CCL People

Among her books: Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (2012); Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (2001); and as editor, Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, with Julia Novak (2017).

She was Academic Co-Director, with Ivan Callus and Stella Borg Barthet, of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership “Mediterranean Imaginaries: Literature, Arts, Culture” (2016-2018). She has been General Coordinator of the European Network of Comparative Literature Studies (REELC/ENCLS, now ESCL/SELC), and currently serves as President of the International Comparative Literature Association. In 2014 she was elected to the Academia Europaea.

This project traces a history of postcolonial theatre in France from the 1950s to today, asking how theatre looks back at histories of colonialism, better to understand identity, community and the postcolonial nations today. As well as examining seminal postwar decolonial playwrights like Aimé Césaire from Martinique or Kateb Yacine from Algeria, the book sheds light on less known but highly influential contemporary theatre-makers including Marine Bachelot Nguyen, Alexandra Badea, Nasser Djemaï, Latifa Laâbissi, Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Léonora Miano and Dieudonné Niangouna, illustrating how postcolonial arts can promote racial and social justice by viewing contemporary societies through the prism of colonial pasts.

Clare’s other publications include special issues of Théâtre/Public on postcolonial theatre (2023) and on the Situationist International (2019), The Great Stage Directors: Littlewood, Planchon, Strehler (2018, with Peter Boenisch), Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict (2017), Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (2015, with Carl Lavery) and Jean Genet (2012, with David Bradby). She is the co-founder of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance.

Across all Clare’s publications, she addresses some of the most pressing political and social issues of the modern world: the ecological crisis, global conflict, and migrant and post-migrant identities and communities.

She is the author of Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (2006) and has published essays in the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013) and volumes 4 and 5 of the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (2015, 2019). In 2019 she gave the Annual Classics and English lecture at the University of Oxford, on Edith Wharton and the Classics. Her work on contemporary women writers and the classics appears in Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (2009) and Homer’s Daughters: Women’s Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2019). She is the co-convenor (with Lucia Boldrini) of the CCL event series, ‘Sing in Me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical and the Creative’.

Isobel is a member of the Executive Committee of the Classical Reception Studies Network; the Steering Group of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar; the Advisory Board of the Decadence Research Centre and the Editorial Advisory Board of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies; and the Women Writers and Classics Network.

In particular she has edited a four-volume collection of French seventeenth-century ballet libretti, as well as two volumes of collected essays on early modern festivals, Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe (with Jean Andrews) and The Wedding of Charles and Henrietta Maria. Celebrations and Controversy (1615) (with Sara Wolfson). She has also published monographs on La Politique spectacle au grand siècle. Les rapports franco-anglais; on Faire le roi: L'autre corps de Louis XIII; on Molière’s comédies-ballets and more generally on French drama across the centuries.

She is particularly interested in examining the applicability of categories such as woman, body and gender, all of which emerged in the West, for understanding non-Western pasts and presents. Her research in manga and anime considers how political concerns and ideologies are reflected in these contemporary artistic forms.

Among her publications: Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives (2016). She has taught at the Department of Asian Studies at Washington University, at the Department of Religions at the University of Hawaii, at Tallinn University, and was Head of Asian Studies at La Trobe University. She has held a number of Fellowships in Japan, including the Japan Foundation Fellowship.

Her work is structured around issues of diversity, gender and conflict and the exploration of the disciplinary boundaries between literature, the arts and other disciplines. An author of over 150 publications in Portuguese, English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, some of her titles include  Fleeting, Floating, Flowing: Water Writing and Modernity (K&Neumann, 2010); Literacia Visual  (2012); Hazardous Future: Disaster, Representation and the Assessment of Risk (de Gruyter, 2015), The Cultural Life of Money (de Gruyter, 2016), Humanidade(s). Considerações Radicalmente Contemporâneas (2016), and The Ballets Russes. Modernity After Diaghilev (2018).

She has worked consistently to develop international research networks, exploring the different ways in which the practice of the arts and humanities is pivotal to advance a more sustainable and intellectually robust global research and education agenda. Dr Gil was a Fulbrighter, a DAAD and Gulbenkian Fellowship recipient as well as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, and at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Center. In 2019 she was recognized as one of the top Women in Science by the Portuguese Science and Technology Agency. Amongst her honors are an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Sciences from Boston College and the University of Lisbon Alumni Award (2019). She was nominated for Academia Europaea in 2020.

