)
Marta Puxan-Oliva (University of the Balearic Islands, Spain)
Irma Ratiani (Tbilisi State University, Georgia)
Matthew Reynolds (University of Oxford, UK)
Godwin Siundu (University of Nairobi, Kenya)
Fatiha Taib (Mohammed V University, Morocco) [Second term]
Paul Tenngart (Lund University, Sweden)
Clotilde Thouret (Paris-Nanterre University) [Second term]
Makoto Tokumori (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Rita Wilson (Monash University, Australia)
Ying Xiong (Shanghai Normal University, China)
BIOGRAPHIES
Nomination for President (1 to be elected)
Ipshita Chanda (English and Foreign Languages U, Hyderabad, India)
Bio: Ipshita Chanda has taught Comparative Literature since 1993, first at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and since 2017 at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. At Jadavpur University she was coordinator of the Centre of Advanced Study in Comparative Literature (2010-13) and founded the Centre for Studies in African Literatures and Cultures in 2006. She edited the Bengali section of the Encyclopedia of Indian Poetics (forthcoming from Sahitya Akademi) and has been a member of the English Board of the Academy (2012-17). She held the ICCR Chair of Indian Culture at Georgetown University, Washington DC in 2013-14. She held an e-residency in the Fung Global Fellows Program at Princeton University in 2021, and taught a seminar in the MA Program offered by the Lisbon Consortium, at the School of Human Sciences, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in 2024. Her books include Packaging Freedom: Feminism and Popular Culture (Stree 2003); Reception of the Received (ASIHSS Program in Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, 2006); Tracing the Charit as a Genre (DSA program in Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, 2003); Selfing the City : Single Women Migrants and their Lives in Kolkata (Sage, Delhi 2017). Edited volumes include Literary Historiography (CAS program in Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, 2006) Locating Cultural Change: Theory, Method, Process (Sage, Delhi, 2011), Shaping the Discourse (with Joyeeta Bagchi, Stree Kolkata 2014), Emotion, Expression and Aesthetics (Sahitya Akademi Delhi, 2018), Literature and the Other Arts (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 2018) and three volumes of Palaver, proceedings of the annual Forum for Scholars of African Studies (2006, 2008 and 2010, Jadavpur University). She translates between Bangla, Hindi, Urdu and English and has translated Sukumar Ray (Lakshman’s Shaktishail and Chalachitta Chanchari Sahitya Akademi 2006), Satinath Bhaduri (Dhorai Charit Manas, Sahitya Akademi Katha Bharati series, 2013), Phaniswarnath Renu and Mahasweta Devi (Bitter Soil, 1996 and The Glory of Sri Sri Ganesh, 2002, both from Seagull, Kolkata). She is currently Secretary of ICLA, along with Anne Duprat (2022-2025).
Nominations for Vice-Presidents (4 to be elected)
Anne Duprat (U of Picardie, France)
Bio: Anne Duprat is Professor of Comparative Literature at UPJV and a Senior Member of Institut Universitaire de France. A recognized specialist in the theory of fiction and in Comparative Literary Theory, she has published numerous monographies and multi-authored essays on Early Modern European Literature, on Travel- and Geographic literature and on diachronic literary epistemology, as well as translations from Italian, Latin, Greek, English and Spanish literature, and novels (Grasset). Her main publications includeHistoire du captif. Un paradigme littéraire, de l’Antiquité au XVIIe siècle(2023), Histoires et savoirs (ed. with F. Aït-Touati, 2012), Fiction et cultures (ed. with F. Lavocat, 2010), and Vraisemblances. Poétiques de la fiction en France et en Italie (2009). The latest collection of essays she edited, Figures of Chance I and II (Routledge, 2024), analyses the representations of chance in European art and literature (16th-21st c.). She also published a first French translation of Cervantes’ theater and is currently a co-editor, with H. Saussy and O. Fotache et al. of the ongoing Global History of Literature directed by A. Gefen and T. Samoyault [2026].
Anne Duprat has been President of the French Comparative Literature Association (2015-2019, 2 terms), and of the American Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies (SE17) in 2020-2021. She is a member of Academia Europaea since 2020. At ICLA, she is a member of the Research Committee for Literary Theory since 2017, and of the Research Development Committee since 2020. She is currently Secretary of ICLA, along with Ipshita Chanda (2022-2025).
Noriko Hiraishi (U of Tsukuba, Japan)
Bio: Noriko Hiraishi is Professor of comparative literature at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo. Through her analysis of European fin-de-siècle literature and modern Japanese literature, she continues to be interested in modernization, exoticism, and female representations. She is also currently engaged in research on contemporary literature and culture with a focus on aspects of intercultural dialogue. She is an active member of the standing research committee “Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative,” as she considers graphic narratives to be a very important genre of material for examining these issues. Her recent publications include “Fin-de-Meiji as fin-de-siècle: D’Annunzio and Japanese literature,” (Elisa Segnini and Michael Subialka (eds.) Gabriele D’Annunzio and World Literature: Multilingualism, Translation, Reception, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.2023), “Female Writers and Autonomy in Love: ‘Romantic Adultery’ in Japanese Literature around 1910,” (Halina Zawiszová and Martin Lavicka (eds.) Voiced and Voiceless in Asia, Olomouc: Palacky University Olomouc,2023), “Weibliche Sexualität in der japanischen Literatur des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts: Hinterfragung geschichtlicher/sexueller Normen (translated by Aizawa Keiichi),” (Aizawa Keiichi (ed.) Gemeinsame Herausforderungen: Ein aktueller Blick auf den deutsch-japanischen Wissenschaftsaustausch anhand von Beiträgen aus den Ringvorlesungen 2021 und 2022, München: Iudicium, 2023), and “Manga and Fukushima: Subjectivity/Objectivity and Political Messages,” (Françoise Lavocat and Charlotte Krauss. (eds.) L’Art séquentiel et les catastrophes: Bande dessinée, manga, roman graphique, Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle,2022).
