CCL People

The researchers who make up the Centre for Comparative Literature.

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Advisory Board

 

Lucia Boldrini, Director of CCL

Lucia Boldrini, Director

Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Her research interests include fictional biography and autobiography; Joyce, Dante and modernist medievalism; comparative literature; and literature on and from the Mediterranean area.

Clare Finburgh Delijani, Deputy Director CCL

Clare Finburgh Delijani, Deputy Director

Professor Clare Finburgh Delijani is a teacher and researcher in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths. She is the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2023-26) during which she will be writing Ghosts of Empire: Performing Postcoloniality in France (Liverpool University Press).

Isobel Hurst, Deputy Director

Isobel Hurst is Lecturer in English in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Her research examines the reception of Greek and Latin literature in English, looking at the connection between classical education and authorship and women writers’ creative engagement with the classical tradition.

Marie-Claude Canova Green, Deputy Director CCL

Marie-Claude Canova Green, Deputy Director

Marie-Claude Canova Green is Professor Emerita of French at Goldsmiths. She has research interests in early modern European court entertainments and other forms of large-scale public spectacles, and has published widely on the topic.

Raj Pandey, CCL

Raj Pandey

Rajyashree Pandey is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths. She has published widely in the areas of medieval Japanese literature, Buddhism, gender, postcolonial studies and popular culture.

Profile Photo of Isabel Capeloa Gil

Isabel Capeloa Gil

Isabel Capeloa Gil is Professor of German and Comparative Culture Studies at UCP’s Faculty of Human Sciences (Lisbon). She is an Honorary Fellow at the School of Advanced Studies (University of London) and has held Visiting Professorships at the National University of Ireland (Galway), the University of Hamburg, LMU Munich, PUC-Rio de Janeiro and USJ (Macau).

David Johnston, CCL

David Johnston

David Johnston is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Translation in the Centre for Translation and Interpreting at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published widely on the theory and practice of translation.

Wen-chin Ouyang, CCL

Wen-Chin Ouyang

Wen-chin Ouyang FBA is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. Born in Taiwan and raised in Libya, she has a BA in Arabic from Tripoli University and a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University.

Haun Saussy, CCL

Haun Saussy

Haun Saussy is a University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages & Civilizations as well as in the Committee on Social Thought.

Expert consultants

 

Profile photo of Khalid Amine

Khalid Amine

Khalid Amine is a Professor of Performance Studies at the Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tétouan, Morocco. He has been a Research Fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität Berlin and is now Member of the Advisory Board.

Catherine Boyle CCL

Catherine Boyle

Catherine Boyle is Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at King’s College London and Director of the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking. Her research areas include cultural studies, theatre as text and in performance, and translation, and her work is by the interest in how cultural expressions are produced within their socio-historic context.

Ivan Callus CCL

Ivan Callus

Ivan Callus is Professor of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches courses in post-1945 British and American literature and in literary criticism and theory.

Ipshita Chanda staff profile image

Ipshita Chanda

Ipshita Chanda is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Comparative Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She received her PhD from Jadavpur University, Kolkata and taught at the Department of Comparative Literature there from 1993 to 2017. Her areas of interest include theory of literature, comparative literature, Indian language literatures. 

César Domínguez Prieto staff image

César Domínguez Prieto

César Domínguez is Associate Professor of comparative literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Françoise Lavocat, CCL

Françoise Lavocat

Françoise Lavocat is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She was a member of the Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin (2014-1015) and is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2015-2020) and of the Academia Europaea (since 2016).

Lianggong Luo, CCL

Lianggong Luo

LUO Lianggong is professor of English at Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China. Concurrently he is chief editor of Foreign Language and Literature Review, associate editor-in-chief of Foreign Literature Studies, and member of the Editorial Board of academic journals in China and abroad.

Ellen McDougall

Ellen McDougall

Ellen McDougall is Artistic Director at the Gate Theatre. Previous credits at the Gate include – Dear Elizabeth (2019), Effigies of Wickedness (2018), The Unknown Island (2017) and Idomeneus (2014).

Royona Mitra staff profile image

Royona Mitra

Royona Mitra is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Palgrave, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award awarded by Dance Studies Association (DSA).

Mònica Rius Piniés staff image

Mònica Rius Piniés

Mònica Rius Piniés is the Director of the UNESCO Chair "Women, development and cultures", a member of ADHUC—Research Center for Theory, Gender and Sexuality at the Universitat de Barcelona.

Marina Warner staff image

Marina Warner

Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history with a special focus on myths, legends and fables. Her books include studies of the Virgin Mary (Alone of All Her Sex, 1976), of Joan of Arc (1984), and public statuary (Monuments & Maidens, 1988).

Rita Wilson staff image

Rita Wilson

Rita Wilson is Professor in Translation Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. She is Interim Director of the Monash Intercultural Lab and Co-Director of the Monash-Warwick Migration, Identity and Translation Research Network.

