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Laura Bak Cely University of Oviedo Doctoral Candidate Laura Bak is a Gender and Diversity Ph.D. student at the Universidad de Oviedo. She holds a B.A. in Literary Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, with a minor in Philosophy, and an M.A in Literature from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work has focused on the problems and representations of space in exiled Latin American Jewish women’s autobiographical writing, emphasizing in the search and creation of places that have disappeared in the current geopolitical maps. Her research continues to explore the subject of ‘autocartography’ within life-writings by migrant women through the lens of counter-mapping, spatial justice, and geocriticism. The subject of imagination and representation of lost places in life-writings has been at the centre of Laura's research trajectory. In this research phase, she plans to study how migrant women in Europe produce life-writings in an exercise of creating alternative representations of the spaces they inhabit and transit. She intends to designate this type of writing as counter-autocartographies as they challenge dominant cartographic representations and weave counter-maps that represent the perspective and understanding of the spaces dwelt by migrant women.

Review of 'White is for Witching' by Helen Oyeyemi Helen Oyeyemi’s 'White is for Witching' combines elements of the gothic tradition, vampire stories and haunted house stories to craft a narrative which probes issues of xenophobia and racism in contemporary British society. The novel follows Miranda, a young woman with vampiric qualities, as a sentient house intervenes in her life to protect, control and possess her. by Séamus O’Kane 23 April 2025 Review: Oyeyemi, Helen. White is for Witching. Helen Oyeyemi found literary success early. She wrote her prodigious debut, The Icarus Girl (2005), and secured a publisher while she was still in secondary school. The years since then have seen her produce a tremendous output: seven more novels, two plays and one short story collection. Born in Nigeria and raised in London, Oyeyemi’s nomadic trajectory has taken her to Paris, Berlin, New York, and, finally, Prague, where she now resides. White is for Witching (2009) is Oyeyemi’s third novel and garnered her the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award in 2010, placing her in the company of such luminaries as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Zadie Smith. White is for Witching opens with a cryptic and disorienting prelude as its protagonist, Miranda, lies already dead, with competing accounts of how this occurred. These segments set the stage for the narrative perspectives that make up the novel: Miranda herself, Eliot (her twin), Ore (her friend and partner), and the house itself, 29 Barton Road. The house is in Dover, a coastal town in England which serves as a major port to Calais, and therefore acts as a main entry point into England for many migrants and refugees. This setting allows Oyeyemi to examine contemporary issues of racism and xenophobia in her setting of England in the year 2000. Much like the welcoming façade of the house, the locals of Dover are superficially friendly but harbour a deep-seated racism. Refugees from Kosovo are stabbed, with Miranda’s twin, Eliot, blaming other refugees for the crime. Chinese migrants die in a truck trying to cross the border. There are protests outside the immigrant detention centre after a man commits suicide. When Miranda and Eliot’s mother, Lily, inherited the house, their father, Luc, persuaded his wife to turn the seven-bedroom Devon home into a B&B. Upon moving into the house, Miranda develops the same eating disorder which afflicted her great-grandmother. This disorder, pica, causes her to constantly chew on chalk and plastic, spurning regular food unless she makes a sustained effort to eat, usually to please her parents. When Miranda and Eliot’s mother dies, shot dead at a polling station in Haiti, Miranda finds herself in a psychiatric clinic for six months. Her memory of the events is already untrustworthy as she cannot recall how she got there. Consequently, an ambiguity persists when events are recounted from Miranda’s perspective. Physically weak from her eating disorder, her perception of reality is also unreliable, meaning that it is difficult to separate the supernatural events of the novel from Miranda’s own hallucinations. The house itself often casts aspersions on the reliability of Miranda and Eliot’s stories, whilst slyly suggesting multiple possibilities of its own. When recalling the fate of one of Miranda’s predecessors, the house presents two competing stories: she could have been strangled to death or allowed to reside within the house’s walls until she reached middle age. As the novel progresses, we learn more about the house, including the origins of its sentience, beginning at the time of Miranda’s great-grandmother. Thereafter, the house’s desire to “protect” the female members of the family becomes a corrupted, unwanted inheritance, as its desire manifests as possession and control, seeking to deny them any agency or autonomy. Miranda’s eating disorder is implied