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Post-doctoral fellows & visiting scholars

(2023-2024)

Yuan Li

Yuan Li

Yuan Li is a Professor of English at the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from Beijing Normal University in 2004. She started her academic career as a lecturer and later became an associate professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she co-founded the first Irish Studies Centre in China in 2007.

Yuan Li served as an academic visitor at Cambridge University, UK, from 2008 to 2009 and held the position of a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department of Harvard University from 2013 to 2014. She is an alumna of the Harvard Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research (attended in 2014 and 2022).

Currently, she is an academic advisor to Guangzhou Drama Centre and a member of the IASIL bibliography committee. Professor Li's teaching and research interests encompass Contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama and theatre, translation studies, and comparative literature. Her published books include An Aesthetic Dandy: A Study of Oscar Wilde (author, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press 2008), By the Bog of Cats… (translator, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press 2010; Translation Grant Program by Literature Ireland), A History of 20th Century Irish Drama and Theatre (author, The Commercial Press 2019), Franz Kafka and Chinese Culture (translator, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022; Sponsored by Chinese Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences). She has contributed articles to journals such as Asian Theatre JournalNew Theatre QuarterlyJournal of Popular CultureForeign Literature Review, Foreign Literature, and Foreign Literature Quarterly.

Portrait of Fadel Jobran-Alsawayfa

Fadel Jobran-Alsawayfa

Fadel Jobran-Alsawayfa is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University. He is an assistant professor at Bethlehem University, Palestine, a pedagogue and a poet. He teaches courses in drama in education, storytelling, theatre, play and creativity, arts-based research and creativity in practice. His forthcoming book with Brill Sense Press, The Road to Found Poetry: Understanding People’s Lived Experiences Creatively is based on his doctoral thesis in which he experimented with found poetry and explored the potential of using it as a means of data analysis, presentation and dissemination in qualitative research.

Jobran-Alsawayfa received his doctorate degree in 2019 in the Faculty of Education and Children’s Services at the University of Chester, England. He holds a master’s degree in Comparative Education from the Institute of Education, University of London, England. He also completed a bachelor degree in English Language and Literature at Hebron University, Palestine. He uses self-reflexive methodologies like self-study, poetic inquiry, autoethnography, drama, theatre and narrative inquiry. He is passionate about research and teaching methods that are inspired by the arts and use creativity.

Past visiting scholars

Domingos da Cruz

Domingos da Cruz

Cruz’s research currently focuses on Mental Illness as Political Problem: Kant’s Principle of Human Dignity and the Human Rights as Instruments to Protect Mad. He is also a guest researcher at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Communication and Media, in South Africa (ongoing) and Junior Researcher at the University of Zaragoza, Department of Philosophy, in Spain (ongoing). Over the last eight years, his main research topics have been on Human Rights, Philosophy of Liberation and Authoritarian Regime in Angola and as result he has published eleven books in these areas in Portuguese.

Camille Renarhd

As a settler, performer, researcher, teacher based in Tiohtià:ke (now called Montreal), Camille Renarhd uses dance, image and sound to revitalize the relationship with the body in social, poetic and physical/biological realms. After a master’s degree in Fine Arts, she spent one year in Togo where she developed interdisciplinary workshops and groups of theoretical reflection. She worked with the international research in choreography group (ESSAI) at the National Superior Centre of Contemporary Dance (France) where she developed various projects (e.g., performances, site specific works, and colloquies). She has taught and performed internationally including work with Christine Quoiraud (Company Maï Juku, Min Tanaka), Boris Charmatz, and Deborah Hay. camillerenarhd.com

Rachel Zellars

Black Studies Consultant for Concordia University Black Studies Initiative (CUBC) and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC)

Rachel Zellars is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on slavery and Black migration to and through the Maritimes beginning with the American Revolution, gender, and the relationship between disability/neurodiversity and anti-blackness. She completed her bachelors in philosophy at Howard University, holds a masters degree from Cornell University, and a PhD in education from McGill University.  She is also a lawyer. Recently, she completed a two year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont, where she studied with historian Harvey A. Whitfield. She is also a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the award winning online blog of the African American Intellectual Historical Society.  

