Participants

CROSSING BOUNDARIES:

RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES ACROSS DISCIPLINES

International Conference organized by

the Department of English and American Studies,

Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology,

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski

2-4 December 2022

Final Bio notes for Crossing Boundaries Conference (in pdf file)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

 

Ludmilla K. KOSTOVA is Professor of British literature and cultural studies at “St. Cyril and St. Methodius” University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century, Romantic, and modern British literature, as well as on travel writing and representations of intercultural encounters. Her book Tales of the Periphery: the Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (1997) has been frequently cited by specialists in the field. Together with Charles Forsdick and Corinne Fowler, she edited Travel Writing and Ethics. Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013/2014). Kostova also authored one of the book’s chapters, “Writing Across the Foreign/Native Divide: The Case of Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name (2008).” Together with Efterpi Mitsi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), Kostova edited a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies (EJES), entitled Narratives of Religious Conversion from the Enlightenment to the Present (Vol. 23, 1, 2019).  Kostova’s recent publications include “The Reception of Blake in Bulgaria” (co-authored with Lubomir Terziev, The Reception of William Blake in Europe, ed. Morton Paley and Sybille Erle, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and “Upper-Class Travel with a Political Slant: The Destinies of Nations and Empires through the Eyes of Lord and Lady Strangford” (Continental Travel, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814 – 1900, ed. Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Kostova is Editor of the journal VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2017 – present) and member of the editorial boards of Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Ad Americam: Journal of American Studies, Word and Text. A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, and The Annals of Ovidius University Constanta – Philology. One of her most recent interests is in writing in English by Eastern European migrant writers.

 

Miglena NIKOLCHINA is a Bulgarian poet, writer, and theoretician whose research interests involve the interactions of literature and philosophy. In English, her publications include numerous articles as well as the books Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (2004) and Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Heterotopias of the Seminar (2013). She guest-edited a special issue of differences (2021, 32.1) on “The Undead of Literary Theory.” Her most recent book (in Bulgarian) is God with Machine: Subtracting the Human (2022).

 

János KENYERES earned his doctoral degree in Literary Studies in 2000. He is currently Director and Associate Professor at the School of English and American Studies (SEAS) at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, where he teaches English and Canadian literature and Canadian cinema. He has several publications in these fields, including the book Revolving around the Bible: A Study of Northrop Frye (2003). He became a habilitated doctor in Literary Studies in 2014 and is member of the Modern English and American Literature Doctoral Program at ELTE. He was Visiting Professor of Hungarian at the University of Toronto from 2005 to 2008, a position he also filled in March–April 2015, as well as in 2018–2019, where his work focused on Hungarian literature, cinema and culture. He also served as president (2009-2015) and vice president (2015-2018) of the Central European Association for Canadian Studies.

 

Amelia LICHEVA, a poet, literary critic and theorist. Prof. Licheva graduated in Bulgarian philology at Sofia University. The topic of her PhD thesis was The Female Voice as a Historical and Theoretical Problem (2001). In 2007 she became an Associate Professor at the Department of Theory of Literature at Sofia University with a habilitation thesis on Voices and Identities in Bulgarian Poetry. Since 2013 she has been a professor in the same department and in 2019 she became a doctor of sciences with a dissertation on Is the Nobel Prize universal?. She edits translated prose and other texts in the humanities, she is also the author of research compendiums and books. She is the author of numerous literary studies, literary criticism, textbooks and dictionaries. She worked as an editor in “Literaturen Vestnik” (1995) and is its editor-in-chief since 2013. Since 2007, she has been the editor of the magazine “Literaturata” published by the Faculty of Slavic Philology of Sofia University, she has been a member of the editorial board of the “Foreign Language Learning” magazine since 2012. She was a literary observer of “Kultura” magazine (1999-2006) and columnist in the “Words Against Words” column. She worked as a book reviewer of newspaper “Capital” (2007–2008). Amelia Licheva debuted with poems in the magazine “Plamuk” (1988), at that time she also published in the magazine “Most” (1989). She was an emblematic representative of postmodernism in Bulgarian literature in the 1990s and also of the new Bulgarian poetical directions in the 21st century. As an artist, she mainly works in the poetic genre.

 

PANELISTS:

 

  1. Mehrinigor Bahodirovna AKHMEDOVA , was born on September 28, 1982. She is an Associate professor, PhD in philological sciences in English literature department, Bukhara State University. She has published more than 60 theses and articles, 5 books, 2 dictionaries. She has had teaching experience in around ten countries with ITEC program (Aptech University), Erasmus program (Erasmushogeschool University), SUSI for scholars program (New York University), KGDP (Chungbuk University), Istanbul Ticaret University (Turkey), Gottingen University (Germany), Delhi University (India) and others.