Youngmin Kim (Dongguk U, Korea)
Bio:Youngmin Kim is visiting professor at the Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS)/Department of Film and Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden; Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea; and Qiantang Scholar/Chair Professor at Hangzhou Normal University, China; founding Director of Institute of Trans Media World Literature and Director of Digital Humanities Lab, Dongguk University. He has served as Dean of College of the Humanities and of International Education; editor-in-chief of Journal of English Language and Literature;current editor-in-chief of Journal of East-West Comparative Literature of Korea. He was visiting professor at Cornell University and faculty affiliate at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, USA. He is currently executive council member of ICLA; President of ICLA Translation Committee; co-chair of recently established Research Committee of ICLA Digital Comparative Literature. His current project on comparative world literature, AI avec Digital Humanities has been supported by the grant of the National Research Foundation of Korea. His recent publications include: “Sublime and Technology.” Journal of English Language and Literature 66.1 (Spring 2020); “Transductive Convergence of Digital Humanities/Trans Media Art/World Literature,” Forum for World Literature Studies 13.4 (December 2021): 694-713; “Human consciousness and prosthetic temporality: On the way to new technological humanities,” New Techno-Humanities 2 (2022) 41–46; “Digital World Literature as Database: From Coding to Representation,” Forum for World Literature Studies 16.1 (March 2024): 1-18. His current book project, “Database and World Literature,” explores the convergence of comparative world literature and digital humanities.
Helga Mitterbauer (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
Bio: Helga Mitterbauer has been teaching German literature at the Université libre de Bruxelles since 2015; Austrian Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Alberta (2010–2015), PhD (2000) and venia legendi (2008) at the University of Graz where she taught from 1993 till 2013; Visiting professor (ELTE Budapest, University of Zagreb, University of Innsbruck); President of the Coordinating Committee of the book series CHLEL (Amsterdam, Benjamins) and co-editor of the book series Forum: Österreich (Frank & Timme, Berlin). She has published over 20 books and numerous articles on Austrian, German, and comparative literature. Recent book publications: Franz Blei: Das trojanische Pferd (ed., Frank & Timme 2023), Brussels 1900 Vienna (co-ed. Rodopi-Brill, 2022), Vorstellungen vom Anderen in der tschechisch- und deutschsprachigen Literatur (co-ed., Frank & Timme, 2021), Cahiers de la Mémoire contemporaine 15 (Brussels 2021, co-ed.), Crossing Central Europe: Continuities and Transformations, 1900 and 2000(co-ed., University of Toronto Press, 2017).
Ato Quayson (Stanford U, USA)
Bio: Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor English, and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford in 2019, he taught at University of Cambridge (where he got his PhD), the University of Toronto, and at NYU. Professor Quayson has published 6 monographs and 10 edited collections, including the Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2014), which was nominated in the Guardian newspaper as one of the Best City Books for 2014 and won Urban History Association Best Book Prize in 2015; and Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature(Cambridge University Press, 2021), which was the recipient of the Warren-Brooks Best Book in Criticism Award for 2022. Recent books include The City in World Literature, co-edited with Jini Kim Watson (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, co-edited with Ankhi Mukherjee (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is currently working on a collection of his own essays titled Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation, also with Cambridge University Press and scheduled for completion by the end of 2024. Professor Quayson was President of the African Studies Association and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Haun Saussy (U of Chicago, USA)
Bio: Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and in the Committee on Social Thought. His work attempts to bring the lessons of anthropology and rhetoric to bear on several periods, languages, disciplines and cultures. Among his books are Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010); The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1994), Great Walls of Discourse (2001), The Ethnography of Rhythm (2016), Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (2017), Are We Comparing Yet? (2019), The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature in Multilingual Asia (2022) and the edited collections Sinographies (2007) and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2008). He is co-author, with César Dominguez and Darío Villanueva, of Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications (2015). He is fortunate to have seen his work translated into Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. As translator, he has produced versions of works by Jean Métellus (When the Pipirite Sings, 2019) and Tino Caspanello (Bounds, 2020), among others. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nominations for Secretaries (2 to be elected)
Oana Fotache (U of Bucharest, Romania)
Bio: Oana Fotache Dubălaru Is Professor of Literary Theory at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest (Romania). She has taught courses and published on modern literary theory, comparative literature, history of literary ideas, and exile studies. She has been a member in several research projects in Romania and abroad. Currently a member of the scientific boards of the journals Romània Orientale (Italy), Dacoromania litteraria (Romanian Academy), Annals of the University of Bucharest – Philology series, and Synthesis (Romanian Academy). Member of the jury for the FIL Guadalajara Award, 2023.
Her recent publications include: “Surviving the Change, Adjusting the Language. Romanian Writers in the Cultural Media, December 1989–1990” (with Magda Răduță), in E. Wohl, E. Păcurar, Language of the Revolution. The Discourse of Anti-Communist Movements in the “Eastern Bloc” Countries, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023; A. Babeți (coord.), Dictionary of the Central European Novel in the 20th c., 2022 (in Romanian; scientific editor); The Map and the Legend. 22 essays on Mircea Cărtărescu, 2020(in Romanian; co-edited with Cosmin Ciotloș); “Did Romania Move South? Representations of Geocultural Identity”, in Journal of World Literature, 3:1, 2017. Translator into Romanian of Northrop Frye’s The Great Code. The Bible and Literature (2024). She has been a member of the ICLA Executive Committee for two terms, and has chaired the ICLA Participation Grants Committee in 2022-25.
Zoé Schweitzer (Université Jean-Monnet, France)
Bio: Zoé Schweitzer holds a doctorate (Sorbonne Université 2006) and a habilitation to direct research (Sorbonne Université 2019), and is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université Jean-Monnet – Saint-Étienne (France). She works on European theater, with a particular interest in the theoretical issues and scenic effects of dramatic transgression, from Antiquity to contemporary theater, particularly in the relationship between spectacular springs and aesthetic and ethical demands. Her latest book is entitled La Scène cannibale. Pratiques et théories de la transgression au théâtre (XVIe-XXIe siècle) [The Cannibal Scene. Practices and Theories of Transgression in the Theatre (16th- 21st centuries), Classiques Garnier, 2021. She has also recently published, with two colleagues, La Fiction face au viol, Hermann, 2024.Recognized in her field and discipline, she has been called upon for collective research projects as well as scientific expertise, has sat on numerous recruitment juries and participated in various national and international evaluation bodies. She holds a number of local and national teaching, collective and scientific responsibilities. In particular, since 2021, she has been co-director of the ARTS Institute (arts, research, territory, knowledge), which brings together art schools (architecture, design, theater) and cultural institutions at the University of Saint-Etienne to offer original graduate school programs and promote multidisciplinary research. Committed to the defense and promotion of comparative literature, she was a member of the board of directors of the Société française de littérature générale et comparée (SFLGC), of which she was secretary general from 2013 to 2015 and from 2020 to 2023.
