Calin-Andrei Mihailescu is a tetra-lingual writer and a Professor of Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, and Spanish at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. He has been the Editor-in-Chief of Literary Research/ Recherche littéraire, journal of the International Comparative Literature Association (1997-2005), and Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at his university (2002-2006). In addition to his academic writings spanning a number of disciplines, he has published prose, poetry, children stories and texts which defy pigeonholing. His pedagogical activity includes some 80 different graduate and undergraduate courses, more than 100 theses supervised, and the creation of three doctoral programs at his university.
This century he published a large number of shorter texts in English, French, Romanian and Spanish, as well as eight books: A Europressed Country (2002), The Calendar According to Caragiale (with Liviu Papadima and Rodica Zafiu, 2002), The Coming of Don Global (with Ilinka and Andrei Mihailescu, 2003), Night Calendar/Calin's Night Gift (2003), Anthropomorphine (2005), 16-17~ Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque (2002; 2nd ed., 2005), and two edited volumes: This Craft of Verse, by Jorge Luis Borges (2000; 2002), and What Was It Like? Something Like That. Memories from the Years of [Romanian] Communism (2006). His ongoing work includes volumes (The Book of Points. A Ballet of Ricochets, Gambling Theory, The Age of Borges, Deunamor), and various shorter texts.
At the conference he will be speaking on: "Securing What? The Romanian Secret Services twenty years after (and counting)".
Fatima Festic obtained her Ph.D. in Literary Theory from the University of Zagreb, and has worked as a Lecturer and Professor at Universities in Zurich, Fribourg, Los Angeles, Michigan, and Ankara, as a Research Scholar/Fellow at Universities in Oxford, New York and Pretoria, and as an Assistant to Edward Said at Columbia University. She is the author of the book "The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator: between violence and artistry” (CSP, forthcoming) and the editor of the book: "Betraying the Event: constructions of victimhood in contemporary cultures" (CSP, forthcoming), the author of a number of articles in literary theory and criticism and in cultural semiotics (e.g. “Who is Afraid of Hysteria? - they also kill desires, don't they?”1997; “The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman” 1998; “Architectonics of Abyss: a female account of the theatricality of a holocaust” 1999; “Monsieur Lacan, This Dance is Mine” 2001; “On Nomadic Intellectualism, Terrorism, Horror and Some Related Issues” 2002; “Antigone in (Post-)modern Palestine” 2003; “When We Dead Awaken: Srebrenica's victims versus rhetoric”, 2005; “Said’s Legacy and Representations of the Intellectual” 2007, “Said's Out of Place: A Cartographic Memoir and Modernity in Place”, forthcoming in "Fluid Cartographies, New Modernities" Blackwell, etc.) as well as of translations in literary theory, aesthetics and fiction. She is currently working on the book: "Political Life of Horror: social geographies, norm and delineation of inner spaces" and editing a book with the title "Gender and Trauma: some attempts at critical intervention into the past". Her research interests are in the intersection of literature/culture, gender, psychoanalysis, and politics. She is a member of the Executive Board of the International Association of Semiotic Studies and of the Scientific Committee of the European Journal for Semiotics, as well as of the Boards of various journals and a member of various international associations for literature and culture.
At the conference she will be speaking on: "Coming to Terms with Horror: the ghosts of the ex-Yugoslav wars and psycho-politics after communism".
Professor of Russian Studies ,Stephen Hutchings, specializes in Russian cultural studies, Russian and Soviet television and film, Russian and Soviet literature and literary/cultural theory. He has just completed a 3-year AHRC-funded project on 'Post-Soviet Television Culture'. He is currently working on a new 3-year AHRC-funded project on 'European Television Representations of Islam as Security Threat: A Comparative Study (Russia, France, UK)'. The project is interdisciplinary and is carried out in collaboration with Professor Chris Flood of the Politics Department at the University of Surrey. He was formerly Professor of Cultural Studies and Russian at the University of Surrey (1996-2006) and Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Rochester, New York (1990-1996). He is on the editorial board of Russian Studies in Literature and is a member of the RAE 2008 subpanel for Russian and Slavonic Languages and Cultures. He is a member of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies and of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. Website: www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/russian/staff/stephen-hutchings/
His publications include:
Professor of Comparative Economics in the department of Social Sciences, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he also coordinates the Centre for the Study of Economic and Social Change in Europe. He serves on the board of trustees of the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies (London) and on the editorial board of the journal Post-Communist Economies. He coordinates the UK-wide 'Managing Economic Transition' research network, and is an affiliate of the CASE Institute in Warsaw. His research has been focused on the control structures of industrial enterprises. In particular the role of labour in enterprises and the implications for wage and employment decisions, a theme which continued to be highly policy-relevant, due to the design of the privatisation programmes in the transition economies. Expanding this line of research, he has been working on the effects of privatisation, contrasting short-term and long-term effects, and comparing privatised firms with both state firms and new private firms. He was one of the few researchers who provided empirical evidence pointing to the fact that the difference between the 'new private' and 'old' firms (i.e. both state-owned and privatised) may be as important as the traditional difference between the state and private sector.
Website: www.ssees.ac.uk/prospect/mickiewicz.htm
His publications include:
At the conference he will compare post-Soviet economies in the presentation: The Ghost of the Command Economy: Twenty Years After.
Peggy Watson is a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. She has carried out research in Eastern Europe both before and after the end of communism.
She has been an invited fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA, and has received a series of awards from the Economic and Science Research Council, The MacArthur Foundation, the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust.
She has been editor of The Ontology of Socialism (Clarendon Press 1992) and co-editor of Crisis and Transition: Polish Society in the 1980s (Berg 1987). Key papers include: The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe, New Left Review, 1993; Explaining Rising Mortality Among Men in Eastern Europe, Social Science and Medicine 1995; Rethinking Transition: Globalism, Gender and Class, in JW Scott and D. Keates (eds) Going Public: Feminism and the Boundaries of the Private Sphere (University of Illinois Press 2004); Unequalising Citizenship: the Politics of Poland’s Health Care Change, Sociology, 2006.
Further details can be found at: www.nowahutastudy.info
Libora Oates-Indruchová obtained her PhD in English from Lancaster University, U.K. and has completed „habilitation“ (dr. habil.) in Literature (specialisation in Cultural Studies) at Szeged University, Hungary. She teaches at the Department of Sociology, Masaryk University, Brno and is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study.
Her research interests include censorship, narrative research and cultural interpretations of gender. Most of her published work concerns late state-socialist Czech cultural issues. She is the author of Discourses of Gender in Pre- and Post-1989 Czech Republic, editor of two anthologies of translations from feminist theory, and is now writing a book on academic censorship in state-socialist Czech Republic.
Her publications include:
Articles and Book Chapters
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