 

  1. Nevena ALEXIEVA joined the Department of English and American Studies in 1973. Senior Asst. Prof., now retired. She has taught BA and MA theoretical and practical Modern English grammar courses (Morphology, Lexicology, and basically, the Course in Syntax) and also two elective courses: A Cognitive Approach to Lexical Borrowing and Analyzing English Texts Syntactically. As the contributor for Bulgarian, she participated in an international lexicographical project (A Dictionary of European Anglicisms; English in Europe (OUP, 2001-02), involving 16 languages. She has taken part in many national and international conferences, where she has presented different aspects of the integration of anglicisms in Bulgarian and other languages in the light of a cognitive approach to inter-language lexical contacts.

 

  1. Yana ANDREEVA is a Professor of Portuguese literature at the University of “St. Kliment Ohridski”, where she teaches Portuguese and Brazilian literature. She is the head of the “Portuguese and Lusophone Studies” department at the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philologies. She is the author of Portugal Segundo a Bulgária, 2020; Literary Readings of Migration, 2017; Creator and Society in the Portuguese Writers’ Diaries from the End of the Twentieth Century, 2011; Readings in Portuguese Literature, 2010; The Self as an Other: Discourses of Identity in the Autobiographical Work of Fernando Namora, 2007, and also of numerous studies and articles in Bulgarian and foreign scientific journals. She has also compiled scholarly collections and three anthologies of Portuguese literature, published in Bulgaria.

 

  1. Nozimjon ATABOEV I is an accomplished teacher with over 5 years of experience in teaching EFL. He has BA in Philology and Language Teaching (English) and MA in Linguistics (English) from Uzbek State World Languages University, Uzbekistan. At present, he is working at BSU as an associate professor in the English Literature Criticism Department and is the Dean of Foreign Languages Faculty at Bukhara State University. He has had research stays for short period of time in Spain, Russia, Malaysia and Indonesia. In 2020 he received his PhD diploma, with a thesisentitled “Functional characteristics of English corpora (on the example of COCA corpus)”. He has published more than 35 articles according to my research.

 

  1. Galina AVRAMOVA, PhD, is a Senior Assistant Professor teaching at the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria. She is lecturing and conducting seminars in Canadian Literature and Culture, and American Literature. Her research interests are in the fields of Modern and Postmodern Canadian and American literatures. Her PhD thesis is in Canadian Literature – The Postmodern Identity: Timothy Findley’s ‘Pilgrim’. She is founding member of the Bulgarian Chapter of CEACS (Central European Association of Canadian Studies), member of BASA (Bulgarian-American Studies Association), and member of BSBS (Bulgarian Society for British Studies). Galina Avramova is founder and executive editor of Vox Litterarum, a journal for culture, literary criticism and intercultural communication. She is also member of the editorial board of Phililogia journal.

 

  1. Nouzha BABA is completing her PhD at Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society. In her thesis Culturalism and Its Discontents: Comparative Studies in Rhetoric, Theory and Literature, she undertakes an interdisciplinary comparative research about contemporary European socio-political rhetoric, cultural theory and literature of Moroccan migration in French and Dutch. Baba has participated in numerous international conferences and summer/winter schools and has published articles in edited books and peer-reviewed journals. Her articles include: “Caught in a Space of Dislocation: Cultural Hybridity Reconsidered in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Les Yeux Baissés in the edited book: W(h)ither Identity: Positioning the Self and Transforming the Social, Wisschenschaftliche Verlag Trier, 2015; “Transcultural Reflections on Identity, Memory and Gender in Naima El Bezaz’s ” In Gendered Bodies on the Move: Re-undestanding Women’s Migratory Experiences. Contemporary Medusa: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Vol. 3. Issue 1. 2022.

 

  1. Alexandra BAGASHEVA, PhD, is an associate professor of Linguistics at the Department of English and American Studies Sofia University. She teaches diverse linguistic subjects at the Department at the three levels of higher education, among which the interdisciplinary course Cognitive approaches to literature and culture. Her main research interests are in the fields of word formation, cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, semantics and the epistemology of linguistics. She has supervised a number of publicly funded PhD projects, has managed several other publicly funded research actions, and taken part in international and national research projects as both coordinator and participant. She has also organized several international scientific fora in Bulgaria and abroad since 2010. She is a member of the editorial board of Contrastive Linguistics and a member of the advisory boards of ExELL, SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics and Zeitschrift für Wortbildung / Journal of Word Formation. Her major publications are in the fields of word formation, cultural linguistics and semantics, he is a regular reviewer for international journals. She has published papers in the field of word-formation and cognitive linguistics and reviews with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, de Gruyter Mouton, John Benjamins, Peter Lang, Brill, etc. She has been co-editor of both special journal issues and edited volumes.

 

  1. Reneta BOZHANKOVA is a Professor at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. She is the author the monographs “The Postmodern Russian Text” (2001), “Horizons of digital Literature” (2013), “Digital Humanities and the Study of Literature” (2018), and of more than 90 articles on literature and culture in the 20th and 21st Reneta Bozhankova has participated in national and European educational and research projects, she has specialized in Oxford Internet Institute – University of Oxford, UK, University of Saarland, Germany, and the University of Kansas, USA. Her research is focused on digital literature, cyberculture, e-learning, new methods and interdisciplinary approaches in the Humanities.