to be part of this supernatural inheritance as it afflicts subsequent generations who are connected to the house. As part of this disorder, she symbolically internalises chalk, connecting to the novel’s larger themes of racialisation and whiteness. This repeated act not only allows the house to symbolically extend its xenophobia beyond its physical boundaries, but it also weakens Miranda, causing her to become reliant on the house, and foreshadows the novel’s ending where the ultimate aims of the house’s idea of protection becomes clear. One of the novel’s focalisers is Ore, a woman with a Nigerian mother and white adoptive parents, who strikes up a friendship and romance with Miranda in Cambridge in some of the novel’s most touching scenes. Her perspective gives an insight into the discomfort and impostor syndrome of an elite academic environment. Furthermore, we see how Ore is subjected to the casual, mocking racism of her white cousins, who read aloud sections of leaflets distributed by the fascist British National Party. These scenes further add to the various manifestations of racism within the novel, emphasising how the xenophobia that the reader encounters is not simply a supernatural curse that is generations old, but a contemporary reality which can personally impact characters even in a familial context. In White is for Witching , neither the family nor the home, both traditionally associated with safety, can provide refuge. Oyeyemi’s novel subverts the trope of the monstrous, racialised Other, turning it back onto the white, colonial culture of England (indeed, the house has a fondness for the glory days of Rule Britannia). The uncanny is now the British family home. Sade, the Yoruba housekeeper, uses her culture’s charms and superstitions to counter the house’s malevolence. Ore, meanwhile, recalls the Nigerian folktale of the soucouyant, a shape-shifting old woman who feeds on the souls of her victims. She projects her understanding of this tale onto her experience of the haunted house, allowing her to defend herself against it. Miranda’s eating disorder leaves her pale and thin, visually recalling the vampire, a metaphor for the parasitic, colonial draining of resources and, indeed, her relationship with Ore leaves her lover in a similarly weakened state. A kissing scene towards the novel’s climax also heightens the novel’s supernatural elements and further troubles the boundaries between perception and reality. Drawing on Gothic tropes, Oyeyemi’s novel brilliantly conveys a sense of unease, foreboding, creeping uncertainty and inescapable decline throughout its narrative. Oyeyemi’s pages list various authors of dark fairytales and gothic stories which presumably shaped her writing, including the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffman, and Sheridan LeFanu. However, it is the influence of Edgar Allen Poe which is felt most strongly in the novel. Humorously, one scene features Miranda and Eliot discuss how they could easily deal with the events of a Poe story. Indeed, one could view the novel as a reworking of The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), with its sentient home tied to a doomed bloodline. Oyeyemi’s story, like Poe’s, hints that there is an incestuous connection between the twins. Miranda possesses many characteristics shared by the Usher twins: she suffers from a mental illness which manifests itself physically, she has uncanny, pale white skin, and soft, ethereal hair. Like Roderick Usher, her fate is inseparable from the home. The reader is left to question whether she has control of her own actions. Upon the novel’s conclusion, it is natural to return once again to the prelude, now armed with the knowledge of what happens to Miranda and able to slice through its disorienting opacity. Yet, despite everything they have read, the reader will wonder about her fate long after the book is closed. This encouragement of circularity mimics the novel’s own themes, triggering many questions and unsettling any easy resolution. Although there are scattered, individual acts of resistance to the house and its xenophobia, it ultimately achieves its goal, raising the question of whether it is possible to break the cycle of victimhood and the continuity of a colonial past. Will the house, and by extension, the racist spectre of empire, continue to haunt British society forever?

Uthara Geetha University of Oviedo Doctoral Candidate Uthara Geetha is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oviedo, Spain working on ‘The role of transnational literatures in the decolonization of understandings of gender within the European academe’. She was an Erasmus Mundus scholar (2019-21) of Gender Studies from University of York (UK) and University of Oviedo (Spain). She also holds a master’s degree in applied economics from Centre for Development Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her main research interest is on the intersections of gender with race, caste, and class inspired from her Dalit identity. In addition to her academic works, she also writes online articles on popular culture from a decolonial intersectional feminist perspective. Contributions: Prose and Counter-history: Review of The Emperor's Babe by Bernadine Evaristo

