Realism, Globalization, and Cosmopolis

Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University. His recent books include The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (2024); The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies (2023); For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists (2022); Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019); and Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectic Criticism (2014).

Gabriele Lazzari is a Lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Surrey. His research focuses on how contemporary literature engages with transnational migrations and the legacies of colonial and racial modernity. His monograph, New Global Realism, is a comparative studies of contemporary novels that still think in terms of totality. His work has appeared in Comparative Literature, Research in African Literatures, Critical Quarterly, and Public Books.

Ruochen Bo is an Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research examines cinematic forms in relation to philosophical concerns regarding aesthetics and ethics. In 2022-23 she was a Hou Family Predoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Her work has appeared in Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, Film Quarterly, and Asian Ethnicity, among others.

Ashwin Bajaj is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine. He is interested in the global novel, dialectical thought, and postcolonial studies, and his work has either appeared or is forthcoming in NOVEL, Studies in the Novel, and Postmodern Culture.

Eli Park Sorensen is an associate professor in the English Department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought, and critical theory. Sorensen received his PhD in Comparative Literature at UCL in 2007. He was a Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge (2009-2011) and a National Humanities Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2020-2021). He is the author of Postcolonial Studies and the Literary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (Routledge, 2021), and Science Fiction Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and has co-edited the collection East-West Dialogues (Peter Lang, 2020). Sorensen has published articles in journals such as NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Journal of Narrative Theory, Paragraph, Modern Drama, Research in African Literatures, Partial Answers, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Genealogy.

Xiaolu Ma is assistant professor in the Division of Humanities at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She engages in research in the interrelationship of trans-Eurasian literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880–1930) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2024). Her research articles have been published or are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals, including JAS, PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Twentieth-Century China, among others.

Meghan Gorman-DaRif is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University in California. Her research centers on Anglophone novels from India and across Africa, focusing on contemporary forms of realist and historical fiction as well as the Indian Ocean as a framework for literature. She has published articles in the South Asian Review on the contemporary Naxal novel in India, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, and has written several chapters for edited collections including for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms.

Aleksandar Stevic holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale and currently teaches at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He is the author of Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning (Virginia, 2020), editor of The Limits of Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2019) and of a special issue of Genre on aestheticism today (2025, forthcoming). His essays have appeared in New Literary History, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, and ELH, among other venues.

Didier Coste, PhD in French Studies (Literary Aesthetics), PhD in Spanish Studies, HDR in Comparative Literature, Professor of Comparative Literature (retired) is the author of many scholarly articles and several books including A Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature (Routledge 2023) and Modern Indian Literature as Cosmopolis (Routledge 2024). Co-editor of the Migrating Minds Journal, he is also a trilingual award-winning translator, poet, and novelist.

N. Noé is a PhD student in French and Francophone Studies completing his dissertation on theoretical and aesthetic production in the Francophone Caribbean (1981-2007). His presentations on Frankétienne, Glissant, and the relation between poetics and politics in Caribbean literatures earned the 2024 William Slaymaker Essay Prize (Indiana University) and an Honorable Mention at the 38th Annual CIÉF Congress.

Michelle Lee is Andrew Mellon Assistant Professor of French, Francophone and Italian Studies at Wellesley College. Her current manuscript, entitled Imperial Innovations: French Orientalism and the Post-Romantic Travelogue, 1830s-1860s, examines the Orientalist representations produced by Balzac, Flaubert, Du Camp and Baudelaire between 1830 and 1860.

Ipshita Chanda has taught comparative literature since 1993, first at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and since 2017 at the English and Foreign Languages University , Hyderabad, India.

Anjalee Nadarajan is a PhD candidate in English literature at York University. Her dissertation focuses on the role of patience within Kim Stanley Robinson's and Thomas Pynchon's novels. One of her research interests in on formal innovations in the novel and their relationship to migrant realities.

Alexandra Yan is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature department at UC Irvine. In her dissertation, "The Fourth Way Literary Imagination: Alternative Foci and the Entangled Matrix of Colonial Japanese-language Literature, 1930-1945,” she reads the Japanese-language fiction of Kim Sa-ryang, Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi, and Long Ying-zong, for their literary imagination of a fourth way beyond the multilateral matrix of Japanese imperialism, Western modernity, and colonial nationalism.

Natasha Belfort Palmeira was born in São Paulo in 1991. She holds a degree in Social Sciences from PUC-SP and a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo and the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, with a dissertation on the novels of Machado de Assis and Gustave Flaubert. Among other works, she translated The Bildungsroman by Franco Moretti (Todavia, 2020). She was a Temporary Teaching and Research Associate (ATER) at the University of Clermont Auvergne.

After obtaining an MA in Documentary by Practice at Royal Holloway University in London, Luigi Storto obtained a PhD at Jean Jaurès University in Toulouse, with a research on the relationships between documentary codes and fictional languages. He is currently working on an essay based on his doctoral thesis

Indrani Mukherjee retired as a professor from the Jawaharlal Nehru University last December, after 30 years of teaching Spanish and Latin American Studies.The last book that she published is entitled, "Posthumanist Nomadisms across Non-Oedepal Spatiality" by Vernon Press.

Ruth S. Wenske is a senior lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her research focuses on contemporary Anglophone African literature, with a secondary research interest in the interconnectedness of literature, literacy, and language in East Africa. She has published in a range of literary and educational journals, most recently co-editing a special issue on African sf for Science Fiction Studies.