 

  1. Milena BRATOEVA, PhD is a Professor of Indian literature and culture at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria. She delivers lectures on Vedic Literature and Culture, Sanskrit Epic Literature, Contemporary Hindi literature, Cods and Symbols of the Traditional Indian Culture, Contemporary Indian Culture between Tradition and Modernity in the BA and MA-Programs in Indian Studies at Sofia University. Her main research interests are in the field of traditional Indian Aesthetics, Vedic rituals and Buddhist Sanskrit literature.

 

  1. Vesselin M. BUDAKOV is Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia. He holds a PhD in eighteenth-century epistolary fiction. He teaches English Literature of the Enlightenment period and conducts seminars on American literature and Victorian Literature. His research interests and publications include “Dystopia: an Earlier Eighteenth-Century Use,” Notes and Queries 57.1 (2010), “Cacotopia: An Eighteenth-Century Appearance in News from the Dead (1715),” Notes and Queries 58.3 (2011) as well as studies on eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, travel writing, early science fiction, and utopianism. Along with Jonathan McCreedy and Alexandra Glavanakova, he co-edited Swiftian Inspirations: the Legacy of Jonathan Swift from the Enlightenment to the Age of Post-Truth (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020).

 

  1. Adina CIUGUREANU is Professor Emerita of English and American Literature at Ovidius University Constanta, Romania. She was the Dean of the Faculty of Letters between 2004-2012 and Director of the Institute for Doctoral Studies at Ovidius University between 2016-2019. Her major interests range from Victorian literature to British and American modern fiction and poetry and popular culture. She has had numerous research grants to prestigious institutions such as Cambridge University (1996, 2002), Oxford University (2006), Baylor University (Armstrong Browning Library, 2007) a Fulbright grant to UNLV, Nevada (2001-2002) and a second one at UCSB, California in 2016-2017. Among her publications, mention should be made of Victorian Selves (Constanta: Ovidius University Press, 2004, revised version in 2008), Modernism and the Idea of Modernity (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2004, republished in 2008), Post-War Anxieties (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2006), The Boomerang Effect (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2002), revised, translated into Romanian, and published in 2008 as Efectul de bumerang (Iasi: Institutul European). She has also published over 40 articles and essays in national and international volumes and journals, edited and co-edited 8 conference volumes (among which National and Transnational Challenges to the American Imaginary, Peter Lang, 2018, Ideology, Identity, and the US: Crossroads, Freeways, Collisions, Peter Lang 2020) and had numerous participations in international conferences, including keynote addresses. She has recently published a chapter in the volume A Critical Compendium on Alejandro Morales: in the Crosshairs of Canon, Fiction and History, edited by Marc García-Martínez and Francisco A. Lomelí (University of New Mexico Press). Currently, she is working on a study on cityspace and its representations in Los Angeles fiction.

 

  1. Danail DANOV, PhD, DLitt., is a Professor of Media Studies and Media Pedagogy at the Faculty of Educational Studies and the Arts at Sofia University St. “Kliment Ohridski”. He has published extensively on digital literacy, media, journalism, PR, project management, training and education and media pedagogy and has participated in a number of international projects on media literacy. Over the last 15 years he has been consulting various media and communications related projects implemented by organizations such as BBC WS, Deutsche Welle, RNTC, Open Society Institute, GTZ, Fulbright International Summer Institute and the European Parliament.

 

  1. Madeleine DANOVA is Professor of North American literature in the Department of English and American Studies and the Dean of the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. She has published extensively on American, Canadian and African literature, literary modernism, mass media, ethnicity, nationalism, and cultural identity. She has been involved in several international projects on mass media, intercultural communication, ethnicity and English and Canadian studies. She is the author and editor of books on American and Canadian literature, mass media, nationalism, identity, and postmodern biofictions such as Nationalism, Modernism, Identity (2000), British and American Mass Media (2004), The Jamesiad: The Postmodern Lives of Henry James (2011).

 

  1. Aikaterini DIMA is a PhD candidate at the Theatre Studies Department of the School of Fine Arts of the University of Peloponnese. She has studied at the Pedagogical Department of Primary Education of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and has completed the Postgraduate program of “Drama and Performing Arts in Education and Lifelong Learning” of the Department of the Theatre Studies of the University of Peloponnese. She has published articles in international scientific journals, as well as conference proceedings on Drama in education, Critical thinking and Prisoner education. Furthermore, Aikaterini holds a scholarship for the program “Supporting researchers with an emphasis on young researchers – cycle B”, ESPA 2014-2020. She is a partner of the Postgraduate Program MA in Drama and Performing Arts in Education and Lifelong Learning and works as a Primary Education teacher in the area of Argolis. In addition to the above, she is a certified Adult Educator and a member of the Jury Committee of the scientific journal Journal of Culture in Tourism, Art and Education. Finally, she has volunteered in the educational programs conducted by the University of Peloponnese, in the Argolis and Tripoli Detention Offices.

