Program

Dr. Peter Maurits (Department of English and American Studies, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Nürnberg) will open this year’s conference with a talk on the Mozambican ghost story. Drawing upon Derridean notion of spectres, Dr. Maurits will illuminate the history of the Mozambican hauntology, discussing the notion of ghosts in an arguably underrepresented genre of African ghost story, with a view to delineating its impact in the postcolonial contexts. Arguing that the ghost story was a "foreign form" imported to Mozambique from Europe (Maurits 2015: 181) uses the genre to examine the extent of imperial powers within literary contexts with the aim of problematising the notion of haunting both in metaphorical and literal senses.

Dr. Peter Maurits has earned his PhD on the Mozambique ghost story from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2015. He received a DFG postdoctoral fellowship and is currently working at the University of Nürnberg. His latest article, "Fuel Scavengers: Climate Colonialism in the South African Science Fiction of Alex Latimer’s Space Race, Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Poison, and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9" can be found here.

Ifeoluwa Aboluwade is a senior research associate with the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple” and a Habilitation candidate in the Department of English Literature, University of Bayreuth, where she also lectures. She is a research affiliate with the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, University of the Witwatersrand and a recipient of multiple international research fellowships such as Fulbright and DAAD.

Dr. Aboluwade will tell us about the importance of agility and adaptability in academia. While it feels like the world is ending when things don’t work out, there is always a plan B! (and C; and D; and so on)

She is the author of Subversive Transformations: Translation, Orature and Multimodality in Selected Plays by Femi Osofisan (Edition Assemblage, 2020) and co-editor of the forthcoming African Shakespeare: Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations
(Routledge, 2024)

Robert Craig gained his PhD in Modern German Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge in 2016. After a DAAD postdoctoral fellowship at the FU Berlin, he moved to Bamberg, where he taught English, American and German literary and cultural studies between 2017 and 2024, published in the environmental and medical humanities, talked both locally and nationally on postcolonial topics, and appeared in both regional and national media. From September 2024 onwards, he is based at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen as Project Coordinator of the “Transforming Curricula” Project in the EUPeace University Alliance for Peace, Justice, and Inclusive Societies.

In his talk, he will tell us about his own move from academia into academic management. "From a place of (sometimes sleepless) uncertainty as to what on earth I was going to do with a PhD in modernist literature, new paths and possibilities slowly began to open. There’s no one-size-fits-all plan for PhDs and early career researchers in the arts and humanities – there never has been – but I’d like to share some of my own experiences, and a few strategies, for making unexpected transitions in strange and uncertain times…".

Hanna Teichler is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She holds a PhD from the department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt, and an M.A. in English and Romance Studies. Her research interests include Anglophone world literature, memory studies, oceanic literature and cultures, ecofiction and environmental studies, as well as postcolonial literatures. Hanna is the co-editor of the book series Mobilizing Memories and of the Handbook Series in Memory Studies (with Rebekah Vince, both Brill). She co-directs the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform with Astrid Erll. In 2023, Hanna co-founded a new journal in memory studies, the Memory Studies Review (Brill, with Justyna Tabaszewska, Erol Gülüm, and Paul Leworthy). 

Life in academia is not easy, especially if all you want to do is bury yourself in your research. Lovely as many academics are, many of us are quite shy, and yet networking is one of the prime skills to possess if you wish to succeed! Dr. Teichler will give us some insight into the art of connecting and how useful it can be when it comes to job hunting, publishing, and making this messy experience more enjoyable.