Dr. Florian Kläger is Assistant Professor at the English Department of Münster University. Having studied at the Universities of Mainz and Galway, he completed his PhD at the University of Düsseldorf. His thesis appeared as Forgone Nations. Constructions of English National Identity in Elizabethan Historiography and Literature: Stanihurst, Spenser, Shakespeare in 2006. He has also published on literary constructions of home, the Elizabethan discourse on Ireland, and aspects of genre, postcoloniality, and intertextuality in the contemporary novel, and is currently working on his post-doctoral thesis.
Annika Merk M.A. studied at the Universities of Dublin (UCD) and Münster, where she received her M.A. in English Philology, Modern History and Public Law in 2008. She is currently a research assistant and lecturer at the English Department of Münster University, teaching British and Irish literature and culture. She is working on her PhD thesis on the contemporary dramatic monologue in Britain and Ireland.
Prof. Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer is Professor of English at the University of Münster. He studied English language and literature and theology at the Universities of Regensburg and Oxford. In 1993 he received his PhD at the University of Oxford. He moved on to teach at the University of Würzburg before taking up a Professorship of English at the University of Düsseldorf. In 2004, he then accepted the Chair of British Studies at Münster University. He is the author of John Oxenford (1812-1877) As Farceur and Critic of Comedy (1996) and Konstruktion Literarischer Vergangenheit: Die Englische Literaturgeschichte Von Warton bis Courthope und Ward (2001) and has published widely on his research areas fundamentalism, Canadian literature, empire writing, law and literature and constructions of home. Furthermore, he is editor of the journal Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics and is series editor of Women Writing Home 1700-1920: Female Correspondences Across the British Empire.
Dr. Silke Stroh studied at the Universities of Aberdeen and Frankfurt, where she completed her PhD thesis “(Post)Colonial Scotland? Literature, Gaelicness and the Nation” in 2005. Having taught at the universities of Frankfurt and Giessen, she is currently an Assistant Professor at the English Department of Münster University. She teaches British and postcolonial literature and culture, and is working on a post-doctoral research monograph (Habilitationsschrift) on diasporic identities in British colonial settler cultures. She is the author of Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry and co-editor of Hybrid Cultures, Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World (both forthcoming, Rodopi 2010). She has also published on anglophone Scottish, Asian British, African and Canadian literature and culture; as well as on the teaching of diasporic literature and transcultural competence in EFL (English as a foreign language) classes.
University of Northampton
Andrew Pilkington is Professor of Sociology at The University of Northampton. He is currently Associate Director of the Centre for Children and Youth and Director of the Equality and Diversity Research Group. He has written extensively in the field of the sociology and is regularly invited to give presentations of his work across the world. Recently, he has given keynotes and other talks in Greece, Jamaica, Singapore, Spain, Turkey, New Zealand and Australia. His research has especially focused on issues relating to race and ethnicity, and he has published widely in this area, including Racial Disadvantage and Ethnic Diversity in Britain (Palgrave, 2003) and, with Shirin Housee and Kevin Hylton, an edited collection, Race(ing) Forward: Transitions in Theorising Race in Education (C-SAP, 2009).
IN addition, Professor Pilkington has a keen interest in pedagogic issues. He has taught Sociology both in schools and universities and is co-author of a popular textbook, Sociology in Focus (Pearson, 2009). He has been an Associate of the Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics, is Vice President of the Association of Teachers of Social Sciences and is particularly interested in exploring different pedagogies in addressing equality and diversity issues, especially in relation to the police.
Professor Pilkington is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is also a member of the editorial board of Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences (ELiSS) and Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World.
David Waller is Lecturer in American History and Politics at the University of Northampton. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford (B.A. in Ancient & Modern History), the Institute of U.S. Studies, University of London (M.A. in Area Studies), the University of California at Berkeley and the London School of Economics. He has served as chairman of the steering committee of the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences at the LSE and as a member of the Council and National Executive of The Historical Association. His research interests include Anglo-American relations in both the 19th and 20th centuries and he currently serves on the editorial committee of the International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research.
Janet Wilson is the Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies in the School of the Arts at the University of Northampton, UK, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Fiction and Narrative (CCFN) in the School of Arts. A New Zealander, she formerly taught at the University of Otago. She has research interests in white settler societies, in postcolonial and diasporic writing, in the literature and cinema of New Zealand and Australia, and in religious fundamentalism. She has recently published the co-edited collection, Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Essays for the New Millennium (2010), and Fleur Adcock (2007) a study of the work of the New Zealand- born, UK-based New Zealand poet, Fleur Adcock, and an edition of stories by the New Zealander and editor of the Clarendon Press, Oxford, Dan Davin, The Gorse Blooms Pale: The Southland Stories of Dan Davin. Two volumes of co-edited essays on the works of Katherine Mansfield are currently in press, and her introduction to a new edition of short stories by New Zealand writer Frank Sargeson was published in September 2010.
Professor Wilson was Research Fellow and is now Associate Research Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford. From October 2010 to April 2011, she is Research Fellow in New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and currently Chair of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS). She is also on the editorial advisory boards of Kunapipi, Studies in Australasian Cinema,. Hecate, Journal of New Zealand Literature, and British Review of New Zealand Studies.
