Helen Abbott graduated from King's College London, where she wrote her dissertation entitled: The Aesthetics of Voice in the Works of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Her research interests include rhetorics, poetics, music and aesthetics 1850-1950, with particular emphasis on theories of voice; post-romantic French poetry, in particular Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Valéry, and post-romantic French song; developments in aesthetic theory from the nineteenth-century onwards; influence of French symbolist poetics on early twentieth-century Italian poetry. She is currently working on the completion of her second monograph entitled: Killing off Poetry: Baudelaire Revisited.

May E. Bletz graduated from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, in Latin American Studies and obtained her PhD from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Her monograph Immigration and Acculturation in Brazil and Argentina, 1890-1929 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. Dr Bletz is currently working on a proposal for her next book, tentatively titled La maestra sufrida: Women, Teaching and Nation Building in Argentina and Brazil, 1840-1940. During her stay as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute she will research the narratives of European governesses to Latin America.

Adriana Bontea graduated from the University of California and is currently Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex. Her book, Les Origines de la Comédie Française Classique, which was published in 2007, re-situates comedy within the Renaissance intellectual, aesthetic and stage-performance contexts. Her current project is a book-length study entitled Faces and Masks and aims to explore the expressive possibilities of masks within the wider anthroplogical context of the mysterious nature of human faces. The study will examine among others Ensor's, Picasso's and Klee's painted masks of the commedia in the context of Lévi-Strauss' anthropological interpretation of Caduveo face paintings.

Erica Carter is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute, and Professor of German Studies at King's College London. A historian of film and popular culture, she teaches, researches and writes on German-language cinemas, and on gender and consumption. Her books include How German is She? Post-war West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (University of Michigan Press, 1997); The German Cinema Book (co-edited with Tim Bergfelder and Deniz Göktürk; BFI, 2002); Dietrich's Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (BFI, 2004); and Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (with Rodney Livingstone; Berghahn, 2010). She is currently researching a new book on melodrama and the émigré sensibility.  

Patrícia Oliveira da Silva McNeill received her doctorate in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from King's College London. Her principal research interests lie in European Modernism and in 19th and 20th century Portuguese and Comparative Literature. 'Her book, Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), is a comparative study of W. B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa. She has also written on Portuguese and English Modernist Magazines and on ekphrasis in Jorge de Sena and José Saramago. She is currently looking at the reception of Darwin and Darwinism by the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz, one of Portugal's most read and translated 19th century writers.

Ruth Dawson is Emeritus Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Her research combines feminist analysis of literature and history, focusing in particular on European representations of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia during her lifetime and afterwards.

Joan deJean is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of nine books on French literature, history and culture during the reign of Louis XIV. In her latest book The Age of Comfort (Bloomsbury, 2009) she considers the evolution of each room in the modern home, looking at the effects of new objects on body language, family configurations and the the larger community. Her current research centres on the many ways in which Paris of the 17th century, in the course of that crucial period in Franch history and culture, was transformed and began to take on its modern identity.

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese at University College Dublin. Her main research areas are contemporary Spanish and Portuguese narrative. She has published books on Juan Goytisolo and Carmen Martín Gaite, and articles on several contemporary Spanish novelists. She has co-edited two volumes of essays on cultural memory in Spain and Portugal (the second due out with Peter Lang in 2011), and is currently writing a monograph on narrative mediations of civil war, war and dictatorship memory in Spain since the 1990s.

Evelyn Ferraro completed a PhD in Italian Studies at Brown University (USA) with a dissertation entitled 'Moving Thresholds: Liminal Writing in the Italian Diaspora', which explored Italian national identity through the cultures produced by 20th-century migrations to English-speaking North American countries. Her research interests and publications are within the areas of migrant literature and cinema, and the relationships between theories of space and migrant identity, nationalism, post-colonialism, and writing. She is currently working on a project about the documentary film Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on Earth, 2008) and the construction of an archive of migrant memories.