Nominations for Treasurers (3 to be elected)
Gundela Hachmann (Louisiana State U, USA; Treasurer for the Americas)
Bio:Gundela Hachmann is Associate Professor and Section Head of German in the Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, and she serves as book review editor for the German Studies Review. She teaches courses in German language and literature as well as in film history in the Screen Arts program and seminars in literary theory in the Comparative Literature program. Her research focuses on literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, intermedia studies, literature and science, as well as literary theory and poetics. Her publication include her 2014 monograph Zeit und Technoimagination. Eine neue Einbildungskraft in Romanen des 21. Jahrhunderts (Koenigshausen&Neumann), as well as numerous journal articles such as “Network Analysis in Literature and the Arts: Rethinking Agency and Creativity” (Journal of Literary Theory), “Politisches Engagement: Auf der Suche nach neuen Modellen” (Wirkendes Wort), “Drafting the Techno-Imagination: A Future for Literary Writing?” (Flusser Studies), and “‘Sieh auf deine Hand, bis sie zerfällt.’ Entropie und Individualzeit in Thomas Lehrs Roman 42” (Gegenwartsliteratur).Currently, her research focuses on notions of authorship and creativity. She acted as lead-editor of the compendium Handbook Lectures on Poetics (de Gruyter, 2022) in which she also published several contributions about lectures writers give to explain their personal approaches to writing. She is now working on a monograph entitled The Arts and the Social.
Alexandra Lopes (Catholic U. of Portugal; Treasurer for Europe, Africa and the Middle East)
Bio: PhD in Translation Studies. She is currently Associate Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon and member of the Research Centre for Communication and Culture. At the Centre, she coordinates the research group ‘Literature and the Global Contemporary’. Her most recent publications include the co-edition of The Age of Translation. Early 20th-century Concepts and Debates (Peter Lang, 2017) and of Mediations of Disruption in Post-conflict Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She has many articles published in national and international volumes. She has participated in research projects, such as Culture@Work (funded by the Culture Programme of the EU) e Lugares de O’Neill (funded by Gulbenkian Foundation). As a translator, she has rendered into Portuguese Peter Handke’s Versuch über den geglückten Tag (1994; revised edition: 2020), Herta Müller’s herztier (1999) and Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2002), among others. She has been ICLA Treasurer for Europe, Africa and the Middle East for the 2022-25 term.
Yuriko Yamanaka (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan; Treasurer for Asia-Pacific)
Bio: Yuriko Yamanaka is Professor and Director of the Department of Advanced Human Sciences at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan. She received her PhD from the University of Tokyo in Comparative Literature in 2007. She edited The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from the East and West (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006) which was Runner-up for the Katharine Briggs Award. For her monograph Allegoresis of Alexander: from Antiquity to Mediaeval Islam (in Japanese Alekusandorosu henso: kodai kara chusei isuramu e:, Nagoya University Press, 2009) she has been awarded the Japan Academy Medal (2011), Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences Prize (2011), Japan Comparative Literature Association Award (2010), and the Shimada Kinji Memorial Prize (2010).She has also edited Cultural History of Marvels in Europe and the Middle East (in Japanese Kyoi no bunkashi: chuto to yoroppa wo chushin ni, Nagoya University Press, 2015). Recent Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS) funded projects she has been leading as principal investigator are Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) “The Natural and the Supernatural in Comparative Perspective” (2018-2023), and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) “Ecological Imagination in the Interface of Knowledge Systems” (2024-2028). She is also the Chief Organizer of the Special Exhibition “Regnum imaginarium: Realm of the Marvelous and Uncanny” at the National Museum of Ethnology (August 29 – November 26, 2019) which has since toured in Hyogo, Kochi, Fukuoka, and Hokkaido.
Yamanaka is Executive Board Member of the Japan Comparative Literature Association since 2021, and is currently its chairperson.
Nominations for Executive Committee members (16 to be elected)
Megumi Arai (U of Tokyo, Japan)
Bio: Megumi Arai is a professor of English Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo. She obtained her PhD at the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture, in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo. Her primary research area is British fiction, drama and culture, and she has published works in Japanese on the representation and depiction of “class” in British literature and culture. She has also translated the letters of Jane Austen into Japanese (Iwanami Shoten, 2004), and co-translated Mansfield Park into Japanese (with Yuji Miyamaru; Iwanami Shoten, 2021). Her most recent publications (in Japanese) include a treatise on the image and representation of the British Upper Class in British literature and culture (Noblesse Oblige: The British Upper Class, Hakusuisha, 2021), and a discussion of the relationship between class and language as represented in British literature and culture (Class and English, Kodansha, 2022). She is currently on the Executive Committee of the Japan Comparative Literature Association, has served as Chair of the Editorial Committee of the Journal of Comparative Literature of the JCLA and as Chair of the Committee for International Activities.
Alexander Beecroft (U of South Carolina)
Bio: Alexander Beecroft received his B.A. in Classics from the University of Alberta, and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He is currently the Jessie Chapman Alcorn Memorial Professor of Foreign Languages at the University of South Carolina. His scholarship covers a range of topics in the classical literatures of the Mediterranean and China, and in comparative and world literature. He is the author of Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation (Cambridge, 2010), and of An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Verso, 2015), and is currently writing A Global History of Literature. From 2011 to 2019, he served as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Comparative Literature Association.
Raul Calzoni (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) [Second term]
Bio: Raul Calzoni is Full Professor at the University of Bergamo, Italy. He teaches German Literature and Comparative Literature. He has participated as a speaker at numerous international conferences in Italy, Germany, and the USA, and has been a member of international and European research projects. His interests lie in memory studies, strategies for rewriting and transmitting European cultural memory in the contemporary German and Austrian literature, science and literature, and music and literature of the classical-romantic period and of the second post-war period, visual studies, writing and arts. His most recent publications include: R. Calzoni, F. Di Blasio, G. Perletti (eds.), Translation and Interpretation: Practicing the Knowledge of Literature, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2022; R. Calzoni, K. von Hagen (eds.), Der Vampir: Ein europäischer Mythos des kulturellen Transfers, München Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft München, 2023; L. Bani, R. Calzoni, T. Persico (eds.), Traduzioni, tradizioni e rivisitazioni dell’opera di Dante. In memoria di Marco Sirtori, Napoli, La Scuola di Pitagora, 2023; R. Calzoni, V. Serra (a cura di), Representations of Work in Literature and Visual Culture, “Between”, 26/2023, pp. i-xvi (http://www.Between-journal.it/); E. Agazzi, R. Calzoni (eds), Günter Grass, „Culturatedesca, 66/2023.
