Thinking the Literature of Islands

Thérèse Migraine-George is the author of African Women and Representation: From Performance to Politics (Africa World Press, 2008), From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), French Gastronomy in the US: Transatlantic Foodways and New Convivialities (Routledge, 2025), a book of essays, and two novels. She has published on Francophone writers, African literatures, cultures, and films, and queer studies. 

Li Qi Peh is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. She completed her PhD at Columbia, and was previously a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program. Her works have appeared or are due to appear in Configurations, ELH, and SEL Studies in English Literature. Her first book, Friction and Flow: Bodies in Motion in the Long Eighteenth Century, is currently under review.

Yuke Song recently completed her MA in Chinese Studies at SOAS University of London, following a BA in English Literature at McGill University. She is interested in global modernism and world literature. Currently, she is preparing to pursue a PhD in Comparative Literature. In her free time, she has published poetry pieces in literary journals and engaged in local creative writing communities, which deepens her interest in poetics and the creative dimensions of world literature.

Joseph Keith is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University. He is the author of Unbecoming Americans:Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship (Rutgers UP, 2013). His work has appeared in The American Quarterly as well as in The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, and Archipelagic American Studies (Duke, 2017). His current research project is entitled “Islands and the Aberrant Geography of US Empire.”

Jace Jung is a second year Ph.D. student in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His research is on contemporary global Anglophone literature, island and archipelagic cultural production, ecocriticism, and posthuman theory. His research examines the interspecies entanglements between the sea/landscape in global anglophone oceanic novels to explore a posthuman polyphony and the ocean as an archive that subverts the image of the island as a dys/utopia.

Solihin is a fourth year PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. Housed in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, they are currently trying to lock in for their Qualifying Examination whose proposed fields include: "Literatures of the Malay World," "Literatures of the Islamic World," and "Maritime Histories of Southeast Asia." 

Ethan K Hill is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. At Stanford, he coordinates the Focal Group on Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone. His research engages literary studies with legal studies as they apply to Spanish maritime literature of the long 19th century. He seeks to understand how legislation and morals change while on the high seas, which foreground romanticized outlaw figures.

Jeff Noh is an assistant professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses on Asian North American literature. His recent article on H. T. Tsiang's Ellis Island poems appeared in American Literary History.