Isabel Capeloa Gil is Professor of Cultural Theory at the Catholic University of Portugal and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Communication and Culture. She is currently Dean of the School of Humanities and Director of the Doctoral Program 'The Lisbon Consortium'. Her main research areas include intermedia studies, gender studies as well as representations of war and conflict. She is the author of Mythographies. Figurations of Antigone, Cassandra and Medea in German 20th-Century Drama (2007), and co-editor of Landscapes of Memory. Envisaging the Past/Remembering the Future (2004); The Colour of Difference: On German Contemporary Culture (2005), as well as The Poetics of Navigation (2007) and Fleeting, Floating, Flowing: Water Writing and Modernity (2008). She is also editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Comunicação e Cultura. She has been Visiting Professor at numerous institutions in Europe and the USA, and Fulbright Scholar at Western Michigan University in 2001. She is currently conducting research for her book The (In)Visibility of War in Modern Culture.

Claire Gorrara received her doctorate from Oxford University and is currently Professor of French Studies at Cardiff University. She has written extensively on memory and representation of the German Occupation and on French crime fiction, establishing links between that fiction, historiography and the difficult legacies of the Occupation period. Her current research project, Past Crimes, Present Memories: French Crime Fictions and the Second World War, explores France's preoccupation with memories of the War through an examination of popular culture and one of its most enduring forms, crime fiction.

Andrea Hajek is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. She received her doctorate in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick, with a dissertation on the public memory of student protest movements in the late 1970s. Previously, she studied French, Comparative Literature and Italian at the University of Utrecht. Since 2009, she is Senior Editorial Assistant for the Sage journal Memory Studies. More recently, she has also been appointed Assistant Editor of Modern Italy, the journal of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI).

Gisela Holfter is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute, Senior Lecturer in German and Joint Director of the Centre for Irish-German Studies at the University of Limerick. She studied in Cologne, Cambridge and St. Louis, and worked as a Lektor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. She has published widely in German literature and Irish-German relations. One of her main research areas at present is Ireland as a destination for German-speaking refugees 1933-1945.

Sharon Jordan received her doctorate degree in art history from the City University of New York, where her dissertation 'Philosophers, Artists, and Saints: Ernst L. Kirchner and Male Friendship in Paintings, 1914-1917' was an iconographic examination of the German Expressionist artist’s devotion to the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche. She was Curatorial Research Assistant at the Neue Galerie, a Museum for Austrian and German Expressionism in New York, and has taught numerous modern art and art history courses at Parsons, the New School for Design, and the City University of New York. She is currently an independent scholar in London where her research interests include German Expressionism, Nietzsche, and an ongoing study of the influence of the Classical example on modern German artists of the early twentieth century.

Teresa Louro received her doctorate from Birkbeck College, University of London, and her MA from Queen Mary, University of London. She was Course Leader for the BA in Gender and Text in History and Programme Leader for the Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series (IES). Her research focuses on gender, late 19th-century and early 20th-century English literature. She is Assistant Researcher at the University of Porto, and is currently working on the feminist poetics of Ana Luísa Amaral.

Matthias Mansky is a Sylvia Naish Research Fellow at the IGRS. He studied German Philology at the University of Vienna, where he completed his doctoral thesis on the Austrian playwright Cornelius von Ayrenhoff (1733-1819) in 2010. His research interests focus on the Viennese theatre and Austrian literature of the 18th and 19th century. He has presented conference papers and published articles on authors, such as Ayrenhoff, Gebler, Klemm, Steigentesch or Raimund, and on the early Viennese reception of Schiller and Shakespeare in the 18th century.

John Phillips is Emeritus Professor of French at London Metropolitan University. He works principally on eighteenth- and late twentieth-century French literature and also on French cinema, focussing on representations of sexuality and gender in both. He has written numerous articles and seven monographs in this area, including three books on D.A.F. de Sade. His latest book on the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet is about to appear with Manchester University Press. Current research includes the preparation of a new English edition of Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu for Oxford University Press's 'Oxford World Classics' series.

Aino Rinhaug is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow of IGRS and University of Oslo, where she received her PhD in 2007. Her literary research focuses on Portuguese literature, in particular Fernando Pessoa and António Lobo Antunes. She has also written on other authors, such as Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Samuel Beckett, William Blake and Charles Dickens.