 

  1. Irena DIMOVA, PhD, is a senior assistant professor at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. She teaches courses in general and academic English as well as sociolinguistic courses in English as an international language and language and society. Her recent research interests concern the development of English as an international language and its implications for English pedagogy.

 

  1. Orzigul GANIEVA is an accomplished teacher with over 20 years of experience in teaching EFL. She has BA in Roman-German Philology and MA in Literary Criticism (English) from Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan. At present, she is working at BSU as an associate professor in the English Literature Department and completed the teacher training course at the Metropolitan University, London, in 2013, the online course at London Imperial College in 2020. In 2021-2022 she ran the American Literature Club at BSU sponsored by US Embassy in Tashkent. In 2021 she received her PhD diploma on the topic “The Description of the Relationship between a Person and Society in John Steinbeck and Adil Yakubov’s Works”. She has published more than 25 articles.

 

  1. Konstantin GEORGIEV is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, Houston, Texas. His doctoral research focuses on the post-Soviet environmental conservation and labor practices of scientist formerly employed at a now defunct scientific institute in Eastern Siberia. His research has been supported through grants and fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for Visual Anthropology at the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Outside of academia, he has worked in film-related fields. He has been writer and researcher for a number of film and TV documentaries and has worked as an archivist and curator of analog media at the Rice Media Center.

 

  1. Georgi GEORGIEV holds an assistant professorship at the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. His interests lie in the typology of morphosyntax, understudied morphosyntactic phenomena and how these tie in with the philosophy of language, as well as in the theory and practice of interpretation. He is pursuing research on vocatives and their potential assignment to a dedicated feature other than the ones to which vocatives are traditionally considered to belong.

 

  1. Alexandra K. GLAVANAKOVA, PhD, is associate professor in American Literature and Culture and Head of the Department of English and American Studies at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her teaching, academic research and publications focus on the culture and literature of the USA; transcultural studies and identity; the major cultural shifts in literacy, education, and literary studies under the impact of digital technology. She is the author of two monographs: Posthuman Transformations: Bodies and Texts in Cyberspace (2014) and Transcultural Imaginings. Translating the Other, Translating the Self in Narratives about Migration and Terrorism (2016); the editor et al. of New Paradigms in English Studies. Language, Linguistics, Literature and Culture in Higher Education (2017) and Swiftian Inspirations: The Legacy of Jonathan Swift from the Enlightenment to the Age of Post-Truth (2020). She has been involved in several projects and publications on reading in the digital age and e-learning and has recently served as the editor of the special issue “Reading Modes in the Digital Age” of the Sofia University online journal for arts and culture Piron (2020). She received a Fulbright grant as a research scholar at UCSB on a project investigating reading literature online (Feb – July 2022).

 

  1. Kiril HADZHIKOSEV, MA, is currently a PhD candidate at the department of English and American Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” He is interested in Modernist British and American literary art. The topic of his MA thesis was “Forms and Functions of Space and Time in James Joyce’s Ulysses” which he successfully defended at the beginning of 2021. Kiril participated in the XVIIIth Scientific Conference of Non-Habilitated Lecturers and Doctoral Students held by Sofia University where he presented a paper on Virginia Woolf entitled “Deconstructing Colonial Metaphors in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves” published in 2022 by the Sofia University Press. The topic of his PhD dissertation is “Centre and Periphery in British and American Modernism: James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Thomas Wolfe, Jean Rhys.” At Sofia University he collaborates on special occasions with Dr Jonathan McCreedy who also supervised his MA thesis.

 

  1. Angel IGOV, PhD, is a Senior Assistant Professor and has graduated from Sofia University with a BA in English Studies, MA in Literary Studies, and PhD on Fictional Models of the City in the Contemporary British Novel: Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. He has also specialized at the UC Berkeley on a Fulbright scholarship. He teaches English literature and Translation at the Department of English and American Studies of Sofia University. His current academic interests are focused on comparative poetics and intertextuality. He is the author of Flags and Keys: A Poetics of the Epigraph (in Bulgarian), as well as three novels, two collections of short stories, and a number of publications in periodicals. He is a practicing translator of fiction and poetry from English, and holds several national awards for fiction and translation.

 

  1. Alexandra-Maria IVAN is a PhD Candidate from Romania with a PhD thesis tackling, among others, alien depictions of society through language. She has attended several conferences in the past, dealing with both translation of science fiction as well as cultural analyses of futuristic societies in crisis, with articles both awaiting publication and already published. Notable past papers include “The Strain of Language in China Miéville’s Embassytown: between Multiculturalism, Oppression, and the Alien Society”, “Sonmi~451 and the Image of the Subservient Asian Woman ”, and  „The (Mis)Translation of Future English in Cloud Atlas: Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”

 

  1. Lola JALILOVA is an accomplished teacher with over 20 years of experience in teaching EFL. She have MA in Roman-German Philology (English) from Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan. At present, she is working at BSU as an Associate Professor in the English Literature Criticism Department and completed the teacher training and professional development courses ​​(ESL / ESP expert), an active participant of international conferences, seminars and webinars organized by the US Embassy. In 2020-2022 she organized Speaking Club at BSU in collaboration with Wyoming University, USA. In 2019 she published the textbook “Practical methods of teaching a foreign language,” and in 2020 received an international copyright certificate for this manual from the Agency for Intellectual Property under the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Uzbekistan (Certificate No. 3550). In 2020 she got my PhD diploma on the topic of “The Poetics of American Satiric Short Stories of the early XXth” She has published more than 50 articles.

