People

Fabio Akcelrud Durão (Project Coordinator) is Professor of Literary Theory at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). He is the author of Modernism and Coherence (2008), Teoria (literária) americana (2011), Entrevistas com Robert Hullot-Kentor (2012), Fragmentos Reunidos (2015), O que é crítica literária? (2016) and Essays Brazilian (2016). He edited Culture Industry Today (2010), among others, and published articles in journals such as Critique, Cultural Critique, Luso-Brazilian Review, Parallax, and Wasafiri. From 2014 to 2016 he was president of the Brazilian Association for Graduate Studies in Literature and Linguistics (Anpoll).

Suman Gupta (Project Coordinator) is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the Open University, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton University, UK. He has coordinated several international collaborative projects with partners in China, India, Iran, Nigeria, Morocco, South Africa, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland and the USA. Recent books include: Globalization and Literature (2009); Imagining Iraq: English Literature and the Invasion of Iraq (2011); Contemporary Literature: The Basics (2012); Consumable Texts in Contemporary India (2015); Philology and Global English Studies (2015); and Reconsidering English Studies in India (2015, co-authored with Allen, Chattarji and Chaudhuri). With Durão he co-edited “The Brazilian Contemporary” special issue of Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing (2015).

Leandro Pasini is Professor of Brazilian literature at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). He is the author of A apreensão do desconcerto: subjetividade e nação na poesia de Mário de Andrade (2013), and published articles in journals such as Remate de Males, Literatura e Sociedade and Wasafiri.

Nicola J Watson is Professor of English Literature at the Open University. Her current research is focused on the past, present and future of the writer’s house museum, and in conjunction with this she has worked with a number of writer’s house museums as academic consultant, most recently with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on the redevelopment of New Place for 2016, and with TRAUM (Transforming Author Museums), a Scandinavian project based in Oslo. She is presently leading on the formation of a pan-European federation of associations and institutions devoted to romanticism which will bring together scholars and curators of literary museums. Recent publications have included The Literary Tourist (2006), Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-century Culture (2009), and essays on the formation and exploitation of literary landscapes.

Derek Neale is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University. He is a novelist, short story writer and dramatist and helped design and write a whole generation of Open University writing courses, including the new Creative Writing MA, recording many interviews with playwrights, novelists, memoirists and biographers about their approach to writing. He is lead educator on the FutureLearn Start Writing Fiction MOOC and convenor of the Contemporary Cultures of Writing research group. His most recent novel is The Book of Guardians (2012), he co-edited the journal Writing in Practice (2015), has published articles about writing and practice-led research in journals such as Literarature Compass, New Writing: the international journal for the practice and theory of creative writing and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. See - about Creative Writing at The Open University.

Toby Manning is a consultant for this project. He completed his Ph.D in English Literature in September 2015 at the Open University via a fully-funded Open University studentship. In September 2015 he organized an interdisciplinary, international conference Spying on Spies: Popular Representations of Spies and Espionage at the Shard building, London. For this he raised funding from the Open University and from Warwick University Business School. He has taught at City Lit college, University of Birmingham and Brunel University, and is about to complete his first academic book, John le Carré and the Cold War for Bloomsbury.

Image courtesy of Ayan-Yue Gupta