Anna Maria Everding has been studying at the Universities of Northampton and Muenster, where she received her BA in 2008 (German and English literary and cultural studies) and MA (National and Transnational Studies) in 2010. Her MA thesis is entitled “British South Asian Film and the Construction of Home and Belonging” and she is currently working on her PhD thesis at the University of Northampton on Postcolonial Cinema with special focus on Hindi Cinema and British South Asian Cinema.
University of the Fraser Valley
Satwinder Bains is the director of the Centre for Indo Canadian Studies at UFV and teaches with the School of Social Work and Human Services. She is a long-time advocate of cross-cultural education and has been a diversity educator, community developer, and community activist in the areas of women’s rights, youth empowerment and immigrant settlement integration. Satwinder is an avid participant in community affairs both at the civic and provincial level. She has served on numerous committees locally and nationally. Her research interests include cross-cultural education curriculum implementation; heritage language curriculum implementation; immigration and integration; social and community development for immigrant women, youth and seniors; women’s rights and cultural politics; diaspora; and Sikhism and the politics of identity.
Dr. Susan Fisher has been teaching with the English department at UFV since 2000. After working for several years as an editor and broadcaster, she decided in the late 1980s to switch careers and become a college teacher, beginning her re-education by studying Japanese language and literature. She then entered the Comparative Literature program at the University of British Columbia, where she earned her MA (1994) and Phd (1997). Dr. Fisher was awarded a Killam fellowship and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council fellowship for her doctoral studies. her dissertation examined the works of the Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki and the Anglo-American writer Russell Hoban. During the 1990s, she taught in the English department at UBC and for the UBC Writing Centre and the Open Learning Agency. In 1998, she received a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
Dr. Nicola Mooney earned her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Toronto. Her book Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams: Identity and Modernity among Jat Sikhs (University of Toronto Press, in press) broadly concerns ethnicity, urbanization, migration, and the notion of what it is to be modern among Jat Sikhs, a community of Punjabi farmers now often living urban and transnational lives, as well as the impacts of these practices and processes on formations of class, gender, religion, memory, and identity amid the transitions from rural to urban and transnational life. She also works on Punjabi popular, public, and performance cultures, and the representation of Punjab and Sikhs in cinema and other media. Her ongoing work on is based on 18 months of doctoral fieldwork in northwestern India, and over a decade’s participation in transnational Sikh communities in Canada. She has taught at Trent and Wilfrid Laurier universities, the University of Toronto, and Mount Allison University, where she remains adjunct professor. She now teaches in the department of Social, Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley, where she is Senior Associate of the Centre for Indo-Canadian Studies; she also heads UFV's Diaspora Studies Certificate. Dr. Mooney’s personal page can be found at: http://www.ufv.ca/scms/Faculty_and_Staff/Faculty__Members/Dr__Nicola_Mooney.htm
Rita Dhamoon (MA; PhD, UBC) works in the area of modern and contemporary political theory. Her primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of critical social and political thought including identity/difference politics, multiculturalism, culture, feminist and gender theory, critical race studies, post-colonial and anti-colonial thought, liberalism and its critics, and democratic theory. Before joining the University of the Fraser Valley, Rita held a Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta (2005-07), and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria (2007-08). She has worked with and for a number of anti-racist and feminist organizations and networks in Canada and the UK.
York University
Shobna Nijhawan is Assistant Professor in Hindi at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University, Toronto. She studied Indian philology at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and completed her PhD in South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her forthcoming monograph Nationalism, Creativity, and the Hindi Public Sphere provides a detailed study of the first Hindi women’s periodicals edited by women in the United Provinces and investigates how topics such as domesticity, the political and social emancipation of women, and Hindi language politics fed into the nationalist discourse of the early twentieth century. She has also published on the role of Hindi children’s periodicals in the establishment of an Indian pedagogical science of childrearing (1910-1930) and edited an anthology titled Nationalism in the Vernacular. Hindi, Urdu and the Literature of Indian Freedom (Permanent Black, 2010). Currently, she is investigating women writers networking across borders in early twentieth-century South Asia.
Dr. Michael Nijhawan is an Associate Professor in Sociology at York University. His research interests are interdisciplinary, combining methodologies and theories drawn from social and cultural anthropology, history, sociology, cultural studies and the study of religion. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research on Sikh religious formations in Punjab, India and Europe. The Punjab work is published in his Dhadi Darbar. Religion, Violence, and the Performance of Sikh History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). He has also co-edited Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia (London & New York: Routledge, 2009). Dr. Nijhawan’s most recent project is titled Predicaments of a “Post-Conflict” Generation: A Comparative Study of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Diaspora Formations in Canada and Germany (SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2010-13). He has also communicated his research to the wider community by means of documentary filmmaking. His first documentary premiered at the 2009 Toronto Spinning Wheel Film Festival; it is called Musafer – Sikhi is Travelling.
Andrew Pilkington is Professor of Sociology at The University of Northampton. He is currently Associate Director of the Centre for Children and Youth and Director of the Equality and Diversity Research Group. He has written extensively in the field of the sociology and is regularly invited to give presentations of his work across the world. Recently, he has given keynotes and other talks in Greece, Jamaica, Singapore, Spain, Turkey, New Zealand and Australia. His research has especially focused on issues relating to race and ethnicity, and he has published widely in this area, including Racial Disadvantage and Ethnic Diversity in Britain (Palgrave, 2003) and, with Shirin Housee and Kevin Hylton, an edited collection, Race(ing) Forward: Transitions in Theorising Race in Education (C-SAP, 2009).