 

  1. Thakurdas JANA is a state-aided college lecturer (Category 1) in the Department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan. He is also presently pursuing PhD from the Indus University, Ahmedabad, India. He has received his M. Phil from the Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, Odisha, India. He has authored several research articles that have been published in international journals and as book chapters.

 

  1. Milena KATSARSKA, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture Studies at the Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv. Her publications are in culture studies; the politics of cultural translation; the history, sociology and politics of institutional academic spaces; English and American studies in Bulgaria. Her recent publications include the co-authored volumes Usurping Suicide: The Political Resonances of Individual Deaths (Zed Books, Bloomsbury, 2017) and Social Analysis and the Covid-19 Crisis: a Collective Journal (Routledge, 2021), as well as the monograph Parapositions: Prefacing American Literature in Bulgarian Translation 1948-1998 (Plovdiv University Press, 2021).

 

  1. Feruza KHAJIEVA is an Associate Professor in the English Literature Department at Bukhara State University. She completed the teacher training courses at APTECH, New Delhi (India) in 2011, Pisa University, Pisa (Italy) in 2016, Ohio Northern University, Ada (USA) in 2021. The topic of her PhD thesis is “Peculiarities of the Biographical Novel (Comparative study of I. Stone’s, M. Qoriev’s and N. Normatov’s works).” The topic of her DSc thesis is “Poetics of the American Postmodern Biographical Novel (on the bases of J. Parini’s, M. Cunningham’s and L. Lalami’s novels)”. She has published more than 90 articles.

 

  1. Dilafruz KHODJAEVA, PhD, is an Associate Professor and the Head of the English Literature Department at Bukhara State University. She is an accomplished teacher with over 20 years of experience in teaching EFL. She has attended professional development Teacher Training courses at the University in Austin, USA in 2019; Norwich Language University, UK in 2015; London Metropolitan University, UK in 2014; Oregon State University, USA in 2007. She was the Head of Bukhara Branch of Uzbekistan English Teachers Association (UzTEA) during 2010-2016. She has been the Coordinator of English Access Microscholarship Program since 2010. The Program is financed by the US Embassy in Tashkent. In 2018 she received her PhD diploma on the topic of “Lexicographic analysis of linguistic terms in English, Russian and Uzbek languages.” She has published more than 60 scientific articles.

 

  1. Antje KLEY, PhD, is a Professor and holds the chair for American Literary Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Together with her colleague Prof. Dirk Niefanger (German Studies), she directs the Research Training Group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Differentiated Cultures,” funded by the German Research Foundation. Her research interests focus on the theory, history and cultural functions of US-American prose fiction and life writing, ethics and aesthetics, media history and theory as well as literature and knowledge. In 2018 she published the volume, edited with Kai Merten, What Literature Knows: Forays into Literary Knowledge Production. She is currently working on a book project concerned with narratives of the end of life entitled Death Becomes Us.

 

  1. Alexander KOSTOV, PhD, is a Senior Assistant Professor at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” His primary interests are within the field of Canadian Literature and Anglophone African Literature. He also teaches Translation and Practical English Classes in the BA and MA programs. He is a BA, MA, and is aPhD graduate of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology.

 

  1. Jeanna KRASTEVA, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Romance Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” Her research interests span the fields of comparative linguistics, specifically problems of phraseology, linguaculturology and lexicography. Her teaching activity in the specialty of French Philology also includes a course in Legal French. She is one of the co-authors of the French-Bulgarian Dictionary (2002-2013) and the Bulgarian-French Dictionary (2013). She was awarded the French order of merit Officer of the Order of Academic Palms for her contribution and services to French culture.

 

  1. Marija KRSTEVA holds a PhD degree in American literature from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” in Bulgaria. Her areas of interest involves American studies, history, culture and literature mainly contemporary literature, life-writing and genre blending. She has worked at the University “Goce Delcev” in Stip, Faculty of Philology since 2012 where she teaches American studies. Marija Krsteva is a Hemingway Society fellow for 2017. She has published and presented a number of papers on academic conferences at home and abroad. She has written the book in literary theory Towards life-writing: genre blending (forthcoming, Routledge, 2022). She is also the author of children’s picture books and a translator.

 

  1. Chi Sum Garfield LAU obtained her Ph.D in English Language and Literature from Hong Kong Baptist University. She is an Assistant Professor in Hong Kong Metropolitan University. She is responsible for courses in English Language and Literature. Her areas of interest include Modernism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and Comparative Studies.