Laura Cernat (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Bio: Laura Cernat is an FWO (Flemish Research Foundation) postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium, working on the project “Biofictions of Border-Crossing: A World Literature for Outsiders.” Laura obtained her doctorate in 2022 with a thesis on the representation of canonical authors in contemporary biofiction. She has contributed to the volumes Virginia Woolf and Heritage (2017), Theory in the “Post” Era (2021), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2022),Reading the Contemporary Author (2023), From Shakespeare to Autofiction (2024), and Experimental Life Writing Today (forthcoming, 2025), has published in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Partial Answers, and African American Review, has guest-edited a special issue of American Book Review on autofiction and autotheory in 2022 and co-edited a special issue on Eastern European Women’s Life Writing in 2023. Together with Lucia Boldrini, Alexandre Gefen, and Michael Lackey, she has co-edited The Routledge Companion to Biofiction (2025). Laura has presented at over twenty international conferences, including several editions of the ACLA and IABA, and was in the organizing committee of four conferences and several panels and roundtables. She was the main organizer of the hybrid bilingual conference Biofiction as World Literature (Leuven, 2021). In 2023, Laura co-taught the course “Highlights in European Literature” with Professor Tom Toremans and in 2024 she taught the BA3 course “Afterlives of the Canon: Spinoffs, Sequels, Biofictions.”
https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/english/our-staff/bap/lauracernat
Abhishek Chatterjee (RV University, Bangalore, India)
Bio: Abhishek Chatterjee serves as the Director of the Centre for Literary Studies and Translation and the Program Head of Literature at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, RV University, India. He completed his doctoral research at the Department of Indian and World Literatures, English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, with a thesis that explored the philosophy of literary traveling and the Modern Travel Book. Dr. Chatterjee’s scholarship has been published in prestigious academic outlets, including Critical Quarterly (UK), Berghahn Books (New York), Springer Nature (Singapore), and the Economic and Political Weekly. Additionally, his contributions to public intellectual discourse have appeared in leading Indian media platforms, such as The Hindu, The Telegraph, and The Wire.
His current research spans diverse interdisciplinary fields, including graphic narratives, Lacanian psychoanalysis, folk-revival music, and Eastern martial arts. As a member of the ICLA Research Committee on Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative, he coordinated the conference Ekphrasis and The Speaking Image: Interrogating Forms of Sequential Art at RV University in 2023. He also contributed to organizing panels for the 2024 Comparative Literature Association of India (CLAI) Biannual Conference in New Delhi and the XXIV ICLA Congress in Seoul, Korea, in 2025.
Dr. Chatterjee’s scholarly work integrates rigorous academic research with a focus on cross-cultural dialogue. As Program Head of Literature at RV University, he leads curriculum innovation and collaborative projects that integrate literary studies with broader cultural, historical, and philosophical frameworks.
Sung-Won Cho (Seoul Women’s University, Korea)
Bio: Sung-Won Cho is Professor of English Language and Literature, Seoul Women’s University, Seoul, Korea; B.A. in Korean Literature, Summa Cum Laude, Sogang University; M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ph. D. in Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin. She was the Organizer of the ICLA 2010 Seoul Congress, and the President of Korea Comparative Literature Association (KCLA) in 2014-15. She has been an active ICLA member since 1997 and participated in several ICLA offices and committees including the Executive Council, Structures Committee, Translation Studies Committee, and Gender and Women’s Studies Committee. At Seoul Women’s University, she served as the Dean of the College of Humanities (2022-3), the Dean of Resource Development and Public Relations (2010-11), and the Director of International Relations (2011). Cho is specialized in the fields of English Renaissance Literature (esp. Shakespeare), Korean Classical Literature (esp. Pansori), Translation theories and criticism, Film and Media studies, Gender and Women’s studies, and comparative drama. She wrote many articles and book chapters in these areas, and recently her publications include “The ‘Defense’ of Medea: A Comparison of Euripides’ Medea and Chaggeuk Medea” (2020) and “’Re-gendering’ the Poetic Self: The Translator’s ‘Visibility’ in the Translations of Hwang Jini’s Sijo” (2021). She also edited the ICLA 2010 Seoul Congress proceedings into the following two books: Expanding the Frontiers of Comparative Literature (2013) and A Return to the Transnational Tradition (2013).
Vilashini Cooppan (UC Santa Cruz, USA)
Bio: Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her articles and essays on comparative and world literature, postcolonial studies, memory studies, affect theory, and genre theory have appeared in symploke, Gramma: A Journal of Theory, Comparative Literature Studies,Public Culture, PMLA, Concentric, Qui Parle, and Critical Times, as well as in the edited volumes Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, The MLA Guide to Teaching World Literature, the Routledge Companion to World Literature, Approaches to Teaching World Literature, The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, The Handbook of Anglophone World Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford UP, 2009) and, with Alex Brostoff, has coedited Autotheories: Experiments in the Languages of Theory (MIT Press, 2025).
Adriana Crolla (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina)
Bio: Adriana Cristina Crolla holds a Master’s Degree in University Teaching (UNL) and teaches literature and Italian. She is full Professor of “French and Italian Literature” – “Germanic Literatures” and “Comparative Literature Seminar” at the Facultad de Humanidades at UNL, and Full Professor of “French and Italian Literature” (Language and Literature Teacher Program) – “Literary Translation” and “Italian Literature I” in the Italian Teaching and Translation Program at FAHyCS-UADER. Her areas of interest include Italian and Francophone immigration in the Pampa Gringa, translated literatures, comparative studies and migration studies. She is founder and director of the Portal Virtual de la Memoria Gringa, the Programa de Estudios sobre Migraciones “Lina y Charles Beck Bernard”, and the Laboratorio de Materiales Orales. She also founded and is the director of the Centro de Estudios Comparados and the journal El hilo de la fábula. From 2007 to 2009 she was the president of the Argentine Association of Comparative Literature (Asociación Argentina de Literatura Comparada, AALC). Awarded the “Piemontesi nel Mondo” prize by the Piedmont Region, Italy, in 2012; recipient of the “Espacio Santafesino 2012” award by the Government of Santa Fe for the project: Altrocché!: espacios de la italianidad en la cultura santafesina (Altrocché!;spaces of Italian identity in Santafesina culture); honored as a Distinguished Piedmontese in Argentina by FAPA in 2008, “in recognition of her contribution to the Piedmontese community.” Member of the Comité d’Honneur of the Revue de Littérature Comparée, directed by P. Brunel, V. Gely, and Daniel H. Pageaux. Author, editor, and translator of 21 books and over 100 articles published in journals and books in Argentina and 10 other foreign countries.
Sayantan Dasgupta (Jadavpur U) [Second term]
Bio: Sayantan Dasgupta has been secretary of the Comparative Literature Association (CLAI) for over a decade. He teaches Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He is also Coordinator, Centre for Translation of Indian Literatures, there. He is currently member of the ICLA EC (2022-2025). Dasgupta’s interests span the history and pedagogy of Comparative Literature in India, translation and South Asian studies.