Nicoletta Asciuto University of York researcher Nicoletta Asciuto is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of York. Her main research interests are in modernism, poetry, and translation. In her research, Nicoletta uncovers the gendered nature of cultures of light in the early twentieth century, and discusses the work of many modernist women poets and artists, such as Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Georgia O’Keeffe, Rosa Rosà, Růžena Zátková, Maria Ginanni, Natalia Goncharova, and others. One of her more recent collaborative works was a cluster for Modernism/modernity on the topic of ‘Modernist Periodical Studies and the Transnational Turn’, co-edited with Dr Francesca Bratton (Maynooth University) and Dr Camilla Sutherland (Groningen University). She was also the recipient of British Academy funding for two independent projects, ‘Radio Pioneers and Forgotten Voices, 1924-1939’, with Professor Emilie Morin (University of York), and ‘Cities of Modernism’, with Dr Nan Zhang (Hong Kong University). Nicoletta has also published several literary translations from Italian, Spanish, and Slovenian into English, including, more recently, those for Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations , edited by Emilie Morin (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Nicoletta also acts as Contributing Editor for Translated Literature at the Fortnightly Review . She is currently at work on the first Italian-language translation of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem (1920), a neglected masterpiece of modernist poetry. She is an enthusiast polyglot, with knowledge of ten languages. She has given various invited talks nationally and internationally, both on the topic of modernism and on translation. In EUTERPE, Nicoletta is Co-Investigator for York, on the strand ‘Translational genres: crossing borders in gender, form, space, and identity’. She is also a member of EUTERPE’s Supervisory and Editorial Boards Publications: Asciuto, N. (2025). Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry . Johns Hopkins University Press. Asciuto, N., & Minta, S., (TRANS.) (Accepted/In press). Marinetti Meets Cavafy: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's The Greek-Egyptian Poet Cavafy , and Atanasio Catraro's Meeting with Marinetti . PMLA .

Evangeline Petra Scarpulla University of Bologna Doctoral Candidate Interested in speculative and imaginative genre criticism, contemporary feminist literary theory, and decolonizing the canon, Evangeline Scarpulla holds a BA in Comparative Literature with Honours from King’s College London and an MSc in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh. During her MSc she explored how contemporary fantasy writers are reimagining the conventions of the genre through her dissertation entitled ‘Folklore in Fantasy: Challenging the Western Conventions of the Genre through a Critical Comparison of Marlon James’s Black Leopard Red Wolf and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.’ Building off her previous explorations into broadening representation in imaginative genres and global literature, Evangeline’s PhD thesis will discuss how transnational feminist authors in Europe communicate narratives of resistance through ‘minor’ literary genres, including fantastic and speculative fiction, magical realism, and graphic novels. Investigating the close relationship between form and content, the thesis will discuss how many migrant female authors reach to border-defying and experimentative genres because their characteristics mirror their own liminal social positioning and hybrid identities. By challenging prevailing notions of fixed genres and truth vs. fantasy, these narratives overturn traditional binaries and ideas of nationalism, creating a unique transnational community of writers, readers, and thinkers. The research will be conducted in conversation with postcolonial and contemporary genre critics such as Homi K. Bhaba, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Nnedi Okorafor and Helen Young, contributing to efforts to expand the subjectivities represented in our ‘collective imagination.’ (Thomas, 2019). Contributions: Scarpulla, Evangeline. 2024. “Writing (a) Home in Times of Crisis: A Review of Scattered All Over the Earth (2018) by Yoko Tawada”. Satura 6 (December). Review: Haratischvili, Nino. The Eighth Life: (for Brilka). Translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin. (London: Scribe Publications, 2019).

Francesco Cattani University of Bologna Researcher Francesco Cattani is Adjunct Professor at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where he teaches “Literatures of English Speaking Countries”. He also collaborates with the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree GEMMA, Women's and Gender Studies, for which he teaches "The Re-vision of the Body in Women's Literature" and "English Women's Literature". He is member of the Diversity Council of the UNA Europa European University Alliance and of the Working Group on Equity, Inclusion and Diversity of the University of Bologna. His research blends postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender studies, science fiction, dystopia, and the posthuman to tackle repetitive patterns in the construction of the non-human. Another area of interest is black British literature and visual culture. He has published essays on the deconstruction of European identity from a transnational perspective, Bernardine Evaristo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Ingrid Pollard, Hanif Kureishi. Publications: Cattani, F. (2024). "Transfigurazioni mostruose. Tra rabbia, disforia ed euforia". DIVE-IN , 4(1). Cattani, F. (2020). L'utopia ambigua dell'Australia: Picnic at Hanging Rock tra mito e futuro possibile. Canterano (RM): Aracne editrice.

