Elizabeth (Liz) Mackinlay is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland where she teaches Research Methods, Gender Studies and Arts Education. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from The University of Adelaide and a PhD in education from the University of Queensland. Her book, Teaching and learning like a feminist: Storying our experiences in higher educationwas published by Sense Publishers in 2016 and together with Briony Lipton, co-authored the 2017 Palgrave publication, We only talk feminist here: Feminist academics, voice and agency in the neo-liberal university. Her most recent book, Critical writing for embodied approaches: Autoethnography, feminism and decoloniality was published by Palgrave in 2019. In 2007 she published her Education PhD as a book, Disturbances and dislocations: Teaching and learning Aboriginal women’s music and dancewith Peter Lang and has co-edited a number of books since then including Musical islands: Exploring connections between music, place and research (2009), Applied ethnomusicology: Historical and contemporary approaches (2010), The Routledge international handbook of intercultural arts (2015).

At ELS 2020, Liz will deliver a plenary talk on Teaching and learning like a feminist: storying our experiences in higher education.

Prof Balaji Ranganathan is the Chairperson of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the Central University of Gujarat.

His areas of specialization are Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, Orientalism, India and Political discourse, Psychoanalysis, Archaeology, and Ancient India, Indian Bronze sculptural studies, and Ancient Indian Numismatics.

At ELS 2020, Prof. Balaji will deliver a plenary talk on Reading War and the Literary Imagination.

Prof. David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. His nine books include What Is World Literature? (Princeton, 2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (Holt, 2007), How to Read World Literature (Blackwell, 2d. ed. 2017), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (Princeton, 2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (forthcoming from Penguin). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, and editor or co-editor of fifteen other books. He has given several hundred lectures in fifty countries around the world, and his work had been translated into an eclectic variety of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

At ELS 2020, Prof. Damrosch will deliver a keynote on World Literature in and through English.

Prof. Manikutty specialized in Business Policy and Strategy in his doctorate and teaching, graduating from IIMA in 1987. Before joining IIMA, he served in the Indian Railways as a mechanical engineer for 21 years. His areas of interest include strategic management and competitive strategy, leadership, global competitiveness of industries, corporate governance and strategies for family businesses. His paper (coauthored with another person) won the award for the best paper on family businesses for 2003 awarded by the Family Firm Institute, Boston, U.S.A. His paper (coauthored) also won an award for the best empirical paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Small Business Institute, Clearwater Beach, Florida, February 11-15, 2004. His book on leadership based on literature, Essentials of Leadership: Explorations from Literature (Delhi: Bloomsbury), co-authored with Sampath P Singh, won the award for the best management book awarded by the Indian Society for Training and Development, in 2010, and its second edition has been published by Bloomsbury India. His subsequent books are: Business Ethics: Ethics as the Foundation of Business and Strategic Management: A South Asian Perspective jointly with Michael Hitt, Robert Hoskisson and Duane Ireland.

Prof. Manikutty was a visiting scholar at the Cornell University in the year 2000. Has written a number of cases, mostly dealing with issues in strategy, and published 13 papers in national and international journals. He was a visiting faculty at ESSEC, France, where he taught a full course for four years before retirement.

He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He also served in the Board of Governors, Sardar Patel Institute for Textiles, Coimbatore from 2016 to 2018. Currently he is on the Board of Governors of the IILM Institute for Higher Education, New Delhi (from April 2018).

At ELS 2020, Prof. Manikutty will speak on Literature: What It Can Offer for Education Community

Prof. Manikutty figured in the Marquis Who’s Who in the World for the year 2012.

He retired from Indian Institute of Management, Ahhedabad on December 31, 2010 and was on a contractual appointment as a full time faculty in the Business Policy Area, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad till March 31, 2012. Now he is a visiting faculty at IIM, Ahmedabad and an adjuct faculty at IIM, Bangalore, teaching courses on understanding leadership through literature.

He was given the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the National Academy of Indian Railways, Vadodara for the year 2018.

Prof. Dr. Jagdish Batra, an academic, writer, and social activist is currently Professor of English at  O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonepat, India (ranked No. 1 Private University in India by QS World Rankings 2020, and declared ‘Institution of Eminence’ by the Govt. of India),  which he joined in 2012 as the Founding Head of English Language Centre. Prior to it, he worked as Principal, Hindu Institute of Competitions & Foreign Languages, Sonipat, and Head of PG Dept. of English in Hindu College, Sonipat.  He has more than 30 years of teaching experience and has guided 33 M.Phil. and 13 Ph.D. scholars. His areas of specialization include contemporary Indian English fiction, Culture Studies, and Literary Theory. He has presented papers as also presided at several international conferences in India, Europe, and South East Asia. He was recently presented the Research Excellence Award by the University. He is the Convener of six annual international literary conferences organized at Jindal Global. A former Rotary Group Study Exchange scholar to the USA, Dr. Batra has published eight books besides more than 50 research papers in leading journals. He is on the editorial boards of three literary journals including The Commonwealth Review and The Indo-American Review, and research panels of many universities. ORCID: 0000-0003-3261-4819.

At ELS 2020, Dr. Batra will deliver a talk on ’21st Century Indian English Fiction: Major Strands’.

Dr. Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prize-winning books and anthologies range from philosophy to the arts. His best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX online course have brought 4000 years of literature to students across the globe. His book The Written World featured on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, and has been translated into some twenty languages. He is a member of the European Academy and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and the Massachusetts Book Award.

His latest book, The Language of Thieves, interweaves family memoir with a reflection on Rotwelsch, the underground language of Central Europe, which he learned from his father and uncle.