He currently edits the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, India’s first CL journal. Heis Principal Investigator of a SPARC project on Academic Social Responsibility with India Dialogue, University of East Anglia, UK. He is Series Editor of Voices from the Margins (Routledge), and of Studies in Comparative Literature (Orient BlackSwan). His latest book is an edited volume featuring translated short stories of Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, Bengali Dalit writer. His recent publications include Writings from the Sundarbans (2023), Dalit Lekhika: Women’s Writings from Bengal (2020), Celebrating the City: Kolkata in Indian Literature (2021),and Twelve Bodo Short Stories (Asiatic Society, 2023).
He was shortlisted for the English PEN Presents Award 2022 for his English translation of Bimalendu Halder’s writings. Tit-for-Tat, his English translation of Girish Chandra Ghosh’s Bengali adaptation of Molière’s L’amour médecin was published by the Sahitya Akademi. Dasgupta is currently working on a biography of Nabaneeta Dev Sen for the Sahitya Akademi ‘Makers of Indian Literature’ series. He is author of books like Indian English Literature: A Study in Historiography and Shyam Selvadurai: Texts and Contexts. He has been Charles Wallace Translation Fellow and Vice-Chancellor’s Global Challenges Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He was also till recently member of the Advisory Board (English) of the Sahitya Akademi.
Neil van Heerden (U of South Africa)
Bio: Neil van Heerden is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Afrikaans and Theory of Literature at the University of South Africa, where he teaches a range of undergraduate and honours-level Afrikaans Literature modules, spanning prose, poetry, and drama. His academic journey began with a doctoral degree in Afrikaans, awarded by the University of Pretoria in 2018, exploring the dynamic interplay between popular crime fiction and the Afrikaans literary canon, with a particular focus on the works of Deon Meyer, South Africa’s most widely read Afrikaans author. As part of this project, he conducted a historical overview of Afrikaans crime and detective fiction, which he aims to develop into a comprehensive book. Beyond crime fiction, his research interests – as reflected in numerous shcolarly articles – include narratology, comparative literature, ecocriticism, literary theory, and the pedagogical potential of popular fiction. His academic citizenship includes serving as secretary of the Literature Association of South Africa (LASA) since 2017 and active membership in the Afrikaanse Letterkundevereniging (ALV). He presented at international conferences, including the 2018 ICLA Congress in Georgia, and regularly contributes as a peer reviewer and external examiner.
Zhang Hui (Peking University, China) [Second term]
Bio:ZHANG Hui is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature in the Chinese Department and Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture at Peking University of China. He is currently Vice-President and General Secretary of the Chinese Comparative Literature Association (CCLA). He holds a doctorate from the Peking University. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard (2000-2001) and a post-doctor associate at Yale (2007), and he taught at Macao University (2008-2009) and Tübingen University (2016). His research interests include comparative literature, literature & intellectual history, literary hermeneutics, and Shijing Studies. His publications include: The Enlightenment of Polyphone: Rereading G.E. Lessing (2024); Essays on Literature and Intellectual History (2017); Unfinished Self: Fengzhi and His World (2013); A Spiritual Journey to Germany: Reading Goethe, Nietzsche, and Hesse (2008); Critique of Aesthetic Modernity: German Aesthetics in Modern China (1999). He is also the co-editor of theJournal of Comparative Literature and World Literature and the Translation Series of Literature and Intellectual History.
Lobna Ismail (Cairo U, Egypt) [Second term]
Bio:Lobna Ismail is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, Egypt. She is a literary critic and referee, freelance translator, International public speaker, and T.V. commentator. Her scholarly work, in both fiction and drama, is mainly concerned with cross-cultural theories, politicizing texts, adaptations and appropriations, women and resistance writing, ritual and the supernatural, post-colonial utopias/dystopias/retrotopias, soft science fiction, Sufism, and New Historical fiction. She is a member of the Translation Committee at the Supreme Council of Culture; International Officer of ESCL (the Egyptian Society of Comparative Literature); founding member of the Egyptian Circle for Genre Studies; and IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research). She is the International Officer of ESCL (the Egyptian Society of Comparative Literature); member of ICLA Executive Committee, founding member of the Egyptian Circle for Genre Studies. Her latest Arabic translations are Palgrave/ Macmillan’s Theatre and Politics, Theatre and the Body, and Theatre & Interculturalism.
Madhu Krishnan (U of Bristol, UK)
Bio: Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol and former Director of the Centre for Black Humanities. She is the author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Her research focuses broadly on African literary writing, taking a comparative approach across European and African languages, and her particular interests lie in the ways in which literary writing functions through a complex network of infrastructure, intimacy, and circulation. She is at present working on a large scale project on literary activism in contemporary Africa, funded by an ERC Starting Grant, which explores the ways in which engagement with the literary functions as a mode of social production.
Rachel Esteves Lima (Bahia Federal U, Brazil)
Bio: Rachel Esteves Lima is professor of Brazilian Literature and researcher at the Graduate Program in Literature and Culture at Bahia Federal University. She holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies at Minas Gerais Federal University (1997) and is a scholarship recipient with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She has been a postdoctoral researcher at University Paris 13 (2010) and Bologna University (2019) and is head of the Contemporary Culture and Critique Studies Group. Her main field of research is within Comparative Literature and Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Has served as Chairwoman of the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature (2022-2023) and has recently been elected as a member of the Literature and Linguistics Advisory Committee at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) for the 2024-2027 term.
Maria Esther Maciel (U of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
Bio: Maria Esther Maciel was a Full Professor of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) until 2019 and is currently a collaborating professor of Literary Theory at the Post-Graduate Programme in Theory and Literary History at the University of Campinas (Unicamp). She is also a researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) since 2008. She has a master’s degree in Brazilian literature (UFMG, 1990), doctorate in Comparative Literature (UFMG, 1995), post-doctorate in Cinema from the University of London (1999/2000) and in Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo (2012/2013). She was also a Resident Professor at IEAT-Institute for Advanced Transdisciplinary Studies at UFMG (2009/2010) and took part of the international project “Problematizing Global Knowledge-The New Encyclopaedia Project” at Theory, Culture & Society Centre, UK (2004/2008), and coordinated the Center of Latin-American Studies of the Faculty of Letters of UFMG (1995-1999). Her publications include, among others, the books As vertigens da lucidez: poesia e crítica em Octavio Paz (1995), Voo transverso: poesia e modernidade (1998), A memória das coisas: ensaios de literatura, cinema e artes plásticas (2004), As ironias da ordem: coleções, inventários e enciclopédias ficcionais (2009), Pensar/escrever o animal (ed. 2011), Literatura e animalidade (2016) and Animalidades: zooliteratura e os limites do humano (2023). She also published seven books of poetry and fiction.
