Notes on contributors
Heike Bartel is Professor of Health Humanities and German Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research background is in literary and gender studies. She is working at the interface of literature, art and health and leads interdisciplinary projects with individuals affected by mental health problems, clinicians, artists, and arts and humanities scholars. She is Nottingham’s lead for the ‘Lived Experience Workstream’ of the EDIFY consortium (Eating disorders: Delineating illness and recovery trajectories to inform personalised prevention and early intervention in young people; MR/W002418/1).
Emma Bond is Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the legacies of colonialism and empire in visual and material cultures. Recent publications include Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery (2022) and Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature (2024). She is Project Lead on the UKRI-funded project ‘Reassessing (Hi)stories of Early Italian Colonialism: The Afterlives of Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti’s African Collections in Italy and Beyond’ (2025–8).
Sarah Bowden is Professor of German and Medieval Studies at King’s College London, where she is also Head of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She is the author of Bridal-Quest Epics: A Revisionary Approach (2012) and Writing Sin in the German Lands, 1050–1215: Confession, Penance, and Textuality (2025).
Charles Burdett is Professor of Italian and Director of the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (School of Advanced Study (SAS), University of London). The principal areas of his research are literary culture under Fascism; travel writing; the Italian colonial presence in Libya and East Africa and its legacies; theories of inter-cultural contact; and the representation of Islam and the Islamic world in recent Italian literature and culture. He was the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) large grant, ‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity, and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures’ (2014–18).
Joseph Ford is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS), based in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where he specialises in contemporary French and Francophone Literature and Culture, with specific interests in North Africa. He has written on theories and discourses of world and comparative literature in relation to the wider Francosphere, on memory and responsibility in Europe, and on multilingualism and education in the UK. Together with Emanuelle Santos, he is the co-convenor of the Decolonising Languages Network.
Abir Hamdar is Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University and a practising playwright. She works on the medical humanities, cultural disability studies and cultural representations of death. Her publications include The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature (2014) and the co-edited volume Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World (2015).
Reham Hosny is Professor of Digital Literary and Cultural Criticism at Minia University and a Gates Scholar at Cambridge Digital Humanities. She is a member of King’s College, Cambridge, and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Her research, supported by the British Academy and the Gates Cambridge Trust, among others, examines how AI and digital technologies reshape cultural expression, power relations and knowledge production, with a particular focus on Global South contexts.
Anja Rekeszus completed her PhD at King’s College London, working with Ben Schofield and Catherine Smale. With a background in Romanticism and transnational fairy tales, her recent research has taken her in new directions, such as her participatory research project ‘Re-telling the Urban Fox’, which she undertook as an Inclusion, Participation and Engagement Fellow at SAS. She is especially interested in how storytelling in the broadest sense acts as an interface between humans and the more-than-human environment, in particular, how we view and identify with landscapes and animals. Anja is currently a Departmental Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford.
Emanuelle Santos is Associate Professor in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the intersections between the cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world, postcolonial studies and theories of world literature, drawing attention to the global–local dialectics in epistemology and literary and critical theory. She is the author of The Late Postcolonial Condition: Twenty-first-century Reconfigurations in the Literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa (2025). Her work also addresses representations of race, gender and sexuality, memory studies, world-systems theory and decolonial critique, especially with regards to structures of inequality, oppression and hegemony.
Rachel Scott is Associate Professor in World and Hispanic Literatures at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in medieval and early modern Iberian literatures. Her research explores cross-cultural exchange and translation, focusing recently on the European reception of fables from the Arabo-Islamic world. Her publications include Celestina and the Human Condition in Early Modern Spain and Italy (Tamesis, 2017) and Al-Andalus in Motion: Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Contexts (Boydell & Brewer, 2021).
Nicola Thomas is Lecturer in German Studies at Lancaster University. Her research explores cultural ways of knowing space, time and the environment across languages. Her first monograph, Space, Place and Poetry in English and German, 1960–1975 (Palgrave, 2018), looked at engagements with place and landscape in the work of a range of writers working in the twentieth century. She is currently co-leading, with Dr Blake Ewing, a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers interdisciplinary research project on ‘Wetland Times’, comparing time, language and concepts across three global wetland landscapes.
Carol Tully is Professor Emerita of German at Bangor University. She studied German and Spanish at Strathclyde and completed her doctorate at Queen Mary London. She has since established an international reputation as a scholar in the area of European cultural exchange in the nineteenth century with a primary focus on Germany and Spain, and was the principal investigator on the AHRC-funded projects ‘European Travellers to Wales 1750–2010’ (http://etw.bangor.ac.uk) and ‘Travellers to Wales’ (http://footsteps.bangor.ac.uk).
Godela Weiss-Sussex is Emerita Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies at SAS, University of London, Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing and Emeritus Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. Her main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the following areas: women’s writing, the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile, multi- and translingualism and postmigrant imaginaries of belonging.
Naomi Wells is Senior Lecturer in Italian and Spanish with Digital Humanities at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies and the Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her recent research focuses on multilingualism on the internet and social media, and sits at the intersection of digital humanities, sociolinguistics, migration studies, and translation and cultural studies. She has a wider interest in supporting cross-languages digital research in her role as joint editor of the Digital Modern Languages section of the Modern Languages Open journal.