This hybrid International Symposium brings together a range of international academic voices conducting research in the fields of transcultural dialogues and border-crossings in the context of contemporary American Studies.
It seeks to promote dialogue across literary and cultural spaces through a transcultural perspective that explores the claims of culture, individuality, mental health, citizenship and belonging.
Date
12 April 2024
Format
Hybrid
Onsite Venue
AUTh Central Library Amphitheatre
Online Venue
The ZOOM platform
Speakers
Dorothy Chansky
Dorothy Chansky is Emerita Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University. Her other books include Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre (2015) and Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (2004). She is a past president of the American Theatre and Drama Society, a past editor of Theatre Annual, and a past Book Review Editor of Theatre Journal. In 2024, she is teaching American drama at the University of Łódź (Poland) on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Cynthia J. Davis
Cynthia J. Davis earned her doctorate from Duke University and is a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She is currently serving as a Fulbright U.S. Research Scholar in Germany. Stanford University Press published her first two single-authored books; her most recent monograph, Pain and the Aesthetics of U.S. Literary Realism, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2022. Her talk draws on the Edith Wharton chapter from that book as well as from a forthcoming 2024 article, “‘Alive in Every Fibre’: Chopin and Wharton on Pain, Pleasure, and Private Feeling,” featured in the journal American Literature in a special issue on “Pain.”
Smaro Kamboureli
Smaro Kamboureli is the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. The author of On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long poem and of Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism, she has edited and co-edited many volumes, including Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves: Oratories. As Canada Research Chair Tier 1 at the University of Guelph (2005-13), she founded and directed TransCanada Institute; its collaborative agenda resulted in seven scholarly volumes that she has co-edited, including Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (with Robert Zacharias), Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies (with Christl Verduyn), and the more recent one, Land / Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures (with Larissa Lai). Her most recent publications include “Diaspora” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature and a bilingual English / Italian edition, in seconda persona, of her 1985 poetry book, in the second person.
Alejandro Morales
Alejandro Morales, the son of Mexican immigrants, earned his B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and a M. A. and P.h. D. from Rutgers University, Morales is a professor in the Department of Chicano Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Writing in Spanish and English over a span of 50 years he has more than a dozen books, including The Brick People, The Rag Doll Plagues, Caras viejas y vino nuevo/Old Faces And New Wine, recognized as classics in Chicano/Latino literature. His most recent novel is The Place of the White Heron released in 2023. Currently he is working on A Rainbow of Colors a novel about his in-laws who worked for United States oil companies and lived in Japan from 1920 to 1941.
Magdalena Paluszkiewicz-Misiaczek
Magdalena Paluszkiewicz-Misiaczek – associate professor working at the Chair of Canadian Studies at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora of the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. Her main areas of interest are connected with social history of Canada and the USA and include the following: history of women with a particular emphasis on women’s organizations as well as social and charitable work; Indigenous Peoples – the forms and manifestations of their self-government; veterans of peacekeeping and peacemaking missions and changing approach to psychological consequences of war and intergenerational trauma transmission.
Art Redding
Art Redding is Professor of English at York University in Toronto. He has published monographs and essays on such topics as contemporary Gothic fiction, the Cold War, and American radicalism and anarchist thought. His most recent book is Pulp Virilities and Postwar American Culture and he is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War.
Theodora Tsimpouki
Theodora Tsimpouki is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. For her graduate and postgraduate studies, she was funded by the Board of Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y) and the Fulbright Foundation, respectively. She specializes in American realism, modernism and contemporary literature, the 1960s, theories of space and contemporary literary theory. She has co-edited a number of edited volumes, the most recent of which are American Studies after Postmodernism (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2023) and The War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (2017). Her research interests are in American Literature, Postmodern Fiction, urban literature and Transculturalism. Her articles have also appeared as scholarly volumes and journals. She is also one of the chief editors of Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Literature, Culture, and Media. She was the Book Reviews editor of the European Journal of American Studies from 2001 to 2021. She is currently president of the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS).
Department of American Literature and Culture
School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