 

  1. Eva MEIER is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of German Studies and Linguistics at the Humboldt Universtät zu Berlin, teaching courses in German Grammar and Historical Linguistics for BA and MA students. Her research interests are in the field of historical morphosyntax as well as of acquisition of connectives by bilingual children. In her PhD thesis she investigates the emergence of concessive connectives in the history of German and traces their developmental path to present-day German.

 

  1. Jonathan McCREEDY, PhD, is Senior Assistant Professor in English literature in the Department of English and American Studies at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia. He received his PhD from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, based upon his study of Finnegans Wake and its compositional “sigla.” His scholarly interests include James Joyce, genetic criticism, Irish English, and multilingualism. He is the head of the Sofia Centre for Irish Studies, which is part of the larger Balkan Centre for Irish Studies network. He has publications in Genetic Joyce Studies, Joyce Studies in Italy, the James Joyce Literary Supplement, and the Journal of Popular Television.

 

  1. Louis MENDY is a professor of American Studies at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. He was a Fulbright scholar at California State University, Fullerton and at Kent State University in Ohio. Prof. Mendy is the author of many scientific articles in American literature and a book entitled: Survivances de la doctrine du puritanisme dans l’Amérique moderne. He is the director of the Journal (REAC) of American and Caribbean Studies of Cheikh Anta Diop University. He participated in two Erasmus teaching programs at the University of Wurzburg (Germany) and the University of Huelva (Spain). Prof. Mendy is also a Human Rights activist. He chaired Amnesty International, Senegal for some years, before joining the international board of the Organization in London for three years.

 

  1. Jonas NABBE is a master’s student of history, anthropology, and critical theory at the University of Bologna. He received his bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts & Sciences from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. His work focuses on transnationalism and takes a critical approach to Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism. His other interests include social movements, political philosophy, and musicology.

 

  1. Lorraine NASSER is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at Tel Aviv University. Her research is focused on classical rhetoric in contemporary literature as expressed in fiction and nonfiction texts.

 

  1. Gulbahor NAZAROVA is a lecturer at the Department of English Literature and Stylistics, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Bukhara State University. In 1984-1994 she graduated from the school 34 in Bukhara. In 1994-1999 she graduated from Bukhara State University, Foreign philology faculty. From 1999 to 2008 she worked as an English teacher at the Regional Academic Lyceum # 1 in Bukhara. In 2022 she defended her PhD thesis on the theme of “The System, Genesis, Literary Functions of Mythological Images in English and Uzbek Literature.”

 

  1. Georgi NIAGOLOV, PhD, teaches Civics at New Bulgarian University and English Medieval and Renaissance literature at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. His most significant publications include: Competent Reading for the 21st Century: Global Trends through a Bulgarian Lens, The Online Journal for Arts and Culture Piron of the Cultural Center of the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, 2020; Teaching Shakespeare through Performance for the 21st Century, Ренесансні студії, 2019; Shakespeare’s Wordplay and Possible Worlds, Sofia University Press, 2011.

 

  1. Chukwu Romanus NWOMA, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State, Nigeria. He obtained a PhD. in English and Literary Studies (Comparative Literature) from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 2014. He has served as Coordinator of the Use of English Unit, Directorate of General Studies and the Head of Department of English and Literary Studies of the Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State, Nigeria among other positions. He teaches BA, MA and PhD. courses and currently supervises six BA and two MA projects. Between 2012 and 2017, he lectured in the Sandwich Degree Programme of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where he taught African Fiction and Studies in Fiction. Between 2015 and 2017, he was an Examiner and Facilitator in the National Open University of Nigeria. In 2019, he was appointed on the Literature Panel of the Global Undergraduates Awards, a global body that is based in Ireland which evaluates and rewards graduating students’ high performances across the globe. He has participated in many national and international conferences and has published in top class journals across continents. He is a member of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA).

 

  1. Ifeoma Francisca NWOMA holds a Diploma in Social Work (2005); BA Archaeology/Tourism, Second Class Upper Division (2010); MA Archaeology/Tourism (2017), all from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She is currently Assistant Lecturer in the Department of History and Strategic Studies, Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State.

 

  1. Magdalena KOSTOVA-PANAYOTOVA is a Professor of literature and Dean of the Faculty of Philology at the South-West University “Neofit Rilski”, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. She has graduated from the Sofia University in 1991, where she majored in Bulgarian philology and Journalism. She received her PhD in 1997 at Sofia University and became an Associated professor in 2006 at SWU, Blagoevgrad. Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova became a professor in 2011, and later received the title Doctor of science – DsC. in 2021. Since 2015 to this day, she has been the Dean of the Faculty of Philology. Her fields of research are literary studies, comparative literature, and literary theory, gender images and studies. M. Panayotova is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Scientists and Pen International; she is also the editor in chief of the scientific journal Orbis Linguarum (Scopus). Furthermore, she works as an editor of the scientific journals Foreign Language Studies (Web of science), Vestnik Slavqnski Culturi, (Moscow, Web of science), the online journal Litternet, Open Journal Studies and American International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova is the author of 12 books (9 of them scientific) and over 140 articles in specialized periodicals. Her works include such titles as Classical Bulgarian Literature, SemaRS Publishing House, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2004, In the Field of the Avantgarde. Russian poetry, 50s – 90s of the 20th century, 2006, Russian Poetical Avant-Garde: Theory and Practice, Neofit Rilski University Press, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, 2011, Neighbor Unknown, Neofit Rilski University Press, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, 2013, Along The Seams Of Literature (Between East And West – Borders And Identities), Neofit Rilski University Press, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria,