Olga Fenoll Martínez Univeristy of Lodz Doctoral Candidate Olga Fenoll-Martínez holds a BA in Translation and Interpreting (University of Granada) and an MA in English Literature and Linguistics (University of Granada). She has been granted with different scholarships for early researchers provided by the Spanish Government and the University of Granada, and she has also engaged in R&D research projects. In her works, Olga has aimed to display a queer approach through different intra-actions such as contemporary queer poetry, translation studies or located audiovisual cultures from a feminist new-materialist lens. Olga’s PhD project aims to tackle located and nomadic transnational womxn’s art and writings as assemblages that are in-the-making by exploring the plastic potentiality of those works through a diffracted approach guided by onto-epistemological new materialist optics and interferenced logics.

Andrea Abreu's 'Dogs of Summer': An in-depth exploration of working-class adolescenthood Abreu's novel places provincial life at the center stage and transforms the ordinary experiences of two young adolescents into extraordinary. Also, the novel celebrates the Canarian Spanish dialect and language difference and invites the reader to experience the narrative through a descriptive narration and imagery. by María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto 10 March 2025 Review: Abreu, Andrea. Dogs of Summer: A Novel . Translated by Carolina Hoyos. (United States: Blackstone Publishing, 2023). Andrea Abreu has earned admiration and recognition as a novelist after her novel Perros de verano was translated from Spanish to German, French, Italian, and then into English as Dogs of Summer . Because of her success, Granta, an English publishing house and literary magazine, selected Abreu among their Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2021 . Abreu’s pride for her family’s working-class background, the place where she comes from, Tenerife, and her Canarian Spanish dialect are perceptible throughout her novel. Although the island where the story takes place does not have a name, there are references to places in Tenerife, and there is a volcano overlooking the inhabitants’ neighborhood which could be an allusion to the Teide. The detailed description of places in the novel takes readers around varied sceneries and spaces that influence both the characters and the narrative itself. Dogs of Summer provides a sneak peek into common daily life affairs from a young adolescent’s perspective. It is also an ode to the Canarian Spanish dialect, and an invitation to explore realist narration through the senses. Dogs of Summer is a novel that invites readers to discover life in a touristic island far away from the all-inclusive hotels and one day tours. Abreu introduces two main characters: Shit, the first-person narrator, and her best friend Isora, the one who refers to her friend as Shit. There is no reference to the narrator’s real name. Both Shit’s and the island’s names are a mystery. The story takes place during a short, but exciting and adventurous summer that the two characters spend together. They are around 10 years old and on the verge of welcoming their teen years, and with them lively experiences with friendship, sexuality, boundaries (and lack of them), family, school, boys, authorities, and many other axes of teen life. Most of the story develops at a neighborhood where everyone knows each other well and experiences similar harsh economic situations. However, the two characters also move around in other neighborhoods, the beach, the fields, computer classes, fancy hotel areas, and other places around the island. Shit’s parents are working most of the time while Isora’s parents are out of the picture, her mother passed away and her dad is not mentioned, leaving both in the care of their grandmothers. This lack of constant supervision grants the girls the freedom they need to experience life on their own and forge their own luck. Isora is a wild and open-minded person. She speaks up her mind and earns older people’s trust easily. She is curious and adventurous, and she influences Shit to go along with her ideas. Shit, on the other hand, is more prone to thinking about the consequences of their actions even though, at the end of the day, she ends up doing what Isora says. Shit loves her friend, and the way she expresses herself about Isora signals that she is the most important person to her. There is no clear boundary between romantic love and friendship; and through Shit’s descriptions and narration, the reader empathizes with this confusion. Shit’s love for Isora is explicit, but also the anger and frustration toward Isora and her careless behavior. They spend most of their time together; and when they are not together, Shit is dreading each minute until they can reunite again. The reader is in for a treat while having access to Shit’s thoughts and experiences with her neighbors, family, and friends around the island. Through her perspective we are introduced to the inhabitants’ daily routines, such as going to the mini market, going to church, cooking, working, among other provincial activities. The readers are invited to all these places while the two main characters discover themselves through the island, which mostly offers a safe haven for them. To highlight the two characters’ daily lives, Abreu evokes pop culture through lyrics and references to specific brands and television shows that set a familiar tone in the novel. On the one hand, the author showcases the two characters’ routines. They visit their neighbors and eat their food, shave their genitals, masturbate, and play with other children. On the other hand, Abreu exposes societal topics and their influence on the two main characters. For instance, although the girls give little to no importance to societal constructions such as gender, those affect them, nonetheless. What for adults might be stereotypically masculine or feminine, for the girls does not carry such difference. For example, they talk about getting thinner and prettier through dieting, gastric balloons, and purging, but these ideas come from Isora’s grandmother who criticizes her granddaughter’s size and eating habits. Dogs of Summer is an in-depth exploration of working-class adolescenthood, but also is an ode to language variations, more specifically, the Canarian Spanish dialect. The novel’s English translation uses a mix of English and Spanish words, especially when it comes to pop culture references, while the Spanish version stays loyal to Abreu’s dialect “el Canario.” Abreu also plays with the rules of spelling and grammar and writes English words as they would sound phonetically for a Spanish speaker (forener, foc yu). She translates the orality of the language into her writing, making it possible for readers to grasp where she comes from, how her dialect is differentiated from Castilian Spanish, and how it is influential to the characters’ identity. Besides, Abreu challenges grammar rules by using constant word repetition and offering long paragraphs with no punctuation. The author revolutionizes the use of language to validate different ways of speaking and writing but she also plays with literary strategies to differentiate her novel from what is commonly accepted. For instance, there are not explicit dialogues in the novel, but she uses language in such a creative way that the different conversations camouflaged in the text are easy to follow and the character who is speaking easy to identify. Finally, Abreu’s explicit and detailed narration is an invitation to activate the senses, a creative writing device that authors use to connect the readers to the story. The emotional responses that these techniques awaken invite readers to take part in the plot through the description of vivid imagery. This connection is accomplished mostly by the description of sensations, tastes, smells, noises, and landscapes. As an outcome, the novel exhibits a strengthened presence of realism because of the way that it exalts the two characters’ adventures and dilemmas, transforming the ordinary to extraordinary. Beyond doubt, Dogs of Summer is an extravagant read, which I cordially invite readers to experience. If this review piqued your interest, you may read an excerpt from the novel here.

