Speaker
Dorothée Boulanger is a Career Development Fellow in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College. Dorothée’s research lies at the crossroads between African literature and history, with a specific interest in Lusophone Africa, gender and ecocritical perspectives. Her first book, Fiction as History? Resistance and Complicities in Angolan Postcolonial Literature (Legenda, 2022), explores fiction as a historical source and the role of writers in shaping historical consciousness in Angola.
Dr Robert Freeman
Speaker
Robert Freeman teaches twentieth and twenty-first century English at Lincoln College, Oxford. His research interests include aesthetic value, cultural theory and African cinema.
Speaker
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Junior Research Fellow in African & Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. His latest book projects include Dambudzo Marechera: The Fear & Loathing out of Harare (Chimurenga) and A Brief History of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (Cambridge University Press).
Chair
Dr Ben Grant is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. He has a research background in postcolonial studies and cultural translation. His first book, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (2009), was about the iconic Victorian explorer and translator, Richard Francis Burton, who began his career as a spy in British India. Ben is also interested in all forms of brevity in literature, and his second book, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (2016), aims to give a consolidated picture of the exciting and often marginalised genres of the aphorism and related short forms, such as the proverb and the fragment. Ben is currently working on life writing and autobiographical fiction, particularly in the work of Jenny Diski.