 

  1. Eleftherios PANDIS is a Doctoral Candidate at the Theatre Studies Department of the University of Peloponnese. He has completed the Postgraduate Studies (MSc) in European Politics at the Faculty of Political Science and Law of the University of Bristol. He studied at the Pedagogical Department of Elementary Education at the School of Education Sciences of the University of Ioannina and graduated from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the School of Law, Economics and Political Sciences of EKPA. Additionally, he has studied at the Military School specializing in Army Law and has worked as an Army Legal Corps Officer. Furthermore, he was an officer in the Ionian Islands District Administration and currently, works as a teacher. Finally, he has participated in various conferences as a lecturer and volunteers in the educational programs conducted by the University of Peloponnese, in the Argolis Detention Offices.

 

  1. Maria PIPEVA is an Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies, Sofia University. Her research interests are in the fields of 20th-century English literature, British culture and comparative culture studies, children’s literature, translation and reception studies. Her books M. Forster’s Novels: From the Monologic to the Dialogic (2009) and The Dialectic of the Domestic and the Foreign: The Bulgarian Translations of English Children’s Fiction (2014; in Bulgarian) were published by St. Kliment Ohridski University Press. She has translated and edited texts in the humanities, fiction, and books for children.

 

  1. Maria PIRGEROU (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.), Ministry of Education, Greece. Dr. Maria Pirgerou is a primary school principal appointed by the Ministry of Education in Greece. She holds a B.A., M.A. and a Ph.D. degree on Anglophone Literature and Culture from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is also employed as part-time faculty in the Academic Writing Program of Degree: The American College of Greece. Her academic and research interests focus on the construction and representation of gendered identities in the fiction of the Victorian Age. In particular, Dr. Pirgerou specializes in gender theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis which are the theoretical perspectives from which she approaches Victorian narratives. Dr. Pirgerou has written one book titled The Vicissitudes of Victorian Masculinity: The Case of the Bachelor (Lambert Publishing, 2014) and is currently writing a comparative study on the representation and construction of femininity in the works of Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde which will be published by Taylor and Francis in 2023. She has published a number of articles and book reviews on a number of topics.

 

  1. Alexander POPOV holds a PhD in computational linguistics from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He teaches linguistics and literature at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” His research focuses on science fiction studies, utopian studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism and literary theory. In 2021 he completed a postgraduate research project examining artificial intelligence from an interdisciplinary perspective. His first monograph, on the topic of contemporary utopias in the context of the climate crisis, is forthcoming from Peter Lang.

 

  1. Ivan POPOV, PhD, has been since 2012 a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Scandinavian Studies at the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philologies at “St. Kliment Ohridski” University, Bulgaria. His research interests span the history of German literature, literary theory, and the philosophy of art. He has published Bulgarian translations of historical, cultural, sociological, and philosophical works from German and English.

 

  1. Milena POPOVA, PhD, is a Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology. She is the head of the Master’s program “Semiotics, Language and Advertising.” She has published scientific papers in the field of syntax, pragmatics, typology and linguistic universals, semiotics, pragmatics of humour, foreign language learning.

 

  1. Rayna ROSENOVA, PhD, is lecturer in English literature at the Department of English and American Studies, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria. Her research interests include the long eighteenth century, women’s writing, Romantic poetry, and Gothic literature. She has published articles on John Keats, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith. Her most recent publication is a chapter on Mary Robinson’s satire in British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Amanda Hiner and Elizabeth Tasker Davis (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

 

  1. Margarita RUSKI is an Associate Professor at the Department of Romance Studies at “St. Kliment Ohridski” University, Bulgaria. She is the author of scientific publications in the field of French linguistics and comparative linguistics, and her attention is directed to the specifics of legal texts. She teaches theoretical courses in lexicology and semantics, as well as Master’s courses devoted to legal terminology in French. She has participated in the development of several general and scientific dictionaries.

 

  1. Rudolf Sárdi is Associate Professor at the Mediterranean School of Business of South Mediterranean University. He earned his doctorate in Modern English and American Literature at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 2014. His current research focuses on utopianism, transmediality, and the cinematic narrative. His book, entitled Journeys Across Vladimir Nabokov’s Unexplored Textual Zones: Mysteries of the Otherworld is forthcoming.

