Our re-launch event will take place at English: Shared Futures on Saturday 9th July 2022 at 5pm on the Grosvenor 3rd Floor.

As part of the re-launch, we're thrilled to announce several new members of our Editorial Advisory Board, including Prof. Adeline Johns-Putra (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Prof. Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton University), Prof. Margaret Ronda (University of California, Davis), Dr Swati Arora (Queen Mary University of London), and Dr Rupsa Banerjee (St. Xavier's University, India). For a full list of editorial biographies, please see below.

The editorial team will announce a series of calls for special issue proposals this Autumn - watch this space!

Swati Arora is Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Her work engages with the intersections of performance and visual culture, feminist theory, and dramaturgies of urban space in the Global South. Her essays have been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Wasafiri, New Theatre Quarterly, South African Theatre Journal, Injury and Intimacy (MUP) and a manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies in Studies in Theatre and Performance. During 2011-13 and 2019-21, she co-convened the Performance in Public Spaces working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.  

Rupsa Banerjee is Assistant Professor of English at St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India. Here areas of research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century American and British poetry, comparative poetics, translation studies and plural literary modernities. She has co-edited the collection Rethinking Place Through Literary Form (Palgrave-Macmillan 2022), and has written on Modernist and late modern poets such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, J. H. Prynne and Peter Riley. Her most recent publications include a study of Kannada Dalit poetry (forthcoming from South Asian Review) and a scholarly engagement with the poetics of translation practice involved in translating J. H. Prynne’s poetry into Bengali (forthcoming from Kaurab). Her poems have been published by Lady Chaos Press (New York), Chaour (Kolkata), Earthbound Press (London), and Veer Press (London). Her poem “Turning Towards” was shortlisted for the The River Heron Review Poetry Prize (2019), and she was a semi-finalist for the Janet McCabe poetry prize, Ruminate Magazine (2021). She has translated the works of Hungry Generation poets of Bengal into English for a collected anthology on literature of the Bengal Partition, and her Bengali translations of J. H. Prynne’s poetry are forthcoming from Kaurab.

Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University in Belgium, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), a co-author of the New Critical Idiom volume Trauma (Routledge, 2020), and a co-editor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017). He has also (co-)edited special issues of journals including American Imago, Studies in the Novel, and Criticism on topics such as ecological grief, climate change fiction, and transcultural Holocaust memory.

Sarah Dillon is Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, UK. She specialises in contemporary literature and film, in particular the intersections of literature and science, and speculative fiction. Her work investigates the epistemic function and value of stories, and she is committed to demonstrating the value and importance of the academic humanities across sectors, including in higher education, government, and wider culture and society. She is the author of How to Study the Contemporary (in preparation), Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (2021), Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (2018) and The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), as well as many articles and book chapters on contemporary literature and film. She is editor of David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011), and co-editor of Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015) and AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (2020). She is General Editor of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays book series, and works regularly as an arts broadcaster for BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.

Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor of Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research interests include the relationship between climate and literature, particularly contemporary climate fiction and the current climate crisis in the context of cultural histories of climate. Her most recent monograph is Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (2019), and her edited books include The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate (with Kelly Sultzbach, 2022), Climate and Literature (2019), Cli-Fi: A Companion (with Axel Goodbody, 2018), and Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text, and Culture (with John Parham and Louise Squire, 2017). She was the President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) from 2011 to 2015.

Barry King is Professor of Communications at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. He is the author (with Sean Cubitt, Harriet Margolies and Thierry Jutel) of Studying the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings (Manchester University Press, 2008), Taking Fame to Market: Essays on the Prehistory and Post-history of Hollywood Stardom ( Palgrave, 2014), and Performing Identity: Actor Training, Self-Commodification and Celebrity (Palgrave in press). He is on the editorial board of Celebrity Studies, Persona Studies and Palgrave Communications and is a project reviewer for the Australian Research Council. King has published a substantial number of articles that explore the relationships been popular culture, celebrity and stardom and digital media. His other publications focus on creative labour, semiotic determinism, the sociology of acting and performance and the New Zealand Cultural industries. 

William McEvoy in Senior Lecturer in Drama and English and joint Head of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Sussex, UK. His work moves between literature and theatre, looking at gender, genre, identity and class in 20th-century and contemporary British, Irish and French theatre, fiction and performance. He is currently completing a monograph on grief and mourning and working on two edited collections on site-specific theatre and contemporary playwriting.

Martin Middeke is Professor and Chair of English Literature at the University of Augsburg and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published widely in the field of twentieth- and 21st-century anglophone literature and theatre and is (co-)editor of the Methuen Drama Guides to Contemporary Irish, British, and American Drama, and South African Playwrights (2011–2015); Of Precariousness: Vulnerabilities, Responsibilities, Communities in 21st-Century British Drama and Theatre (2017); Drama, Theatre and Philosophy (2018); and Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage (2021). His current projects include a Handbook of Theatre Philosophy, a project on Literary Materialisations: Making Matter Matter on Page and Stage (forthcoming with Routledge, 2023) and a website on theatre philosophy located at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is co-investigator in the research group Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona, and he is the founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. Since 2013, he is elected member of the Academia Europaea.

Kinohi Nishikawa is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (Chicago, 2018), as well as essays in PMLA, MELUS, American Literary History, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and other venues. His areas of expertise encompass Black print and popular culture, contemporary African American authors, book history, media theory, and publishing studies. Nishikawa is currently at work on a history of modern African American literature and book design.

Margaret Ronda is the author of a critical study on postwar poetry and global ecological crisis, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford University Press, Post*45 Series, 2018). Her critical essays have appeared in journals including PMLA, ALH, Post45, Genre, and English Language Notes, as well as in edited volumes such as Life in Plastic, Prismatic Ecology, Veer Ecology, and Writing Against Capital. Her public humanities writing has appeared in forums including Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. She is also the author of two poetry collections, For Hunger (Saturnalia Books, 2018) and Personification (2010), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Gulf Coast, Agni, VOLT, West Branch, and Columbia Poetry Journal. She teaches American poetry, environmental literature and theory, and creative writing at the University of California-Davis.

Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University. She has published widely on Gothic in literature, film, fashion and popular culture with an emphasis on the contemporary. Her seven books include Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, which was awarded the 2019 Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize by the International Gothic Association. Her most recent book, The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, co-edited with Dale Townshend, was published in September 2021. She is currently writing a book on the Gothic cultural history of the white dress.