Editor-in-Chief: Panxin Zhong
I am a Master’s student in Comparative Literature at Western University. I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in English (specialized in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language) and Russian in Sun Yat-sen University in China. My research interests include modern Chinese Literature, especially the works of Eileen Chang, Saomao, Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. I am also interested in Chinese American Literature and Immigration Studies. In my spare time, I like listening to music and watching movies. I love animals, nature and travelling.
Deputy Editor: Abhimanyu Acharya
Abhimanyu Acharya is pursuing his PhD in Comparative Literature at Western University. He completed his Bachelors degree in English literature at St. Xavier’c College Ahmedabad, and Masters’ degree in English, with an interdisciplinary approach to Philosophy and Sociology, at Manipal University, Karnataka. He is currently working on political theatre from the margins in Western India. His research interests are theatre and performance, politics of language, South Asian studies, modernism, time and memory, translation and adaptation studies, as well as texts and spaces where disciplines like science and arts comfortably meet.
Copy Editor: Helga Ruppe
Helga is a PhD student at Western University. She earned her first Bachelor’s degree in German Language and Literature at the same institution and went on to earn a Master’s degree in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. More recently, she returned to Western to earn a second Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts. Fascinated with all things medieval, she is studying the scientific writings of the twelfth century abbess, Saint Hildegard of Bingen. She is an inveterate language junkie, and knows nine languages, five of them dead. Helga lives in a wilderness in the middle of the city with her husband, four children, and two cats.
Copy Editor: Laila Zaitoun
Laila Zaitoun is a third-year PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature program at Western University. Her research interests are post-war memoirs in modern Arabic Literature, narratives of displacement, and the discourses of ideology and conflict in translation practices. She obtained a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from Kuwait University in Kuwait with a double minor in French Language and Translation Studies. Upon her graduation she worked as a certified translator at the National Council of Culture, Arts and Letters in Kuwait where she published a dozen of translations in their academic periodical World Culture. She also obtained a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature from University of Balamand in Lebanon where she worked as a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) at the English Language Centre, and she was a writer and reviewer in the Balamand students’ newspaper Highlights. As a separate interest, she completed a workshop on civil society at Le Centre International des Sciences de L’Homme (CISH) at the UNESCO in Byblos, Lebanon. In her free time, she enjoys playing with her rabbit and watching TV series.
Reviews Editor: Busra Copuroglu
Busra Copuroglu is a third-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at Western University. She completed her BA in French Language and Literature at Istanbul University and her MA at Yeditepe Istanbul in Istanbul. She completed her MA thesis exploring the relationship between city and nostalgia in the works of Mircea Cărtărescu, Milan Kundera and Orhan Pamuk. Her research interests include the modern Turkish and European novel, critical theory, modernism(s), nostalgia and phenomenology with a focus on the phenomenology of space. Aside from academia she worked in the Turkish art industry as executive assistant where she represented artists, organizing the PR of their exhibitions and the sale of their works. She also worked as a free-lance contributor to various art magazines, publishing her interviews in both national and international magazines. As a personal project, she completed a screenwriting workshop at the New York Film Academy. She also enjoys binge-watching TV series and movies.
Web Editor: Alexandra Irimia
Alexandra Irimia is a third-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at Western University. While completing a BA in Political Science, she majored in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature and minored in French Studies at the University of Bucharest. After studying in Bucharest and Prague for her MA dissertation on blindness in literature, she developed a theoretical approach to empty signifiers in literature and contemporary arts at the Centre of Excellence in Image Study with support from the FIGURA-UQAM research center in Montreal. She is now investigating literary and cinematic narratives about bureaucracy in the second half of the twentieth century, with a focus on the figure of the scrivener and practices of institutional writing. Alexandra’s work revolves around formal paradoxes of representation, seeking to explore the many relations at work between texts and images, with a particular emphasis on the topics of the figure, figurability, and their negative ontological regimes. Occasionally, she ventures into the troubled waters of translation.