Isabel Gil was a member of the ICLA’s Executive Committee from 2010-2016 and Chair of the Early-Career committee (2016-2019).  She is currently the Rector of the Catholic University of Portugal (UCP).

He is currently co-editing Debates in Translation Studies, with Susan Bassnett (for Routledge), which seeks to build on and develop their work on what they have termed the ‘outward turn’ in translation as both theory and practice (in The Translator, 25, 2019). David is also a multi-award winning translator of plays for professional performance, and has produced work for, among others, the RSC, the Royal Court, the Washington Shakespeare Theatre, and the BBC. He is currently working on a volume of the complete plays of Lorca in English.

She works in Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies. She is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013). She has published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism, and Chinese storytelling.

She founded and co-edits Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature, is Editor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures and co-chairs the Editorial Committee of Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature. She was a judge for Man Booker International Prize for Fiction 2013-15 and for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Literary Translation Prize in 2017.

His work attempts to bring the lessons of classical and modern rhetoric to bear on several periods, languages, disciplines and cultures. Among his books is 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) and the edited collections Sinographies (2007), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2008), and Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010).

As a translator, he has produced versions of works by Li Zhi (A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep Hidden, co-edited, 2016), Jean Métellus (When the Pipirite Sings, 2019) and Tino Caspanello (Three Plays: Sea, Pictures from a Revolution, and 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. A collective blog he animates with several others is accessible at printculture.com. 

He is the winner of the 2007 Helsinki Prize of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). He was Friedrich Hölderlin Guest Professor at Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M., Germany (2017/18).

Since 2007, he has been the Founding President of the International Centre for Performance Studies (ICPS) in Tangiers, and convener of its annual international conferences. He was a member of IFTR Ex-Com (2011–2018); Head of Jury at the Arab Theatre Festival (6th Edition, Sharjah 2014).

Among his published books, feature Beyond Brecht (1996), Moroccan Theatre between East and West (2000), Fields of Silence in Moroccan Theatre (2004), and Dramatic Art and the Myth of Origins (2007). Amine is co-author with Distinguished Professor Marvin Carlson of The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb (2012); he is the co-editor of Performing Transformations (2012), The Art of Dialogue: East-West (2014), Intermediality, Performance and the Public Sphere (2014), Memory and Theatre (2015), and also editor of the Arab Journal of Performance Studies (AJPS).

Her publications include Chilean Theater, 1973-1985: Marginality, Power and Selfhood (1992), the translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Los empeños de una casa as House of Desires (2004), following a collaboration with Royal Shakespeare Company for their Spanish Golden Age Season, and, as co-editor with David Johnston, The Spanish Golden Age in English. Perspectives on Performance (2007).

She is Principal Investigator on the major Research Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council on Spanish and Spanish American Theatres in Translation. A Virtual Environment for Research and Practice, now commonly known as Out of the Wings and she runs the ‘Translating Cultural Extremity Project’, working with theatre practitioners interested in testing the possibilities of translating experiences that seem remote from ours.

 He has published and edited widely in the areas of contemporary writing, comparative literature, poststructuralist literary theory and posthumanism. He is General Co-Editor of CounterText: A Journal of the Post-Literary, launched with Edinburgh University Press in 2015, and a founding member of the Critical Posthumanism Research Network.

She was Professor of Indian Culture as Indian Council of Cultural Relations Chair at Georgetown University, Washington DC, in 2013-14.

Among her publications: Packaging Freedom: Feminism and Popular Culture (2003), Tracing the Charit as a Genre: An Exploration in Comparative Literature Methodology (2003), and Selfing the City: Single Women Migrants and Their Lives in Kolkata (2017) and, as co-editor, Locating Cultural Change: Theory, Method, Process (2011) and Shaping the Discourse: Women’s Writings in Bengali Periodicals: 1865–1947 (2014). She translates between Hindi, Bangla, Urdu and English.

He held the Jean Monnet Chair "The Culture of European Integration" between 2012 and 2015, and Honorary Chair Professor at Sichuan University, China. His teaching and research focus upon the theory of comparative literature, European literature, translation, cosmopolitanism and world literature.

