Kirsti Bohata
Kirsti Bohata is Professor of English Literature and co-Director of CREW, the Centre for Research into the English Language and Literature, at Swansea University. Her books include Postcolonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English (2004), Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880-1948 (2020) and Queer Square Mile: Queer Short Stories from Wales which is a co-edited anthology to be published by Parthian in October 2021.
Phoebe Braithwaite
Phoebe Braithwaite, Harvard University.
Jon Gower
Jon Gower is a prize-winning author with over thirty books to his name. These include The Story of Wales, which accompanied the landmark BBC TV series and Y Storïwr, which won the Wales Book of the Year. His volume An Island Called Smith, about a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay was awarded the John Morgan Travel Writing Prize. Recent publications include studies of the radical film-maker Karl Francis and the visual artist John Selway as well as Gwalia Patagonia, being an account of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia and Wales: At Water’s Edge about the country’s coastal path. Jon has also published five novels and five collections of short stories. He was an inaugural Hay Festival International Fellow and has been awarded an Arts Council of Wales Prize, a Creative Wales award and won both The National Eisteddfod Short Story Prize and the Allen Raine Short Story Competition.
Rhian E. Jones
Rhian E. Jones is a writer, critic and broadcaster from South Wales who now lives and works in London and writes on history, politics, popular culture and the places where they intersect. She is co-editor of Red Pepper and writes for Tribune magazine. Her books include Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender (zer0, 2013); Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest (University of Wales Press, 2015); Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible (Repeater, 2017), the anthology of women's music writing Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them (Repeater, 2017), and Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater, 2021).
Marega Palser
Marega Palser is a performance based artist living in Newport, South Wales. She originally studied at the London School of Contemporary Dance, and after graduating in 1985 went on to work with various theatre companies, as well as being a founder member of the dance theatre group Paradox Shuffle who were based in Cardiff. Since 2001 she has worked with Gareth Clark as one half of the performance duo Mr & Mrs Clark.
She has collaborated with many artists and musicians and has performed and made work for Gallery spaces and for outdoor events both in this country and abroad. In 1994 she went to Japan to study and work with Butoh dancer Tetsuro Fukuhara.
In 2008 she completed a BA Honours in Fine Art at Howard Gardens (UWIC) in Cardiff, and a year later received a Creative Wales Award to develop her art and performance practice.
Harald Pittel
Harald Pittel is a post-doctoral Lecturer at the University of Potsdam and has been a visiting scholar at Delhi University (2018–19). His PhD thesis was titled ‘Romance and Irony – Oscar Wilde and the Political’. His areas of interest include political affect studies, comparative film studies, genre theories and materialist theories of culture. His second book (in progress)
explores how the crises of the present might affect a new understanding of world literature.
Julian Preece
Julian Preece, who is Professor of German at Swansea, heard Raymond Williams lecture at a postgraduate conference in Oxford in 1986. He has been interested in Elias Canetti for some thirty years and recently completed an entry on the international reception of his work for a 'Handbuch' on Elias and Veza Canetti, which will appear with the Metzler Verlag next year.
Aled Singleton
Aled is interested in psychogeography, walking, and using creative ways to explore emotional attachments to place. He has a professional background managing community and urban regeneration projects (2006-18) including community asset transfers, landscape architecture, events, and local economic development. Aled is now starting an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in human geography at Swansea University, focusing on the post-war environment: a time of industrial renewal, increased private motor vehicles and semi-detached suburban living.
WERNER SOLLORS
WERNER SOLLORS received the Dr. phil. degree from the Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones and taught there, at Columbia University, at the Universitá degli Studi di Venezia, and for more than three decades at Harvard University, where he is now Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English, Emeritus. Coeditor, with Greil Marcus, of A New Literary History of America, he is the author of Beyond Ethnicity, Neither Black nor White yet Both, Ethnic Modernism, The Temptation of Despair, African American Writing, Challenges of Diversity, and, most recently, Schrift in bildender Kunst. Among his edited books are The Return of Thematic Criticism, Multilingual America, and An Anthology of Interracial Literature. With Alide Cagidemetrio he is at work on Face to Face with Antiquity, a book about visitors to ancient sites around the world.
