Our speakers

Marina De Chiara 

is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Naples L'Orientale. She is the author of Percorsi nell'oblio: Poetiche postcoloniali di creolizzazione (1997), La traccia dell'altra: Scrittura, identità e miti del femminile (2001), Oltre la gabbia: Ordine coloniale e arte di confine (2005), and La Babele Postcoloniale (2017). Her research and further publications focus on modern and contemporary Anglophone literature, gender and postcolonial studies, and Chicano Studies.

Maricela Becerra

is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California in Los Angeles. Her dissertation focuses on the 1968 Mexican Student Movement and the Tlatelolco Student Massacre of October 2nd, 1968. She analyzes the representations and memory of these events in the 21st century and their contributions to the collective memory. Currently, she is working on the post-memories of the Tlatelolco massacre in contemporary Mexican authors and artists, exploring the role of fiction in memory and history.

Phil Tiemeyer

is Associate Professor of History at Kansas State University and is currently serving as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. His first book, Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, was awarded the 2015 John Boswell Prize for best monograph in the field of LGBT history. He is currently researching a second book, Aerial Ambassadors: National Air Carriers and US Power in the Jet Age, examining the formation of national airlines after World War II. His Ph.D. is in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Alessandro Buffa 

is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of Naples L'Orientale. He is currently drafting a book proposal based on his dissertation, "The Blues Continuum: New York Calls, Naples Responds," and working on a new project tentatively titled "Urban Rhythms and Modern Literary Scenes." His published work includes "Blues in the Bay: The Bluesology of James Senese and Raiz" (2016), "On the Street Where you Live: Italian American Doo-Wop in Postwar New York" (2009) and Transiti Mediterranei: Ripensare la Modernità (2008).

Ondřej Matějka

is an associate professor of contemporary history at the Institute of Area Studies - Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic); main research interests: social history of religion in the Czech lands in the 20th century, generational history (68ers), transnational history of youth movements (YMCA).

Albena Bakratcheva

is a Professor of American Literature at New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria. She has written various books and essays on nineteenth-century American literature, including The Call of the Green. Thoreau and Place-Sense in American Writing (2009) and Visibility Beyond the Visible. The Poetic Discourse of American Transcendentalism (Rodopi, Amsterdam - NY, 2013), and has translated Thoreau's and Emerson's major works in Bulgarian. In 2014 the Thoreau Society gave her the Walter Harding Distinguished Service Award.

Holger Nehring

is Professor in Contemporary European History at University of Stirling. He is a historian specialized in post-1945 Western Europe, with special interests in the history of social movements, protests and political activism in Britain and West Germany, the history of violence and peace, the social history of the Cold War, and environmental history. His book Politics of Security, a comparative and transnational study of British and West German protests against nuclear weapons and their meanings in the context of the Cold War from 1945 to the late 1960s, was published by Oxford University Press in October 2013. 

Shuxi Yin

teaches at Shantou University, Shantou City, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China. In 2014, Professor Yin was a Constitutional Law Research Fellow at the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University Law School. During his time at BYU, Professor Yin developed a taxonomy of document categories appropriate to the study of religious and legal/constitutional issues in China, located hundreds of relevant documents, and prepared them for inclusion, in English and Chinese, in this ReligLaw Database.  

Marco Petrelli

holds a Ph.D. in English-language Literatures from the Sapienza University of Rome with a dissertation titled A Southern Mode of the Imagination: Space and Myth in Cormac McCarthy's Novels. His research is mainly focused upon the literature and culture of the US South. His other research interests include, but are not limited to, 20th century US literature, postmodernism, geocriticism and graphic narrative studies. He published essays on Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. He is the co-founder of Sapienza Graduate Forum, a yearly international symposium for US Studies.  

Derek Catsam

is Professor of History and Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin and is Senior Research Associate at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he spent 2016 as the Hugh Le May Fellow in the Humanities. He is the author of Freedom's Main Line: the Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazil's 2014 World Cup, and Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan's Diary of the 2004 Season. He is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and on the 1981 South African national rugby team's tour to the United States.

Nicola Paladin

is a Ph.D. student at Sapienza University of Rome and he is currently working on Early American Literature, in particular on the political writings of the American Revolution. He is also member of the editorial staff of the journal "Costellazioni", at the department of European, American and Intercultural Studies at Sapienza University. He has recently worked on comics studies, with particular interest on war comics, and the production of Joe Sacco and Frank Miller.

Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel

is an Associate Professor of cultural studies at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University. Her scholarly interests focus on history and reception of American popular culture in Poland. She is an author of books and articles on American popular culture, Americanization and mass media communications.

Tomáš Klvaňa

holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in the U.S. and an M.A. from Charles University in the Czech Republic. He was also a Shorenstein Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. Dr. Klvaňa served as the Press Spokesperson and Policy Adviser for President of the Czech Republic, Special Government Envoy for Communications of the Missile Defense Program. He is a founder and Vice-President of the Aspen Institute Prague. In 2012 he received the Distinguished Leadership Award for Internationals from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Since 2017 Tomáš Klvaňa has been teaching as a visiting Professor at Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague.

György Toth

holds degrees from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary (M.A. in English Language & Lit and American Studies) and The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA (Ph.D. in American Studies). In his academic specializations, György combines U.S. cultural and social history with Transnational American Studies, Performance Studies, and Memory Studies to yield interdisciplinary insights into the politics of social and cultural movements in the U.S. and post-1945 Europe. After working as assistant professor at the Department of North American Studies at Charles University in Prague, the Czech Republic, since December 2014 György has been serving as Lecturer in post-1945 U.S. History and Transatlantic Relations at the Division of History and Politics of the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. His book From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie on the transatlantic alliance for American Indian sovereignty in the Late Cold War was published by SUNY Press in 2016, and he is co-author of Memory in Transatlantic Relations from the Cold War to the Global War on Terror, forthcoming by Routledge.

Further information