 

  1. Michael T. SMITH, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English at the American University of Armenia. Prior to this position, he worked as an English Assistant Professor in Riyadh and held the title of “Transdisciplinary Education Specialist” at Purdue University in the United States. His research and classes revolve around literary theory and film.

 

  1. Traci SPEED is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University, where she teaches courses in Bulgarian-English translation and the History of the English Language. She graduated from the University of California-Berkeley with a PhD in Slavic Linguistics and has lived in Bulgaria since 2017. She also translates contemporary Bulgarian literature, art catalogues and exhibition materials for several Bulgarian art museums, and scholarly works in the field of linguistics.

 

  1. Angeliki SPIROPOULOU (MA; PhD Sussex) is Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory at Peloponnese University, Greece and a Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study- University of London. She is Chair of the Theatre Studies Dept and a Deputy Dean of the School of Arts.

 

  1. Roumiana L. STANTCHEVA is Professor, Dr. Sc., at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”; Doctor Honoris Causa of Artois University; Knight of the Order of Academic Palms of France. She has published over 150 academic articles and 8 books, including Found in the Text: Comparative Literature and Balkan Studies (Balkani, 2011) and The Artist Georges Papazoff as a Writer: Verbalization of the Surreal (Colibri, 2014).

 

  1. Svetlana STOYCHEVA-ANDERSON, PhD, is a Professor at the National Academy of Theater and Film Arts “Kr. Sarafov”. She graduated in Bulgarian Philology at Shumen University “Bishop Konstantin of Preslav” in 1984 and was a PhD candidate at the Department of Bulgarian Literature at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” from 1986 until 1990. The topic of her PhD dissertation is “The fairy-tale creativity of Nikolay Rainov” which she defended in 1993. In 1989, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor, and in 1999 – as an Associate Professor at Sofia University. She was a lecturer on Bulgarian literature and culture at the Beijing University of Foreign Languages, China (2000-2004; 2009-2011) for six years. Since 2011 she has been a full professor of Theory and History of Literature at the National Academy of Theater and Film Arts “Kr. Sarafov”. Her research interests span the fields of modernist literature, anthropology, children’s literature, the synthesis between the arts and between different cultures. She has over a hundred scientific publications, including the monographs The Tales of Nikolay Rainov – Between Magic and Decoration (1995), Boyan Magesnika. Study of Literary Myth (2017) and others.

 

  1. Lubomir TERZIEV taught British Literature of the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism, and Creative Writing at Sofia University’s Department of English and American Studies for twenty years. Since 2016, he has been a full-time professor of Writing and Literature at the American University in Bulgaria. His research is focused on the correlation between politics and aesthetics in Romantic literature as well as on issues concerning literary education. His PhD dissertation was devoted to the figure of the poet as educator in S.T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Terziev is currently working on a monograph entitled Subject and Event in William Blake’s Poetry.

 

  1. Theodora TSIMPOUKI is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She specializes in American realism, modernism and contemporary literature, the 1960s, theories of space and contemporary literary theory. She is co-editor of Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the US, Culture Agonistes: Debating Cultures, Rereading Texts and The War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (2017). Her research interests are in American Literature, Postmodern Fiction, urban literature and posthumanism. Her articles have also appeared in edited volumes abroad and in Greece and a large number of scholarly journals. She is also one of the chief editors of Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Literature, Culture, and Media, an open access journal of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (https://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/ExCentric/).

 

  1. Plamen TSVETKOV, Ph.D. is a Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of German and Scandinavian Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” His research interests are in text linguistics, contact linguistics, media discourse analysis, word-formation of the German language. His Ph.D. thesis defended in Sofia 2015 is entitled “Mutual relationship between the mother tongue and the first foreign language in text writing. Study based on narrative and argumentative texts in the mother tongue (Bulgarian) and in the first foreign language (German).”

 

  1. Irena VASSILEVA, PhD, is full professor of English and German at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, and has worked extensively on spoken and written academic communication in English, German and Bulgarian. She has published three monographs and a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals and collections of articles. Vassileva has also received various research awards from outstanding foundations in international competition and has worked at universities in Bulgaria, Germany, and the UK.

 

  1. Ingrida Eglė ŽINDŽIUVIENĖ is Professor of English and Literature at the Department of Foreign Language, Literature and Translation Studies, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. She teaches contemporary British and American Literature, Literature and Culture, and other subjects. Ingrida Eglė Žindžiuvienė has published articles on contemporary British and American literature, comparative literary studies, American Studies, and TEFL, and has participated in conferences worldwide. With lectures she has visited universities in Estonia, Finland, Great Britain, Italy, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Turkey, the USA and other countries. Ingrida Eglė Žindžiuvienė is the co-author of the following books: English at a Glance (2002), Modern North American Women Writers (2005), Doing Research on ELT (2013) and others. Her main research interests include comparative studies of literature, literary theory and cultural studies. Ingrida Eglė Žindžiuvienė is a member of MLA, ESSE, IATEFL, TESOL and other associations.