Kitty Millet (San Francisco State U, USA)
Bio:Kitty Millet is chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures, as well as Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and has supplemental appointments in Comparative Literature, English, Modern Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Women / Gender Studies, and History. Her previous publications encompass numerous articles, including the books, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust, a Comparative History of Persecution (2017), and the co-edited Fault Lines of Modernity: The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature (2018), a volume tied to the International Comparative Literature Association’s Research Committee on Religion, Ethics and Literature (ICLA) which she chairs, as well as editing a special issue of “Religions,” on Haskalah Modernity (2019). Her most recent book, Kabbalah and Literature (2024), explores the migration of two aesthetic principles coming out of Kabbalah, letter phenomenology and heretical messianism, into secular fiction. While this text concentrates primarily on European writers, her next text, Letters to the New World, tracks these principles as they seed themselves in American literatures. Professor Millet also edits a new volume on Literature and its ‘Other’ Traditions (2026), a collection related to new work from her ICLA research committee, is guest editor of a special issue of “Humanities” on “Comparative Jewish Literatures” (2025), and is editor of the Bloomsbury series, Comparative Jewish Literatures, a series that stakes Jewish writing as a tradition whose synchronic and diachronic registers exceed its status as a “minority literature” in the field of comparative literature. She sits on several editorial boards concerned with Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the study of Antisemitism and Racism.
Florian Mussgnug (UCL, UK)
Bio: Florian Mussgnugis Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies and Vice Dean International in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL. He also holds a fixed-term professorial double appointment in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Rome | Università degli Studi Roma Tre (2021-2025). Mussgnug studied Philosophy and Modern Languages at Balliol College, University of Oxford, and was awarded a PhD in Literary Studies by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In spring 2022, he was appointed to a life membership of Academia Europaea. He has held visiting and honorary positions at Sapienza University Rome, Oxford University, Roma Tre University, Cagliari University, and Heidelberg University. He serves as a professorial fellow on the University of Siena’s International Doctoral Programme in Modern Literature and Culture and as a research associate at the University of Heidelberg’s Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS). He recently joined the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters at the British School at Rome, as Chair of Publications. In January 2025, he was elected to be the President of the ICLA research committee CHLEL.
Nicoletta Pireddu (Georgetown U, USA)
Bio: Nicoletta Pireddu is Inaugural Director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, Director of the Global and Comparative Literature Program, and Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Georgetown University, Washington DC. She holds doctoral degrees from the US and Italy (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles; Dottorato di ricerca, Università di Venezia) and is involved in comparative literature and humanities projects spanning multiple continents. Her research revolves around European literary and cultural relations, cosmopolitanism, borders and migration, history of ideas, translation studies, and relationships between literature and anthropology. She has published over 80 articles and numerous monographs and edited volumes—among them, Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (2022) with Didier Coste and Christina Kkona (2023 ACLA “René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Collection”); Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories: Thought on the Edge (2018); The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society (the first English annotated edition of Scipio Sighele’s works, 2018); The Works of Claudio Magris: Temporary Homes, Mobile Identities, European Borders (2015).
She is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed, online journal Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism; associate editor of Annali d’italianistica; and guest editor of special issues of The European Legacy and Parallax. She is the recipient of a Distinguished Service Award and an Excellence in Teaching Award from Georgetown, the Mario Soldati Award for Literary Criticism and the American Association for Italian Studies Book Award, and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, and the Borchard Foundation.
Active in various professional organizations, she has just completed a 3-year term in the ACLA Board and was the organizer of the 2019 ACLA annual meeting at Georgetown University.
Jeronimo Pizarro (U of the Andes, Colombia) [Second term]
Bio: Jerónimo Pizarro is a Professor at the Universidad de los Andes and holds the Camões Institute Chair of Portuguese Studies in Colombia. He has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures (2008, Harvard University) and a Ph.D. in Portuguese Linguistics (2006, Universidade de Lisboa). He contributed seven volumes to the critical edition of Fernando Pessoa’s Works, published by the INCM, with the last volume being the first critical edition of The Book of Disquiet. With Patricio Ferrari and Antonio Cardiello, the other two coordinators involved in digitizing Pessoa’s private library, he prepared another book, A Biblioteca Particular de Fernando Pessoa. Together with Steffen Dix, he co-organized Portuguese Modernisms in Literature and the Visual Arts. He has edited and co-edited many special issues and book of essays. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Pessoa Plural: A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies. Currently, he is also in charge of Tinta-da-China’s “Coleção Pessoa”. He was the Program Director of Portugal’s visit to the International Book Fairs of Bogotá and Medellín, he has been in the jury of some literary prizes, and he has received important recognitions.
Dobrota Pucherová (U of Vienna, Austria)
Bio: Dr. Dobrota Pucherová, D.Phil. (Oxon.), Privatdoz. is Senior Researcher at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences and Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. She has published widely on African and Afro-European literature in English, as well as Slovak, Czech and Central European literature, especially in the context of postcolonialism, feminism, postcommunism, diaspora, transculturalism, cosmopolitanism and world literature. Her monographs are Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women’s Writing: A 21st-Century Global Context (Routledge, 2022), which was the winner of the 2023 top publication prize of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (WV Trier, 2011). She has co-edited (with Róbert Gáfrik) Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures (Brill Rodopi, 2015), among other books, and published articles in journals such as Research in African Literatures, CompLit, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, World Literature Studies, English Studies in Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies and Women: A Cultural Review. She has book chapters in various volumes, most recently in The Red Globe: Writing the World in Eastern European Travel Literature (De Gruyter, 2024), and in Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research (Brill Rodopi, 2020). Her forthcoming edited books are an English translation of an 18th century Slovak novel (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment) and Slovak Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic). She is on the editorial board of World Literature Studies, published by the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences.
Marta Puxan-Oliva (U of the Balearic Islands, Spain)
Bio: Marta Puxan-Oliva is a distinguished researcher at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. She has worked at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Harvard University, the Universitat de Barcelona, and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and she has conducted research at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University (with a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Outgoing Fellowship from the European Commission, 2012–15) and the Universidad de la República de Uruguay. She is a specialist in comparative literature, especially in the fields of narrative theory, comparative racial studies, ecocriticism, global literary studies, and ocean studies. She has published various articles on these topics in journals such as Poetics today, Studies in the Novel, English Studies, Letral, Journal of Global History, and the Journal of World Literature. Her book Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts, and Ideology in the Modern Novel (Routledge 2019) bridges narrative theory with the constitution of racial ideologies. She is the principal investigator (PI) of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project “Ocean Crime Narratives: A Polyhedral Assessment of Hegemonic Discourse on Environmental Crime and Harm at Sea (1982–Present)” (GA 101043711), and co-PI with Neus Rotger of the Spanish-funded project “The Novel as Global Form: Poetic Challenges and Cross-border Circulation” (2021–24). She is a member of the research group LiCETC: Literatura Contemporània: Estudis Teòrics i Comparatius (Contemporary Literature: Comparative Studies and Theory).
