Dr. Yanyu Zeng - Hunan Normal University, China - (November 2019)

Dr. Yanyu Zeng is currently Professor of American Studies and Comparative Literature and dean of the Foreign Studies School at Hunan Normal University. She is the executive editor-in-chief of Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures. She serves as the Executive Member of the International American Studies Association, the Standing Council Member of China English Literature Association, the Vice President of Hunan Translators Association and the Vice President of Hunan Comparative Literature and World Literature Association. She worked as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto (2000), a Visiting Professor at Emory University (2005-2006) and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University (2014-2015). Professor Zeng specializes in British and American literature and cultural studies, and has contributed to various journals a large range of essays and articles. The academic books she has published include Towards Postmodern Multiculturalism: A New Trend of Jewish-American and African-American Literature Viewed Through Philip Roth and Ishmael Reed (Xiamen UP, 2004), and The Canonization of Contemporary African American Literature (Xian Jiaotong UP, 2015). And her forthcoming book New York Intellectual’s Cultural Criticism will be published in 2019. Currently, she is working on questions of literary awards and cultural productions; post-9/11 fictions; and contemporary American memoirs.

She could be reached at yzeng2646@hunnu.edu.cn

Dr. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez - Visiting Professor (October 2019 - March 2020)

Dr. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is a Professor in General Sociology in the Institute for Sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Germany) and Visiting Professor in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth (South Africa). She has been an Associate Professor in Transcultural Studies in the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies Department at the University of Manchester, UK and an Assistant Professor in Sociology in the Institute of Sociology, University of Hamburg.   

Dr. Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s study Sociology and Political Sciences and Romance Studies (Francophone and Latin American Studies) at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany, Université Lumière II, Lyon, France, and in Quito, Ecuador. She has been a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies, UCSC; Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre of Women Studies at the University of Albuquerque; Humboldt Feodor-Lynen Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Research Fellow in the Five College Women’s Studies Research Centre, USA. In 1999 she received the prestigious Augsburg Research Prize for Intercultural Studies for her PhD Intellektuelle Migrantinnen. Subjektivitäten im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Intellectual Female Migrants: Subjectivities in Times of Globalization). Amongs her publications are Spricht die Subalterne Deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik (Does the Subaltern Speak German? Migration and Postcolonial Critique, with Hito Steyerl 2002); Migration, Domestic Work and Affect. A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labour (2010), Decolonising European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches (2010, with Boatcă and Costa). More recently, she has worked on Creolising Europe. Legacies and Transformations (2015, with Tate). Currently, she is working on questions of decolonial mourning; creolizing conviviality; institutional racism and affect in Higher Education; and the coloniality of migration. For further information, please visit Dr. Gutierrez Rodriguez's profile on ResearchGate and Academia.

Dr. Maria Mayerchyk - Visiting Professor (2019- 2020)

Dr. Maria Mayerchyk holds the Candidate of Sciences Degree in History with a specialization in Ethnology from the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Recently Dr. Mayerchyk is affiliated with the Ethnology Institute of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. She is also a founding editor in chief of the “Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies” and a vice-director of the “Centre for Cultural Anthropological Studies” (NGO).

Dr. Mayerchyk has been a recipient of a number of research grants and fellowships at the Harvard University (USA, Shklar Research Fellowship), the Lund University (Sweden, Visby Program), University of Alberta (Canada, Kule Postdoctoral Fellowship), University of South Florida (USA, Fulbright Scholar Program), Center for Advanced Studies Sofia (Bulgaria, Gerda Henkel Fellowship), Central European University (Budapest, Curriculum Program Research grant), and International Association for Humanities (one year stipend).

She has delivered a numerous public talks and conference presentations in Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Russia, the UK, Ukraine, and the USA.

Maria is an author of a number of publications including a monograph Body and Ritual: Structural-Semantic Analysis of Ukrainian Family Rites (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011). She edited a series of special issues of journals including one dedicated to the issue of Ukrainian folklore in Canada (Narodoznavchi Zoshyty, 2010/3-4) and recently published critically annotated collection of folklore Inventing the Obscene: The Hidden Collections of Fedir Vovk (the Ethnography of Sexuality in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries) (Krytyka, 2018) to which she has written an extended introduction.
Her research interests include history/ethnology/anthropology of sexuality, queer theory, feminist epistemologies, genealogies/geopolitics of knowledge, decolonial option, diaspora studies, ethnology, and critical folklore studies.

Dr. Iryna Skubii - Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professorship (2019-2020)

Dr. Iryna Skubii is an Associate Professor at the Department for UNESCO “Philosophy of human communication”, Social and Humanitarian Disciplines at Petro Vasylenko Kharkiv National Technical University of Agriculture. She holds a PhD degree from Karazin Kharkiv National University in 2013. In 2019-2020 Dr. Skubii will be Tompkins Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta.

Iryna published her book “Trade in Kharkiv in the years of NEP (1921-1929): economy and everyday life” in 2017 (in Ukrainian). During her stay at the University of Alberta, she will be working on her second book project, which deals with consumption and materiality in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920-1930s through gender, age, and spatial dimensions.

She was a fellow at Petro Jacyk Visiting Scholars Program in the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto (2019), where she undertook the project devoted to the material world of Ukrainian children during the Holodomor. She was also a fellow of German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians at the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich (2016), where she was working on the children’s consumption in early Soviet Ukraine.

She got the research grants from Shevchenko Scientific Society in America, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Holodomor Research and Educational Consortium. Iryna participated in various conferences, seminars, and summer schools in Ukraine, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Russia.

She is a member of Association for Women in Slavic Studies and International Association for the Humanities.

Her research interests include economic and social history of Soviet Ukraine, consumption and materiality, consumption and famine, history of childhood, gender studies. She is also working on the research project devoted to the development of tourism in Ukraine and its influence on historical memory.