Decolonizing Comparative Methodologies Through Non-Canonical Imaginaries

Dr. Sarah Al-Faisal is an academic and former Dean at Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, where she also held multiple academic and administrative leadership roles and contributed to the university’s strategic plan. She is a Board Member of the Saudi Human Rights Commission and a UNITAR Human Rights Fellow. Her research bridges literature, cultural criticism, and human rights, with a focus on performativity, identity, and Arabic literature in global contexts.

Tianyi Shou is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, specializing in global imperialism, transnational modernism, and global Asias. She is working on a book project that explores how 20th-century Chinese and Caribbean writers reimagined global space-times through relations with racialized cultural others. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Twentieth-Century Literature, MCLC, Comparative Literature Studies, and the 2024 ACLA State of the Discipline Report.

Tamar Barbakadze is the SNSF Postdoctoral Researcher at the UQAM. She holds a PhD in Arts from the University of Lausanne, and a joint master’s degree in European Literary Cultures (Italy, France). She is an author of several articles and the monograph Catherine Colomb’s Vision of Time: In Dialogue with Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf (Peter Lang, 2022). Her current research focuses on the questions of decolonization, indigeneity and ecology in literary studies.

Agathe Dubois is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne. Her work examines autobiographical writings of Patrick Chamoiseau through orality, memory, and plural voice as decolonial strategies. She has presented at the Alliance Française on magical realism and Creole literature, and at Université Laval on anticolonial solidarities. She also teaches French and philosophy at the Lycée Français in Cuenca, Ecuador.

Marie Julie dite Marie Juillet ou encore Mademoiselle Marie Juillet est artiste, poétesse et chercheuse indépendante en arts, langages et littératures.Elle porte sur son attention sur la porosité comme langage. Sa praxis et Sa poíēsis  questionnent et se nourrissent de voyages, de rencontres, et d’altérité en tous contextes. Elle privilégie l’expérience d’une production artistique à son résultat efficient dans tous les contextes où celle-ci se rend perceptible.

Vanessa Holyoak is an interdisciplinary Asian American writer and artist and a doctoral candidate in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. She is researching the liberatory potential of nocturnal states of indeterminacy in the creative practices of Asian diasporic, Francophone, and queer artists, writers, and filmmakers. Her first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, was published in May 2023 by Sming Sming Books, and explores the longing for ecological opacity in an era of hyper-illumination.

Joanna Cumyn has a Master`s degree in English from the Université de Montréeal. She currently teaches English Literature and Culture at Cégep de la Gaspésie et des Iles, Québec. Her work focuses on postcolonialism, diasporic literatures in English and French from Québec, and sustainable identities. 

Felipe Román Lozano is a Colombian scholar and writer based in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has taught literature and humanities while developing research on postcolonial studies, indigenous voices, and Latin American and African cultural history. His academic work examines silenced narratives in canonical texts and explores the intersections of literature, memory, and colonial violence in Latin America and beyond.

Dr. Jana Konstantinova is a researcher and writer on political economy, urban theory, and ecology. She holds a doctorate from EPFL, where she studied the intersections of capitalism, urbanization, and ecological crisis. Drawing on Marxist ecology and the Yugoslav Praxis School, her work critiques neoliberal development and advances equity-oriented alternatives. She is also founder of People’s Infrastructure, a platform for fair, transparent small-scale PPPs.

My name is Dana Nevels, and I am a PhD student at The University of Missouri.  

An Associate Professor at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Her research focuses on pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics, and translation, with a strong emphasis on the Arabic language and its cultural contexts.

Yichu Wang is a 3rd-year English PhD student from Cornell University. His work explores modern/contemporary poetics, race, and aesthetic theory, with excursions into transnational modernisms, trans studies, and media studies. He received a MA in English at UVa, where he wrote his thesis on Agha Shahid Ali's relational poetics of making and the limits and affordances of the lyric as a form that, haunted by the loss of the beloved other, comes to be imagined as a negative space of non-appearance.