Mariaconcetta Costantini is Professor of English at G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, where she teaches English literature and Anglophone literature. She has published articles and book chapters on Victorian literature and culture both in Italy and abroad, and authored two monographs: Poesia e sovversione. Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins (2000) and Venturing into Unknown Waters: Wilkie Collins and the Challenge of Modernity (2008). Her publications also include essays on contemporary fiction and Anglophone writers, with particular attention to West African authors (Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri). She has explored different aspects of Okri’s oeuvre, given papers on him and published articles, book chapters and a monograph (Behind the Mask. A Study of Ben Okri’s Fiction, 2002). In 2011 she gave two papers on his poetry and fiction at the MLA Convention held in Los Angeles.

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Christiane Fioupou, Emeritus Professor at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, specialises in African Studies, particularly Nigerian and Ghanaian literature. She taught English and African Literature at the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) for twelve years. She has published a monograph on Soyinka –– La route: réalité et représentation dans l'œuvre de Wole Soyinka (Rodopi: 1994) ––, and translated two of his plays into French: The Road (La route, Hatier: 1988) and King Baabu (Baabou roi, Actes Sud Papiers, 2005). Her other publications include articles on Nigerian literature and the French translation of Niyi Osundare’s volume of poems, Waiting Laughters /Rires en attente (Présence Africaine: 2004). She is currently translating Opera Wonyosi, Soyinka’s adaptation of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.

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Vanessa Guignery is Professor of English and Post-colo­nial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of sev­eral books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts. She has pub­lished arti­cles on var­ious British and Indian con­tem­po­rary authors, as well as a mono­graph on B.S. Johnson, This is not Fiction. The True Novels of B.S. Johnson (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She edited and co-edited sev­eral col­lec­tions of essays on con­tem­po­rary British and post-colo­nial lit­er­a­ture including (Re)map­ping London (Publibook, 2008), Voices and Silence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), Chasing Butterflies: Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories (Publibook, 2011) and Hybridity: Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Forthcoming are her collection of interviews, Novelists in the New Millenium (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Seeing and Being: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (PUF, 2012).

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Christian Gutleben is Professor at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France, where he teaches and researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. He is the author of one of the earliest critical surveys of neo-Victorian literature, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Rodopi, 2001), as well as co-editor (with Susana Onega) of Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film. He has also published books on the English campus novel and Graham Greene, as well as numerous articles on postmodernism in British literature, and is co-editor (with Marie-Luise Kohlke) of Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, including Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering, Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, and a volume on Neo-Victorian Gothic to be published in autumn 2012.

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Adnan Mahmutovic is a Bosnian-Swedish lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Stockholm University. His academic work has focused on the immigrant writers from South-East Asia and Africa and is collected in a book entitled Ways of Being Free (Rodopi 2012). His fiction is mainly about the aggression on Bosnia during the 90s and Bosnian disapora in Scandinavia. He has published a novel, Thinner than a Hair (Cinnamon Press), as well as many short stories, collected in How to Fare Well and Stay Fair (Salt Publishing).

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Claire Omhovère is a Professor of English and Commonwealth Literature at University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3 (France). She is affiliated to the research group EMMA (Etudes Montpellieraines du Monde Anglophone). She is the current editor of Commonwealth Essays & Studies and the president of the SEPC (Société d’Etude des Pays du Commonwealth). She has published articles in French and Canadian journals and contributed book chapters on the novels of Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Wiebe, Jane Urquhart and Miriam Toews (notably in M. Dvorak, and W. H. New, eds., Tropes and Territories, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007; H. Ventura, and M. Dvorak, eds., Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre, Peter Lang, 2010; P. Guibert, ed., Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries, Rodopi, 2011). She is the author of Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2007).

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Catherine Pesso-Miquel is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Lyon 2. Her research focuses on the contemporary novel and on travel literature, exploring questions of narratology, intertextuality, postcolonialism, and problematics linked to identity and feminism. She has published books and articles on American novelists (Willa Cather and Paul Auster), British novelists (Graham Swift in particular) and Indo-Anglian authors. She published a monography on Paul Auster in 1996 (Toiles trouées et désert lunaires dans Moon Palace de Paul Auster, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle), Willa Cather in 2001 (Alexander’s Bridge, de Willa Cather, Éditions du Temps), Salman Rushdie in 2007 (Salman Rushdie, l’écriture transportée, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux) and on Anita Desai in 2008 ((In Custody de Anita Desai, Atlande).

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Kerry-Jane Wallart is a lecturer at Paris-Sorbonne. After first focusing on contemporary Caribbean theatre she has published articles on such African playwrights as Athol Fugard and Wole Soyinka. Her research concerns itself more generally with the migration and mutation of genre in post-colonial literatures.

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Philip Whyte is currently Professor of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Tours (France). He obtained an M.A. (Durham University, UK) in French Studies in 1976 and has a PhD from the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle (1992). He has published a three volume study on the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2003-08) and a number of articles on West and East African Anglophone writers (Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awoonor, Biyi Bendele-Thomas, Syl Cheney-Coker, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kojo Laing, Jamal Mahjoub, Ben Okri, M. J. Vassanji) as well as Hanif Kureishi and Kazuo Ishiguro. He is Vice-President of the Société d’Etudes des Pays du Commonwealth (SECP).