Irma Ratiani (Tbilisi State U, Georgia) [Second term]
Bio:Irma Ratiani is a Georgian literary scholar, editor and translator. She is a professor of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Head of the Department of General and Comparative Literary Studies. From 2006 till now she is a director of Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature. She is a President of the Georgian Comparative Literature Association (GCLA). The major field of Irma Ratiani’s scientific interest includes: literary theory, general and comparative literary studies in a broad cultural context; analysis of various literary genres and directions, literary schools and formations in the frame of international cultural-literary processes by using contemporary methodologies and approaches; revision and analysis of literary processes of Soviet and Post-Soviet period Georgian literature.
In 2018 her long-time work – Georgian Literature and the World Literary Process was published by Peter Lang Publishing. In 2018, the same publishing house has printed her book – Anti-utopian Mood, Liminality, and Literature.
In 2019 Irma ratiani was awarded Saguramo literary award for her book – Georgian Literature and the World Literary Process. 2012 Irma Ratiani was awarded the Grigol Kiknadze Scientific Award for the monograph – The Text and the Chronotop.
In 2013 Irma Ratiani was awarded an Order of Presidential Excellence of Georgia for her contribution to the internationalization of Georgian culture. Irma Ratiani is an author of several books, textbooks and more than 80 scientific articles. She is an editor in chief and co-author of books – Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse. 20th Century Experience, and – Literature in Exile. Emigrants Fiction, published, respectively, in 2012 and 2016 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP); and the book – Bolshevism and Georgian Literature (1921-1941), published in Georgia by Mtsignobari Press in 2016. She is an editor and co-author of newly released book, by CSP – Identifying Cultural Intersections in the Works of Shota Rustaveli and Nizami Ganjavi (2023), and editor in chief and co-author of the upcoming book – Georgian Literature. Handbook, by the Brill Publishers.
In 2022 she was head of the organizing committee of ICLA International Congress in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Matthew Reynolds (Oxford U, UK)
Bio: Matthew Reynolds is Professor of English and Comparative Criticism at Oxford University, where he founded and chair the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), an open, democratic grouping that generates innovation in comparative research; he also set up Oxford’s Masters in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation. His work puts translation at the heart of comparative literature by exploring how literary creativity germinates from and moves across language difference, and he develops plural and collaborative practices of research and writing, hoping to contribute to the creation of a heterolingual and non-hegemonic medium of intellectual exchange for our discipline (see ‘Translanguaging Comparative Literature’ in RL/LR). His open access, multimodal, interactive publication Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages presents Brontë’s novel as co-created by its many hundreds of translations in more than 68 languages – a case-study of the theory that he developed in the earlier volume Prismatic Translation. Other books include Translation: a Very Short Introduction; The Poetry of Translation (which offered new ways of understanding translation’s creativity); The Realms of Verse (on poetry and nationalism in C19th Britain and Europe); Dante in English, and the novels Designs for a Happy Home and The World Was all Before Them (both of which are basically experiments in narrative voice). As Chair of the ICLA’s Research Development Committee he has introduced transparent criteria and processes and nurtured the formation of several new committees on the understanding that openness and collaborative innovation are key virtues for the ICLA.
Godwin Siundu (U of Nairobi, Kenya)
Bio: Godwin Siundu is currently a DAAD Guest Professor of Diasporic Literatures at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, and substantive Associate Professor of Literature, University of Nairobi. He researches in area studies and postcolonial discourses, exploring literary and cultural works of South Asian diasporic experiences in eastern Africa and North America; literary journalism and life writing. He is the author of Imagining Home and Community in East African Asian Writings: A Reading of Moyez Vassanji and Yusuf Dawood’s Novels (VDM Verlag Muller, 2009), and editor of History and Violence in Contemporary Kenyan Fiction: Standpoints on Yvonne Owuor’s Writings (Routledge, 2023), which is remarked as a significant locus for local perspectives on an author who increasingly being viewed as the successor of Ngugi wa Thiong´o in narrating Kenya´s struggles with nation making. Siundu has published articles in Research in African Literatures, Journal of African Cultural Studies, African Identities, English Studies in Africa, and the Publication of the Modern Languages Association (PMLA), English Studies in Africa, Journal of South Asian Diasporas, African Identities, among others. Siundu also has published book chapters in various texts on African literature, and currently has a forthcoming chapter in a Cambridge University Series on Leading Writers in Context, focusing on Ngugi´s interest in Caribbean life, society, and literary heritage. Siundu is also founding co-editor of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, a Taylor & Francis journal that has been published on a quarterly basis from 2013 to the present.
Fatiha Taib (Mohammed V University, Morocco) [Second term]
Bio: Fatiha Taib is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Letters ,University Mohammed V in Rabat , Morocco. She is Responsible for « Master of General Literature and Comparative Criticism »(2010-2020), « Comparative Studies Research Team » and Doctoral training : “Comparative Studies “. She is a Member (Partner) of ICLA Executive Council , “Egyptian Association of Comparative Literature”, “International site Disorienting the Orient” and “European Association for Modern Arabic Literature”. She is also a foreign consultant (Ilia State University-Georgia -2024) for the project “The History of Ancient Georgian Literature: Modern Methodological and Conceptual Approaches for the New University Handbook”.
Her international public lectures, books and articles in Arabic , French and English are mainly concerned with Translation Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Inter-narratives (Francophone and Anglophone Arab Fiction ),Cultural Representations, Linguistic and cultural pluralism, Travel literature. Among her publications are: Translation in the Era of the Other (Second Edition : 2020), Kilito and world criticism(Coordinator, 2020), At the Borders of Comparatism (2021), Translation Studies :From the General to the Specific (2022), Country-Nation and Christian Europe in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Rihla(2022), The Eloquence of Silence …The Maze of Words! (2024), Comparative Literature Today in Arab Universities- Mohammed V University in Morocco as a Model-(2024).
Paul Tenngart (Lund U, Sweden)
Bio: Paul Tenngart is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Lund University, Sweden, where he coordinates the Komplitt Forum, a research platform connecting scholars from Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Great Britain and the USA. Between 2016 and 2021, he was a member of the steering committee for the national Swedish research programme “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures”, and in May 2024 he organised the international symposium “Literary Translation and Nobel Consecration”, financed by the Nobel Foundation.