At ELS 2020, Dr. Puchner will deliver a talk on Masterpieces of World Literature.

Dr.Mala Pandurang is Professor/Principal at Dr. BMN College of Home Science  (Autonomous). She is a   postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) and has been nominated as ‘Ambassador Scientist to India’  for 2019-2022. She has also availed of short research- grant visits to the Universities of  Osnabruck, Augsburg,  Frankfurt, Potsdam, and Chemnitz through the sponsorship of the AvH.

Her research grants include Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin; recipient of the Charles Wallace In-UK Research grant;  1 Major research grant and 3 Minor research grants from the University Grants Commission (New Delhi); Inlaks Fellowship in Social Sciences from the Asiatic Society (Mumbai);   Associateship at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla); and NET/JRF from the UGC.  Under her tenure,  Dr. BMN College has been selected as a UGC STRIDE Centre for Research Capacity Building ( 2020-2023). Her areas of research include postcolonial writing, diaspora theory, and gender studies.    

She has published 7 books and 43 research papers. In 2012 she received the SNDT Women’s University ‘Maharshi Karve Utkarshta Shikshak Puraskar’ (Best Teacher Award) from the Governor of Maharashtra.

At ELS 2020, Dr. Pandurang will talk on ‘On community, commuting and urban spaces – Literary representations of the Mumbai local trains‘.

Considered as among the heaviest passenger transit systems in the world,  the enforced lockdown due to the  COVID-19 pandemic has brought the load of the intricate suburban railway network of Mumbai down to a   minimum,  and yet reinforced the centrality of the trains to the lives of Mumbaikars.  My presentation will explore literary representations of the ‘local trains’  and use the same to link the centrality of the daily commute to the suburban culture of a city   ‘that never sleeps’’.

Veronica Alfano is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Victorian poetry and poetics, with particular interests in gender, genre, memory, and media studies. Her first book is titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman. With Andrew Stauffer, she is co-editor of the essay collection Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies; with Lee O’Brien, she edited the Summer 2019 special issue of Victorian Poetry. In 2018, her article “Technologies of Forgetting: Phonographs, Lyric Voice, and Rossetti’s Woodspurge” was awarded the Donald Gray Prize. She leads the Poetry Caucus of the North American Victorian Studies Association, and her current projects focus on Tennyson’s Maud, on Lear’s limericks, and on neologisms in the poetry of Hardy and Hopkins. 

At ELS 2020, Veronica will talk on The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Mnemonic Nostalgia in Rossetti and Housman.

Talk Abstract

Lyric poems, unlike the novels that dominate the Victorian literary scene, resist the teleological drive of plot and vainly pursue stasis and atemporality.  Brevity and patterns of formal repetition, which disrupt a poem’s capacity for depicting progressive action, also impress that poem on the reader’s memory.  Thus Victorian lyricists, whose verses often lament the elusive nature of remembrance, also tend to write highly mnemonic poems – and so to pursue permanence both by dwelling on vanished beauty and by asking to be recalled.  These desires are especially notable in the nineteenth century, because lyric is itself a site of cultural nostalgia in an age of realistic prose.  Christina Rossetti, using exaggerated lyricism and numbed retrospection to subvert the figure of the unambitious and over-sentimental Victorian “poetess,” presents memorable poems that undermine their speakers’ humble requests to be forgotten; in contrast, A. E. Housman – despite the nostalgic tone and formally mnemonic stanzas of A Shropshire Lad – tends to grant individual remembrance neither to the lads he commemorates nor to the poems in his iterative volume.  Through readings of Rossetti and Housman, I propose that lyric is the key to comprehending this era’s fascination with mourning and memorializing the past.  Victorian lyric’s navigation between the desire to recapture lost time and the reality of inevitable transience yields unstable forms of memory that are shot through with amnesia.  Poetic reminiscence thus echoes what Richard Terdiman calls the nineteenth-century “memory crisis” – that is, a secular and industrial era’s simultaneous dislocation from and longing for the past.

Asha Varadharajan (http://ashavaradharajan.org) is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University in Canada.  She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Her current research reconceptualizes the category of the refugee and the realm of “refugeedom.”  Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern in contemporaneity, violence against women and the discourse of human rights, decolonizing pedagogy, postcolonial temporalities, humanitarian intervention, and the legacy of The Frankfurt School.  The most fun she has had writing was while composing her entry on Eric Idle for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The most chuffed she has been lately was when her students nominated her for the W.J. Barnes Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

At ELS 2020, Dr. Varadharajan will deliver a talk on Making History Rhyme with Hope: Revisioning Race in and For Our Times.

Hsu-Ming Teo is a literary novelist and cultural historian based in the English Department at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her first novel Love and Vertigo (2000) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for several other awards. It has been translated into Chinese, Thai, German and Italian. Her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. She is working on her third novel.

Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), and the edited books The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020), The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (ASP 2017), and Cultural History in Australia (UNSW 2003). She has published a range of articles on the history of travel, Orientalism, imperialism, fiction, and popular culture. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and an editorial board member of the Journal of Australian Studies.

Writing Love and Vertigo

In this presentation, Hsu-Ming Teo will talk about her creative practice researching and writing her award-winning novel, focusing particularly on: characterization, narrative technique, and structure. She will then address thematic issues raised in the novel, such as romantic love, feminism, patriarchy, the stresses of immigration, Asian Australian identity, the changing meaning of multiculturalism, and the problematic issue of Orientalism and self-Orientalising gestures in the novel. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of the reception of the novel before opening up to questions from the audience.