Goldsmiths Members

 

Dr Sola Adeyemi

Sola Adeyemi studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, the University of Natal, South Africa and the University of Leeds, UK, and teaches African Theatre History, World Theatres, Postcolonial Theatre and Culture and Performance at Goldsmiths. His most recent research and publications are on the drama and theatre of Femi Osofisan, and his current project is translating the novels of Wole Soyinka into Yorùbá. He is the editor of Opon Ifa Review Literary Journal, Reviews Editor of African Theatre (AT), contributing editor to 3P+ International Journal of the Arts and on the Editorial Board of Africa Book Link. He is the Treasurer of the African Theatre Association (AfTA).

Dr Tiziana Morosetti

Dr Tiziana Morosetti is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance. Her work covers two broad areas of specialism: African/African diasporic theatre, and Theatre and Race. She is the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2018) and Africa on the Contemporary London Stage (2021), the deputy director of the journal Quaderni del ’900, and the General Secretary of the African Theatre Association (AfTA). She is currently co-editing with Lynette Goddard the Cambridge History of Black British Theatre and Performance, and has been recently awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to work on the project ‘The Making of African Theatre: Academics, Playwrights, and Theatre Practitioners at the University of Ibadan, 1952-1970’.

Professor Deirdre Osborne

Deirdre Osborne is Professor of Literature and Drama at Goldsmiths and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her research spans the Victorian to contemporary periods in Britain and Australia with a focus upon the consequences of British imperial-colonial rule in a cross-disciplinary approach to drama, poetry, fiction, life-writing and performance. Her concept, consequentialist aesthetics employs three models: “Landmark Poetics”, “Mothertext” and “Didactic Poetics”. Co-author of This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books, she edited the Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945-2010) and is Associate Editor of Women’s Writing. 

Professor Carole Sweeney

Carole Sweeney is a Professor in Modern Literature at Goldsmiths. She teaches modern and contemporary fiction, specialising in comparative modernisms, women’s writing, and feminism. Her books include From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919-1935 (2013), Michel Houellebecq and The Literature of Despair (2013) and Vagabond Fictions: Gender and Experiment in British Women’s Fiction, 1945-1970 (2020). Her new research is on the influence of public service broadcasting on post-'45 literary culture and writer-critics in France and Britain.

Professor Derval Tubridy

Derval Tubridy is Professor of Literature and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths. She co-directs the London Beckett Seminar and is Vice-Chair of the British Association of Irish Studies. She works on modern and contemporary literature, philosophy, performance, and the visual arts with a focus on the intersections between language, materiality and process. Author of Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity (CUP 2018), and Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems (UCD Press, 2001), she has published widely on Modernism and Irish Studies, with a recent focus on intermediality and neurodiversity. Her work has been funded by the Fulbright Commission, the British Academy and the AHRC.

Professor Frank Krause

Frank Krause is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. His research interests include Expressionism, narratives of the First World War, and the history of literary smell motifs since the Enlightenment. His comparatist studies have focused on comrades and lovers as figurations of motherliness in German and English prose (1918-1933), and on the stench of corpses in German, French and English narratives of the First World War. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Smell and Social Life. Aspects of English, French, and German Literature (1880-1939) (2021).

Dr Mischa Twitchin

Mischa Twitchin's principal research interests are in European theatres of the avant-garde, Afro-European cultural politics, empathy and mimesis, performance philosophy, memory studies, and dialogues between anthropology, museum ethnography, and art. Among his publications: The Theatre of Death - The Uncanny in Mimesis: Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg and an Iconology of the Actor (2016).

Affiliated Members

 

Dr Megha Agarwal

Megha Agarwal completed her doctoral thesis in Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths. Her research interests include comparative literature and intertextuality in practice; some of her work has been published in Comparative Critical Studies and by Maria Curie-Skłodowska and Columbia University Press.

Dr Lucia Claudia Fiorella

Lucia Claudia Fiorella teaches at the University of Udine. Her research focuses on postcolonial literature and on auto/biographism. She co-convenes the Auto / Bio / Fiction Series at the CCL. Her publications include a book on figures of evil in J.M. Coetzee (Figure del Male in J.M. Coetzee, 2006) and the forthcoming Oltre il patto autobiografico. Da Barthes a Coetzee (Beyond the Autobiographical Pact: From Barthes to Coetzee).

Dr Katharina Herold-Zanker

Katharina Herold-Zanker is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. She graduated from Goldsmiths before completing her DPhil at Oxford. Before joining Durham she was Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Regensburg. She has published on European Decadence. Her first monograph The Indispensable East in Decadent Literature 1880-1920, which draws upon theoretical models of orientalism and cosmopolitanism to assess the significance of relating to and embodying 'otherness' in Decadent writing, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Hanan Jasim Khammas

Hanan Jasim Khammas earned a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) working on the representation of the body in contemporary Iraqi fiction and the Anglo-American cultural production surrounding the war on terror. Currently, she is an Adjunct Lecturer of Comparative Literature and coordinates the Master in Contemporary Arabic Studies at UAB. She is also a collaborating postdoctoral researcher at ADHUC–Research Centre for Theory, Gender, Sexuality. She was Visiting Doctoral Scholar at the CCL, from June to September 2021.