She specializes in the theories of fiction (characters, possible worlds, the relationship between fact and fiction), narratives and the memory of disasters. Among her main publications: Arcadies malheureuses, aux origines du roman moderne (1997), La Syrinx au bûcher, Pan et les satyres à la renaissance et à l'âge baroque (2005), Pestes, Incendies naufrages, Ecritures du désastre au XVIIe siècle (2010), Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (2016, Italian translation 2020); and, as editor, Usages et théories de la fiction, la théorie contemporaine à l'épreuve des textes anciens (2004), La théorie littéraire des mondes possibles (2010),  Interpretation littéraire et sciences cognitives (2016).

Her most recent book is Les Personnages rêvent aussi (2020). She was president of the French Society of General and Comparative Literature (2013-2014) and since 2018 has been director of the International Society for Research on Fiction and Fictionality.

He serves as executive director of Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics (CAAP), and standing director of China Association for the Study of American Literature. His academic research is focused mainly on English poetry, African American Literature, comparative literature, and literary translation study. He has published over 80 articles in these fields and over 10 books such as A Survey of English Poetry (2002, 2005), The Interplay between Art and Politics: On Langston Hughes’s Poetry (2010) and LANGUAGE Poetics (2013). His forthcoming monographs include Ideolectical Writing: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry and A History of the 20th-century African American Poetry.

Other credits include Our Town (Regents Open Air) and The Wolves (Stratford East); Othello (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe); the Lyric’s annual pantomime – Aladdin (2016) and Cinderella (2015); The Rolling Stone (Orange Tree Theatre and Manchester Royal Exchange); The Remains of Maisie Duggan (Abbey Theatre, Dublin); The Glass Menagerie (Headlong); Anna Karenina (Manchester Royal Exchange); Henry the Fifth (Unicorn Theatre); Glitterland (Secret Theatre/Lyric Hammersmith) and Ivan and the Dogs (Actors Touring Company/Soho Theatre) – nominated for an Olivier Award. Ellen was formerly part of the Secret Theatre Company at the Lyric Hammersmith. She trained as an assistant to Katie Mitchell and Marianne Elliott. She was awarded an International Artists’ Development Award (ACE/British Council) in 2012.

She is a Reader in Dance and Performance Cultures and Associate Dean in Equality and Diversity at Brunel University London, and her scholarship examines intersectionalities between bodies, race, gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, decoloniality and anti-coloniality in performance.

Her current book project titled Unmaking Contact is an anti-racist, anti-casteist and anti-colonial interrogation of contact improvisation and partnering, towards intersectional theorising of choreographic touch through its analyses in transnational South Asian choreographic practices.

She is also Associate Professor Serra Húnter at the Area of ​​Arab and Islamic Studies. Her research interests focus on contemporary Arabic literature, gender studies and the social history of science and medicine. She has examined the construction of new identities in Spain through literature written by writers of Maghreb origin and through orientalism in film. Moreover, she has studied popular al-Andalus astronomy and North Africa and the role of science in al-Andalus.

She has published numerous articles in scientific journals, books and has given numerous guest lectures. She has been the president of the Societat Catalana d'Història de la Ciència (SCHCT), secretary of the Spanish Society of Arab Studies (SEEA), coordinator of the Master's Degree in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities and director of the Arab and Islamic World Master's Degree, both at the University of Barcelona.

She has explored fairy tales, women's roles and the influence of the 1001 Nights in several books, including From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011; winner of the National Book Critics Circle award, the Sheykh Zayed Prize and the Truman Capote award). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

She was elected to the British Academy in 2005, and became President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities, and in 2017 she was given a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and a British Academy Medal. Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction and Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists were published in 2018. In 2016, she began the project Stories in Transit in Palermo, Sicily. She is currently researching the historical concept of Sanctuary, in relation to the dislocations of people today. Her account of her parents’ lives in Cairo after the war, Inventory of a Life Mislaid, will be published in March 2021. (Photo credit: Dan Welldon)

Her current work contributes to the strand of research in Translation Studies that explores the connections between migrant cultural studies, translation, and intercultural studies. She has long-standing research interests in women’s writing, Italian contemporary literature and transcultural narrative practices. Most recently, she has published on identity and culture in migratory contexts, on practices of self-translation and on narratives of mobility and place-making. Recent co-edited volumes include a Special Issue of Modern Italy, ‘Transcultural Exchanges and Encounters in Italy’ (vol. 25.2) and Translating Worlds. Migration, Memory, and Culture (Routledge).