Note on Contributors
Krzysztof Majer
is assistant professor at the Department of North American Literature and Culture, the University of Łódź, Poland; his academic interests include Canadian fiction, Jewish culture and intermediality. Among others, he has written on Mordecai Richler (e.g. a contribution to the Richler issue of Canadian Literature), Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Steven Millhauser, Thomas Bernhard and M. A. Jarman. He has co-edited Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes (Brill, 2018, with Norman Ravvin, Justyna Fruzińska, and Józef Kwaterko) and Tools of Their Tools: Communications Technologies and American Cultural Practice (CSP, 2008, with Grzegorz Kość). Since 2014, he has collaborated with Canadian Literature as reviewer of criticism and fiction. As a translator into Polish and English, he was twice awarded the Literatura na Świecie prize, as well as the 2nd Prize in BCLT/BCLA’s John Dryden Translation Competition; he was also nominated for the Boy-Żeleński Translation Work Award and the Gdynia Literary Prize. With writers Rawi Hage and Madeleine Thien he was awarded residence at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Among others, he has translated Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, Allen Ginsberg’s letters, the Kerouac / Ginsberg correspondence, his own selection of Bill Gaston’s short stories (Bogowie pokazują klaty, with Kaja Gucio), a 100-page excerpt from Rawi Hage’s Cockroach as well as shorter works by Madeleine Thien, Herman Melville, Chinua Achebe, Steven Millhauser, D. J. Enright and John Gould. For the research purposes of Goldie Morgentaler, he also translated some hundred Polish letters exchanged by writers Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson. He is a member of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies and of the Polish Literary Translators’ Association.
Madeleine Thien
was born in Vancouver. She is the author of four books, including Dogs at the Perimeter, Certainty, and a story collection, Simple Recipes. Her most recent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize; and won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages and her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Brick, frieze, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal and is a Professor of English at Brooklyn College.
F. Elizabeth Dahab
is Professor of Comparative Literature at California State University, Long Beach. She has given numerous talks and published a number of research articles in her fields of specialization, including exilic Canadian/Québécois literature. She has also translated into English Yves Chevrel’s study entitled Comparative Literature Today: Methods and Perspectives. In addition, she published the first monograph devoted to Francophone exilic writing of Middle Eastern origins in Canada, Voices of Exile in Contemporary Francophone Canadian Literature (2011). Her edited anthology, Voices in the Desert: An Anthology of Arabic-Canadian Women Writers (2002), appeared in Toronto. F. Elizabeth Dahab earned her Bachelor of Arts from McGill University (Montréal) and her Master’s from the University of Alberta (Canada). She received her doctorat de littérature comparée in Comparative Literature from the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne.
André Forget
is a literary critic, independent scholar, and former editor-in-chief of the Toronto-based literary magazine The Puritan. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Literary Review of Canada, and Quill & Quire, and he is a contributing editor at Canadian Notes and Queries. He holds an M.A. in English Literature from Dalhousie University, with a specialization in Canadian literature and refugee studies.
Kyle Gamble
is a Ph.D. candidate working on contemporary Arabic and diasporic literature and culture at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Kyle holds a B.Soc.Sc. in International Studies and Modern Languages as well as an M.A. in World Literatures and Cultures, both from the University of Ottawa. His areas of interests include Levantine literature and art, the history of the modern Middle East, and theories of exile and diaspora. Kyle’s research has focused on the claustrophobic apartment space and other figures of dilemma within novelistic representations of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Kyle is a recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for his doctoral studies.
Syrine Hout
is Chair of the Department of English and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. Her publications include Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Viewing Europe from the Outside: Cultural Encounters and Critiques in the Eighteenth-Century Pseudo-Oriental Travelogue and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Voyage en Orient’ (Peter Lang, 1997); chapters in Politics, Culture and the Lebanese Diaspora; Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature; Literature and Nation in the Middle East; Nadia Tuéni – Lebanon: Poems of Love and War, and Christian Encounters with the Other, in addition to numerous articles in international journals. She is currently working on a monograph on multilingualism, particularly on code-switching, in Anglophone Lebanese fiction.
Ewa Macura-Nnamdi
is assistant professor at the Institute of Romance Languages and Translation Studies (University of Silesia, Poland). She holds a doctorate in English literature (New Woman fiction of the late-Victorian period). Currently, her main research interests include postcolonial Anglophone literatures of Africa and African diaspora, postcolonial theories as well as refugees and migration in cinema and literature. She has published articles on, among others, Dambudzo Marechera, Rawi Hage, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Omar Khadr. Her recent publications include “Mouthwork” (ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature) and “Omar Khadr, Guantánamo and Carceral Gastronomy” (European Journal of English Studies).
