Keynote Novelist
Vauhini Vara
Vauhini Vara is the author of The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Colorado Book Award. Publications that named it as a notable book of the year include NPR and The New York Times. It has been published around the English-speaking world, including in India, where it won the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Times of India AutHer Award. Her most recent short story collection is This is Salvaged (Norton 2023). She has also worked as a technology journalist and published essays related to AI in Wired and The Believer.
Keynote Scholar
Waïl Hassan
Waïl S. Hassan is Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Head of the Department of Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse UP, 2003) and Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (Oxford UP, 2011) and most recently, Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism (Oxford UP, 2024). He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions (Oxford UP 2017) and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz (MLA 2012). He also translated Abdelfattah Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (Syracuse UP, 2008) from Arabic to English and Alberto Mussa’s O enigma de Qaf, from Portuguese to Arabic, forthcoming in Cairo, Egypt, under the title, Lughz al-qāf. He is a former president of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).
Plenary Panel
Stephanie DeGooyer (Assistant Professor of English, UNC-Chapel Hill)
DeGooyer’s research examines intersections between law and literature, with interests in immigration, global migration, and human rights, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. She is the author of Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization, (JHUP, 2022), and co-author of The Right to Have Rights (Verso Books, 2018). She is also co-editor of the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to the Novel.
Ainehi Edoro (Assistant Professor of English, UW-Madison)
Edoro is the founder and Editor of Brittle Paper, a leading online platform dedicated to African writing and literary culture. Her current book project is titled “Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think.” Academic essays have appeared in ELH and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. She also writes essays and commentaries about contemporary African literary culture in mainstream publications such as The Guardian and Africa is a Country.
Victoria Saramago (Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago)
Saramago’s research covers twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin American literature with a focus on Brazil. She is the author of Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2020) and O duplo do pai: O filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza (São Paulo: É Realizações, 2013). She is also co-editor of Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge, 2023) and the Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (de Gruyter, 2023).
Jorge Tellez (Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Pennsylvania)
Tellez’s research focuses on the legacies of colonialism in Latin American cultural production, past and present, with an emphasis on Mexico. He is the author of The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico (Notre Dame UP, 2021). He is also the General Editor for the Hispanic Review. He is currently working on two book projects, one tentatively titled Barroco, Inc., on modern and contemporary uses of the colonial past as a source of political, economic, and artistic value in Mexico and another provisionally entitled A Museum for the Americas, on 21st-century fiction and Latin American cultural heritage.