Octavian Saiu has taught theatre and dramatic literature as Associate Professor at the National University of Theatre and Cinematography (NUTC) in Bucharest and as Guest Lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies (NUTC) and one in Comparative Literature (Otago). He has been actively involved in several worldwide theatre events and academic conferences in Romania, Israel, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Sweden, Ireland, etc. Since 2004, he is the Chair of the Academic Conferences of Sibiu International Theatre Festival. A former co-editor of Theatre Nowadays, he is a founding editor of Romanian Studies in Theatre Theory. He is currently the Vice-President of the Romanian Section of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC). He has published three theatre books, one of which received the Critics’ Award in 2010. He is currently working on the European reception of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco.

Anna Katharina Schaffner is a Sylvia Naish Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute and Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. She has published on avant-garde, concrete and digital poetry, as well as on David Lynch, Franz Kafka and Frank Schulz. She is a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Beyond Text’ project Poetry beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition, and is currently writing a monograph on representations of sexual deviance in early 20th-century literature.

Simone Testa is currently editing for publication a 16th-century treatise on the ideal prince, written in Italian, and his 17th-century manuscript English translation. He has published on political literature of the 16th century, and on Italian Academies (1530-1700). His research interests include the history of political information, and the European intellectual network.

Deirdre Finnerty is a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. She is currently studying for her doctorate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Limerick. While at the Institute she will be examining the representation of Republican mothers in testimony and post-transition (post-1978) literature and cinema of the recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. The expriences contained in women's testimonial narratives of resistance will be compared with the portrayal of Republican motherhood in fictional representations.

Daniel García-Donoso is a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute’s Centre or the Study of Cultural Memory. He is originally from Córdoba (Spain), where he got a Licenciatura in Hispanic Philology in 2005. He is currently a 5th-year doctoral student at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he has also taught courses in Spanish language and translation. His research thus far has led him to realize the importance many contemporary writers from Spain (Miguel Delibes, Manuel Rivas, and Eduardo Mendoza, to name just a few) attribute to religious writing, especially the Bible, secularizing it and at the same time re-evaluating the ethical validity of this type of discourse. While at the IGRS, he will examine the ways in which religious discourse develops into a key analytic through which to access cultural memory in contemporary Spanish fiction, both narrative and film, about the Civil War.

After having spent the year in Darmstadt as a Rotary International Exchange Student and International Ambassador at the Justus-Liebig-Schule Gymnasium, Mary Catherine Lawler worked as a 'Praktikantin' (intern) at the Goethe-Institut in Melbourne, and then went on to obtain both her BA in German Language and Literature and MA in German Literature from Rutgers University. While at the Institute she will be examining Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina as a triangular love story. She also plans to focus on Bachmann’s personal relationships with men to see how her correspondence (particularly with Paul Celan and Hans Werner Henze) may determine Bachmann’s theory of fascism between the sexes.

Mattia Marino is based at Bangor University where he teaches Italian, comparative literature and European ideologies, history and cinema. In 2010 he also lectured in translation and co-organised an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Salford on the concept of crisis. His research focuses on relativism and European identity in literature and cinema, and he writes grotesque poetry. He has conducted research in Catanzaro (Italy), Maastricht, and in America, and published among others in the journal Other Modernities and The Journal of Contemporary European Studies, where his articles focus on Italy and Germany and their relationships to both Eastern and Western Europe, and on texts in English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese representing postcolonial hybridity and social diversity in western identity. Marino is a Junior Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Memory at the IGRS, where he is working on grotesque female bodies in recent novels by, and public interviews with, Italian-, German-, and French-speaking women writers. He has contributed to the European Cinema Research Forum and is a member of the British and American Comparative Literature Associations.

Philipp Redl is a Junior Visiting Fellow at the IGRS. He studied German literature an philosophy at the University of Freiburg (Staatsexamen, 2009). Since 2010 he has been Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institute for German Philology in Heidelberg. His particular interests are in turn-of-the- century literature and 'Editionsphilologie'. Currently, he is working on the relation between poetry and academia 1900-1933.

Renée Winter studied history in Vienna and Paris. Her research interests include film and television, representations of the National Socialist past, gender and migration and post-colonialism. In 2007 she published on Austrian filmic representations of Africa in the 1950s: Nicht alle Weissen schiessen. Afrikarepräsentationen im Österreich der 1950er Jahre im Kontext von (Post-)Kolonialismus und (Post-)Nationalsozialismus [together with Vida Bakondy]. She is currently writing a dissertation about the representation of the National Socialist past in 1960s' Austrian television, and teaching at the Institute for Theatre, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Vienna.