Lisa Marchi
is currently adjunct professor at the University of Trento, Italy. Her research interests include contemporary Arab diasporic literature (both poetry and prose), migration, gender studies, ethics, and philosophy. She has conducted periods of research at UCLA (Dept. of Near Eastern Studies), McGill University (Institute for Islamic Studies), Free University in Berlin (JFK Institute) and Humboldt University (Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies). Lisa has collaborated with international research groups and has published articles in international journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Canadian Literature, and Humanities. She is now finalizing her first manuscript on the poetry of Arab women in the diaspora.
Judit Molnár
(dr. Univ. PhD, CSc., habil.) is Associate Professor at the North American Department, University of Debrecen, Hungary, where she is also the Director of the Canadian Studies Centre. She introduced Canadian studies at the University of Debrecen. She teaches courses on Canadian literature and culture as well as 19th century American literature and civilization of the USA. She has published a large number of articles on Canadian literature and edited two books related to Canadian studies. Her book entitled Narrating the Homeland: the Importance of Space and Place in Canadian Multicultural English-Language Fiction was published in 2013 (U of Debrecen). She has given a wide range of papers at numerous conferences in and outside Europe. Her main field of interest is minority literatures in Canada and English-language writing in Quebec.
Alex Ramon
is a British critic and academic currently based in Łódź, Poland. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Reading, UK, and is the author of the book Liminal Spaces: The Double Art of Carol Shields (CSP, 2008). His work on Shields has also been published in the edited collections Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo (eds. Aritha van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse, 2009) and The Worlds of Carol Shields (ed. David Staines, 2014). His most recent article, “Mordecai and Him: Relationality, Canadian-Jewish Identity and Yanofsky’s ‘Really, Really, Really Unauthorised’ Biography,” was published in Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture (eds. Majer, Fruzinska, Kwaterko, Ravvin; Brill, 2018). Ramon’s research interests include British and Canadian fiction and film, gender theory, and adaptation. He is currently working on a study of novel to film adaptations and a collection of critical pieces and interviews.
Rita Sakr
is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (Continuum, 2012 and Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and of ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies (Palgrave, 2013). She is co-editor of The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (Routledge, 2013) and James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (Rodopi, 2011); she is also the co-director and co-producer of White Flags (2014), a documentary on peacebuilding in Beirut. Recent and forthcoming publications focus on migrant and refugee experimental aesthetics as well as urban cultural studies. Her current book-length project is titled ‘Global Arab Literary Geographies’.
Dima Samaha
holds a Ph.D. from Aix-Marseille University (Aix-en-Provence, France) and Saint Joseph University (Beirut, Lebanon). Her research focuses on sociology of literature, identity, speech and memory in Lebanese immigrant narratives since the end of the civil war. Since 2009, Samaha has taught at the French Literature Department of Saint Joseph University and since 2017 at the Institute for Migration Studies as well as at the Department of English of the Lebanese American University (Beirut, Lebanon). Since 2018, she has been an affiliate researcher at the Institute of Migration Studies of the Lebanese American University. She is currently working on a book, forthcoming in 2020 from Éditions Classiques Garnier, devoted to works of fiction by Lebanese immigrant writers of the 1959-1969 generation, written and published after the Civil War outside of Lebanon, in both English and French. In it, she explores the narrative strategies, memory mechanisms, and the writing of history (individual and collective) as part of a process illustrating a permanent concern about identity, in the dual experience of war and emigration.
Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka
(PhD) is a graduate of Adam Mickiewicz University, Faculty of English, in Poznań, Poland. She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Philology, Department of Research on Language, Literature and Translation, State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, where she teaches courses on English, American and Canadian literature. For over ten years (2003-2014) she also lectured as an assistant professor at The Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Pedagogy, Adam Mickiewicz University, in Kalisz, Poland. Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka’s main fields of research are Canadian literary canon formation, postmodern auto/biography, Canadian women’s fiction, the western/the northern in Canadian literature, intertextuality in contemporary fiction in English, historiographic metafiction, transgression, and postmodern identities. She has published numerous essays as well as reviews, both in Poland and abroad, on Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Aritha van Herk, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Timothy Findley, Rawi Hage and other contemporary Canadian writers. Her most recent publication is “From Dora to the Moon: Inter/national Politics, Private Histories and National Haunting in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies” in Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture (Brill/Rodopi, 2018). She co-edited a volume of essays entitled Crossroads in Literature and Culture (Springer 2013) and with Anna Żurawska, the 9th volume of The Polish Association for Canadian Studies annual journal on interdisciplinary Canada-oriented research TransCanadiana: “Conflicts, Confrontations, Combats. Canada in the Face of Wars / Le Canada face aux guerres” (2017).