Dr Jacqueline Rattray

After studying for a BA in European Thought and Literature & Spanish Jacqueline Rattray went on to specialise in Spanish Surrealism for her doctoral studies. She has written and published on the Spanish surrealist poet, José María Hinojosa and is currently researching the experimental writings of selected visual artists of the Spanish avant-garde.

Dr Meritxell Joan Rodríguez

Meritxell Joan Rodríguez completed an MA in Comparative Literary Studies at Goldsmiths and earned a PhD in Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Barcelona. Currently, she is the coordinator of the Gender Department of the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed). She has published on migration in and across Western Mediterranean countries and on the Harki legacy.

Dr Rita Sakr

Previously a Lecturer in World Literature at Goldsmiths, Rita Sakr is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Maynooth University, Ireland. Among various other publications, she is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study and of ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies.

Dr Michael Simpson

Michael Simpson, Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the CCL, works in Romanticism and in Classical Reception Studies. He has written on postcolonial adaptations of Greek tragedy, on the Olympic Games, and on the classicising of global economic crisis. He is a member of the Steering Group of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar and of the Executive Committee of the Classical Reception Studies Network

Dr Tamar Steinitz

Tamar Steinitz specialises in world literature and the intersection of literature and language in transnational contexts. She is the author of Translingual Identities: Language and the Self in Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind and editor, with Rachael Gilmour, of Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation, and Culture.

Dr Meiping Zhang

Meiping Zhang studied at Goldsmiths and completed her PhD research on Paul Auster's works. She teaches at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Her publications include "Pen and Bomb: Creative Agency in Paul Auster's Leviathan" and "'A World Compete Without Me': Writing Cinema in Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions."

Academic Visitors

Marlene Meuer

Marlene Meuer, Postdoctoral Research Visitor at the CCL, 2022-23, is a German comparative literature and cultural studies scholar with a strong focus on the history of ideas and philosophy of arts, currently working on a book about postdigital language art.

After having completed her Ph.D. thesis on ‘Polarisations of Antiquity in the Age of Enlightenment’ (“Polarisierungen der Antike’, published in 2017), Marlene wrote a second book on the ‘Laura’ cycle in Schiller’s ‘Anthology of the Year 1782’ (“Der ‘Laura’-Zyklus in Schillers ‘Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782”, published in 2018) and completed teaching and research stays in Weimar (DE), Freiburg (DE), Eichstätt (DE), Aberdeen, Catania (IT), Marbach (DE), Konstanz (DE), Lüneburg (DE) and Prague (CZ).

She is a member of the Young Academy at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz (“Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz”). During her visit at the CCL (2022-23) she explores what kinds of postdigital language art were developed in the UK in the last decade.

Students

Alhussien Elhishani

Alhussien Elhishani is a PhD candidate in Translation at Goldsmiths. His research delves into treating gastronomic culture-specific items in Arabic translations of Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms.

Alhussien's research interests include literary translation, Arabic-translated literature and translation strategies for culture-specific items. He has completed an MA in Translating and Interpreting Arabic at the University of Salford, UK (2015), and has worked as an assistant translation lecturer at the University of Misurata, Libya (2016 – 2019), and as an Arabic translator and interpreter since 2010. His previous projects include Translation Strategies for Cultural References, published by LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing (2017).

Augusta Ivory-Peters

Augusta is an AHRC funded doctoral researcher in English at Goldsmiths. Her research explores the reception of ancient Greek literature and women’s writing in the classical metascholarship of scholar-poet Anne Carson.

As part of her doctoral training, Augusta is currently undertaking a placement with the open-access peer-reviewed postgraduate journal Brief Encounters in the role of Senior Editor. She also works part-time for Classics for All, a charity that raises funds to support the teaching of classical subjects in state schools across the UK. Augusta is a member of the Advisory Board for Sex Ed Matters, a social enterprise that tackles sex and relationship taboos in UK schools, which she co-founded in 2019.

Elsa Kienberger

Elsa Kienberger is a PhD candidate in Comparative literature at Goldsmiths (principal supervisor: Professor Deirdre Osborne). Her research delves into Elizabeth Robins's re-imagination of fin-de-siècle gender through 'the North' in her fiction on Alaska and English translations of Scandinavian texts.

Elsa's research interests include Victorian and Edwardian theatre, Nordic literature and translation, and postcolonial studies. She is a collaborator on EcoAusten, a social annotation project through Pacific Lutheran University's Jane Austen Review, and her previous projects include a digital genetic edition of Michael Field's In the Name of Time (1919).

Laphatrada O’Donnell

Laphatrada O’Donnell is a PhD candidate in Translation at Goldsmiths. Her research focuses on translation and its connections with the tourism industry, and examines the marketing of touristic texts written originally in Thai texts and their English translations in community-based tourism settings in Thailand.

Her other research interests include teaching and learning English as a foreign language in higher education.