Notes on Contributors
Peter Childs
is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English Literature at Newman University in Birmingham, England. The author or editor of nearly thirty books, he has specialised in the study of post-colonial and modernist writing as well as contemporary British literature and culture. He has published widely on literature post-1900 and on such writers as E. M. Forster, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and Paul Scott in particular. His long list of publications includes Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature (1999), Modernism and the Post-Colonial (2007), Modernism: New Critical Idiom (3rd edition 2016), Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches (2006), and Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels (2013, with James Green).
Britta Maria Colligs
is a PhD student and lecturer at the Department of English Studies at the University of Trier, with a specialisation in Ecocriticism and New Zealand Literature and Culture. Her research interests include dystopian fiction and fantasy literature, with a particular focus on the worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and G. R. R. Martin. She is currently working on her PhD thesis on ecocriticism in fantasy literature, in which she analyses the characterisation and importance of forests on various levels. An article on the loss of ancient forests in contemporary fantasy fiction, “The Loss of Ancient Forests: An Ecocritical Reading of T. A. Barron’s The Ancient One” was published in the Inklings Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik (year book) in 2020.
Sarah Dillon
is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar of contemporary literature, film, and philosophy in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (2018) and co-author (with Claire Craig) of Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (forthcoming). She has edited David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011), and co-edited Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015), ai Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (2020), and Imagining Derrida (2017), a special issue of Derrida Today. She is the general editor of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays book series, and also works regularly as an arts broadcaster for bbc Radio 3 and bbc Radio 4.
Paul Hamann-Rose
is a Research Associate at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. While pursuing an ongoing research focus on the history of literary engagements with genetics and proto-genetics, he is currently finalising a monograph on the genetic renegotiation of life itself in the contemporary novel. He recently participated in the interdisciplinary nih-funded research project GetPreCiSe on genetic privacy at Vanderbilt University, USA. His publications include an article on genetic privacy in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy in the Journal of Literature and Science (2019) as well as a chapter on ‘Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A. S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman’ in Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, edited by Julia Hoydis and Nina Engelhardt (2019).
Ralf Hertel
is Professor of English Literature at the University of Trier, Germany. His research interests include encounters between England and East Asia, contemporary Asian writing in English, early modern Englishness, and failure studies. He is author of Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (2005) and Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play (2014). He has co-edited Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Encounters (2008, with Manfred Pfister), Early Encounters with the Islamic East: Cultures at Play (2012, with Sabine Schülting and Sabine Lucia Müller), On John Berger: Telling Stories (2015, with David Malcolm), and Early Encounters Between East Asia and Europe: Telling Failures (2017, with Michael Keevak).
David Malcolm
is a professor of English at swps University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Prior to that he taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Gdańsk. He is author of books on Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and John McGahern and of The British and Irish Short Story Handbook (2012). He co-edited (with Cheryl Alexander Malcolm) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the British and Irish Short Story (2008) and (with Ralf Hertel) On John Berger: Telling Stories (2016). Currently, he is co-editing (with Wolfgang Görtschacher) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Poetry, 1960–2015 (forthcoming). His edition of Hubert Crackanthorpe’s Wreckage (1893) was published in 2019. A novel The German Messenger was published in 2016.
Diana Thiesen
has studied English Literature and Linguistics, French Literature, and Political Sciences at the University of Trier, Germany. Currently, she is doctoral researcher at the International Research Training Group ‘Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces’ (University of Trier and Saarland University; Université de Montréal). In her PhD thesis, she works on the negotiation of intersectionality in contemporary anglophone East Asian Canadian fiction. Besides, her research interests include postcolonialism, dystopian literature, Shakespearean comedies, and gothic fiction.
Eleanor Ty
is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and was Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2019. She has published on cultural memory, Asian North American and 18th Century British literature. Her book Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (2017), won the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award for Literature in the Adult Non-Fiction Category. She is author of Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (2010), The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (2004), Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (1998), and Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (1993). With Cynthia Sugars, she co-edited Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (2014); with Russell J. A. Kilbourn, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (2013).
Eva-Maria Windberger
is a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Trier and recently finished a PhD thesis investigating empowerment in the novels of David Mitchell. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary fiction, utopian and speculative fiction, philosophy in literature, and modernism. She has presented on a variety of topics relating to David Mitchell’s work in Lisbon, Maribor, Lincoln, St Andrews, and Trier; her peer-reviewed journal article on the function of islands in David Mitchell’s fiction, for which she won the publication prize awarded by the Graduate Center of Trier University, was published in C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings in 2018.