Tenngart’s articles on Swedish and French poetry, politics and ideology, prose translations from Swedish to English, translation patterns from and to semi-peripheral positions, and Anthropocene fiction have appeared in Journal of World Literature, Interventions, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Climatic Change and other international journals.
His academic monographs include Den komplexe Baudelaire: om nyansernas politik i Les Fleurs du Mal (The Complex Baudelaire: on the Politics of Nuances in Les Fleurs du Mal, Ellerströms 2012), Exporterad realism: svensk arbetarlitteratur på engelska (Realism on Export: Swedish Proletarian Fiction in English, Makadam 2020), and Northern Crossings: Translation, Circulation and the Literary Semi-periphery, co-written with five colleagues (Edfeldt et al, Bloomsbury 2022). His latest book is a multi-angled study of the impact of the Nobel Prize on 20th-century world literature, The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature (Bloomsbury 2024).
In addition to his academic writing, Tenngart has published several monographs for a wider audience, for example introductions to literary theory and biographies on Swedish authtors. He is currently finishing the manuscript of a comprehensive history of the Nobel Prize in literature, to be published in 2025.
Clotilde Thouret (Paris-Nanterre University, France) [Second term]
Bio: Clotilde Thouret is Professor of Comparative Literature at Paris Nanterre University (since 2022). A former student at the École Normale Supérieure, she holds an agrégation de Lettres modernes (1997), and she received her doctorate in Comparative Literature the University of Paris-Sorbonne (2005). She was a lecturer at Edinburgh University (1997-1999) and taught for six years at the University Paris-Diderot (Paris VII) and the University of Nice; she was Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (2006-2017), before becoming full Professor at Lorraine University (Nancy, France) in 2017.
Her research and teaching interests focus on European Theater (theater and politics, controversies over theater, spectatorship and audience response) and comics (superheroic genre, relationship between comics and literature). She is the author of Seul en scène. Le Monologue dans le théâtre européen de la première modernité (Angleterre, Espagne, France ; 1580-1640) (Genève, Droz, 2010) and Le Théâtre réinventé. La défense de la scène dans l’Europe de la première modernité (PUR, 2018). She is the co-editor of Corps et interprétation (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Rodopi, 2012, with Lise Wajeman) and the editor of Littérature et polémiques (Lucie éditions, 2022). She has also published numerous articles on Corneille, Jonson and Shakespeare, the early modern theatrical experience (esp. emotions), theater polemics and scandals. From 2013 to 2019, she has co-directed with François Lecercle, the project « The hatred of theatre » (Labex Obvil, Univ. Paris-Sorbonne), which explored the controversies on theater in Europe and digitized the french corpus. She is currently working on a project devoted to the history and theory of theater as prostitution.
Makoto Tokumori (U of Tokyo, Japan)
Bio: Mokoto Tokumori is a lecturer in comparative literature and culture in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He also holds the position as vice director of the Center for International Exchange, and am chief of the International Students’ Advisory Office. Tokumori has been a member of the Comparative History of East Asian Literatures Research Committee, ICLA (2016-), and also served as a member of the Executive Committee of Japan Comparative Literature Association (2019-2023) and chaired the committee for JCLA Congress (2019-2021).
His main areas of research are 1) the comparative study of libertine thoughts and rhetoric in early modern Japan and England and 2) the study of ancient Japanese scriptures and the history of their interpretations from the viewpoint of comparative literature in East Asia. On the former subject he published a monograph in Japanese, Kaihō Seiryō: Edo no jiyū o ikita jusha (Kaihō Seiryō: a life of a Confucian libertine in Edo-period Japan, 2013), which include a comparative study of this Confucian scholar with the thoughts of Bernard Mandeville. One of the recent publications in English on the latter theme is “Formative and Alternative Reading of Scripture: Ichijō Kaneyoshi’s Interpretation of Nihon shoki in Fifteenth Century Japan” (2019).
Rita Wilson (Monash U, Australia)
Bio: Rita Wilson is Professor of Translation Studies, Founding Director of the Monash Intercultural Lab and Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University (Australia). Her research combines an interest in linguistic and cultural translation with studies of contemporary translingual and transcultural writing. She has long-standing research interests in women’s writing and Italian contemporary literature. More recently, her work has focused on the links between translation, migration and memory, as well as the influence of multilingual creative expressions on global literature. Among her recent publications: Translating Worlds. Migration, Memory and Culture (with S. Radstone, 2020); “‘Pens that confound the label of citizenship’: self-translations and literary identities”, Modern Italy (2020); “Writing the Neighbourhood: Literary representations of Language, Space and Mobility” in Transcultural Italies (2020); “Sites of translation in Melbourne” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and the City (2021); “Youth in the city: Fostering transcultural leadership for social change” (with M. Dutto, F. Ricatti, L. Simeone) in Cultural Change in Post-Migrant Societies : Re-Imagining Communities Through Arts and Cultural Activities (2024). She is co-editor of The Translator and serves on the international advisory boards of Translation Studies, Neke The New Zealand Journal of Translation Studies and de genere. Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies. She was an elected member of the Executive Council, International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (2016-2021), has been a peer reviewer for Horizon Europe, Malaysian and New Zealand research grant schemes, and is currently a member of the Advisory Board, Centre for Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Ying Xiong (Shanghai Normal U, China)
Bio: Ying Xiong holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon,
U.S.A. She is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Research Center for Comparative Literature & World Literature at Shanghai Normal University, where she
specializes in comparative literature, comparative rhetoric, poetry and poetics, and translation studies. A member of the Innovative Team of the High-Level Program in Comparative Literature and World Literature at the university’s School of Humanities, she is also Managing Editor and Editorial Director of the school’s bilingual publication International
Comparative Literature: A Journal Devoted to Research in Transcultural Encounters (ICL) (Journal website: https://icl.shnu.edu.cn/). Starting in 2024, she also serves as Managing Editor and Editorial Director of Cowrie: Comparative and World Literature (CWL), a comprehensive, quarterly English academic journal published by De Gruyter on behalf of the research center (Journal website: www.degruyter.com/cwl). Ying has published extensively on her specialist subjects, and was named a Shanghai Pujiang Scholar by the Shanghai Municipality in 2019 (Grant No. 2019PJC083). Her recent article, titled “Give My Heart Ease: Filiality and Responsibility in Clarissa in Light of Levinasian and Confucian Ethics,” is forthcoming in Kritika Kultura.
- As stipulated by article IV of the Statutes, 2 further members will be nominated from the remaining non-elected list, with consideration given to the diversity of the Executive Council. ↩