Natalie S. Loveless

Natalie S. Loveless

Natalie S. Loveless is an associate professor at the University of Alberta, where she teaches in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture and directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory (researchcreation.ca). Her forthcoming book with Duke University Press, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, examines debates surrounding research-creation and its institutionalization, paying particular attention to what it means – and why it matters –  to make and teach art research-creationally in the North American university today. Loveless received her Ph.D. in 2010 in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the supervision of Dr. Donna Haraway. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Western University, Wilfred Laurier University, and the San Francisco Art Institute and has held residencies and research fellowships at Utrecht University (Center for the Humanities), the University of California, Irvine (SECT), the Western Front (curatorial), and the Banff Center for the Arts (The Future of Idea Art). At the University of Alberta, she supervises both theoretical and research-creation theses and teaches courses on feminist and performance art; activist art and art as social practice; art, ecology, and the Anthropocene. She recently completed New Maternalisms (newmaternalisms.ca), a project bringing together feminist art practice, theory, and curation, and an interdisciplinary collaborative project on global vaccination called Immune Nations (immunenations.com) that culminated in a high-profile exhibition at the United Nations in Geneva during the 2017 World Health Assembly. Loveless currently co-leads Speculative Energy Futures, a multi-year project that is part of the Just Powers initiative funded by the Future Energy Systems CFREF and a SSHRC Insight grant (justpowers.ca), and, during the 2018-19 academic year, is in residence as a visiting scholar in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC), where she is developing a new project, Sensing the Anthropocene: Aesthetic Attunement in an age of Urgency.

Derek C. Maus

Derek C. Maus

Derek C. Maus is Professor of English and Communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where he teaches numerous courses on a wide variety of subjects in contemporary literature. He is the author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (South Carolina, 2019), Understanding Colson Whitehead (South Carolina, 2014), and Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (South Carolina, 2011) He has also edited several scholarly collections, including Conversations with Colson Whitehead (Mississippi, 2019), Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (Mississippi, 2014; co-edited with James J. Donahue) and Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley’s Fiction (Mississippi, 2008; co-edited with Owen E. Brady). 

While at Concordia, he is working on a project that aims to develop and to articulate a clearer understanding of the ways in which African American and African Canadian identities are represented in contemporary fiction, emphasizing not only the instances of overlap between the two, but also analyzing the areas in which the existing models of diasporic solidarity (e.g., Molefi Asante’s concept of Afrocentricity, Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic, post-black/post-racial/post-soul aesthetics, or various articulations of Black nationalism/communalism associated with Critical Race Theory) are insufficient in explaining the significant divergences between these two literary-cultural traditions.

Cara Blue Adams

Cara Blue Adams

As artist in residence at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Cara Blue Adams presented “A reading and discussion of Removal, a novel-in-progress”. Cara Blue Adams is a fiction writer from Brooklyn, New York. Her stories have appeared in Narrative, The Kenyon Review, Epoch, The Missouri Review, The Mississippi Review, and The Sun.

She is the recipient of The Missouri Review William Peden Prize and The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize, judged by Alice Hoffman, and she was named one of Narrative’s "15 Below 30."

Her awards include a New York State Council on the Arts Artist-in-Residence Exchange Grant and scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.  

Past Post-Docs

Sanja Dejanovic

Sanja Dejanovic

Sanja Dejanovic's postdoctoral project is on freedom conceived of as a mutual letting become; a kind of freedom through which it is possible to approach all beings, not merely the human being, as capable of experiencing freedom. Such experience of freedom is explored in her work through embodied temporality, aesthetic ecology, as well as the logic of capture and violence. During the first year of her postdoc, she was under the mentorship of Dr. Bruce Matthews, Philosophy, Bard College, and during her time at Concordia she will be directed by Dr. Erin Manning.

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