Adjunct Faculty
Dr. Astrid Ensslin
Professor, University of Regensburg
Astrid Ensslin (Dr. phil.) is Professor for the Dynamics of Virtual Communication Spaces, Founding Director of DAS|LAB (Digital Area Studies Lab) and VP Artificial Intelligence, Digitalization and Outreach at the University of Regensburg. She has published widely on ludolinguistics and discourses of games and play, (post)digital narratives and cultures, digital-born fiction and literary computer games, Digital Health Studies, critical community co-design and narrative therapy, the spatial design and narrative potential of virtual realities, as well as methods of digital humanities, participatory action research and cognitive reader-response. She is a PI on the DFG/AHRC-funded “Project StoryMachine”, and Co-PI on the Marsden-funded “FEMTRACK” project as well as the DFG-funded research network, “Knowledges of Digital Literature”. Her current book projects include Videogames as Folkworlds (co-edited with Dom Ford and Laura Niebling, Play Story Press), and Researching Videogame Language: A Ludolinguistic Approach (co-authored with Frazer Heritage, Routledge).
Dr. Reisa Klein
Dr. Klein holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Carleton University, and is an expert on feminist media studies and theory. Her work looks closely at digital cultures and tattooing practices, particularly with regarding to mastectomies.
Dr. Sylvia Ijeoma Madueke
Sylvia Ijeoma Madueke, holds a PhD in French Language, Linguistics and Literatures, with a specialization in Translation Studies. Her doctoral research, funded by the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, examined the history of the translation, publication, and circulation of Anglophone African literature in France, with a focus on Nigerian literature. This work has been presented at both local and international conferences and published in peer-reviewed Translation Studies journals, including the journal of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies (CATS), TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, as well as The Translator and Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation.
Her current research extends her longstanding interest in literary circulation and translation to Black Canadian literature. Her SSHRC-funded project examines the movement of Black Canadian writing between French- and English-speaking literary contexts, with a focus on translation, publishing, and the institutional and cultural factors that shape the visibility and circulation of Black writers. Her broader research interests include African and diasporic literatures, translation, literary circulation, and the relationships between language, race, and literary visibility.
She currently works as a Research Partner in the Office of the Vice-President (Research) at the University of Alberta, where she supports researchers across the university with research and proposal development for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants. She is also an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, where she has taught courses in French language and translation studies.
Manijeh Mannani, PhD
Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Athabasca University
Professor, English and Comparative Literature
mmannani@ualberta.ca; manijehm@athabascau.ca
Area of Study/Keywords: Iranian Studies; Cultural Studies; Comparative Literature; Life-writing; Poetry
Research and Teaching: Dr. Mannani's research and teaching interests include Persian literature, comparative literature, poetry, and life-writing. Her publications consist of Divine Deviants: The Dialectics of Devotion in the Poetry of Donne and Rumi (Peter Lang, 2007) and Najvā: Selected poems of E.D. Blodgett in Persian (Nasl-i Nuvīn, 2006). She is the co-editor of Perspectives on Comparative Canadian Literature: A Tribute to E.D. Blodgett (CRCL: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, forthcoming); Shades of Truth: Iranian Short Fiction of the Fifth Generation in Translation (Mazda Publishers, 2019); Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature (Athabasca University Press, 2015); and Selves and Subjectivities: Reflections on Canadian Arts and Culture (Athabasca University Press, 2012). Speak Only of the Moon: A New Translation of Rumi (Guernica Editions, 2017) is a collection of ghazals and other poems by the Persian Sufi poet, Rumi, in English which she has published in collaboration with E.D.Blodgett.