Dorota Golańska University of Lodz Principal Investigator Dorota Golańska is an associate professor (Cultural Studies and Religion) at the Department of Cultural Research, University of Lodz, Poland. She has degrees in Cultural Studies, Literary Studies and International Studies. Her research interests include feminist approaches to political violence and studies of collective memory, especially in relation to traumatic experiences and their representation in culture. She also works on such issues as creative strategies of resistance as well as intersections of memory, art and activism. Publications: Hamarowski, Bartosz, and Dorota Golańska. 2023. “A Wicked Vestal: Subverting the Androcentric Imaginaries of the Smart Home.” Australian Feminist Studies 38 (117): 267–86. Golańska, D., & Woźniak-Bobińska, M. (2023). Spaces of fluidity: articulating ‘politics of presence’ through place-based activism in Iqrit (Israel). Cultural Geographies, 31(1), 47-65.

Kris Országhová Central European University Project Administrator Kris Orszaghova (they/them) holds a Master’s in Artistic Research from Hogeschool Voor de Kunsten Utrecht and a PhD in Sociology from Charles University in Prague. Kris Orszaghova (they/them) holds a Master’s in Artistic Research from Hogeschool Voor de Kunsten Utrecht and a PhD in Sociology from Charles University in Prague. As an artist-athlete-scholar, they explore the intersections of art and social inquiry. Their research focuses on bodies moving and shifting, meandering and at times floating between the urban centres and peripheries, borders both real and imaginary, between hopes and disillusionments, despair and commitment, discipline and disobedience. Currently, Kris is a visiting faculty and coordinator at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University and a junior coordinator for EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, a Marie Curie Doctoral Network. In addition to their research, Kris has participated in various exhibitions, including "To Seminar" at bak (basis voor actuale kunst) "Poetry & Performance: The Eastern European Perspective" at Nová synagóga in Žilina, or "Possibility of Preserving" at Kunsthalle Bratislava. Publications: "Turn the Volume Up! Boxing Hearts and Beats", featured in Boxing, Narrative and Culture (Routledge, 2023) "The Gender of Bruising: A Critical Literature Review on Gender in Boxing," published in Sociology Compass (2023).

Noemi Anna Kovacs Central European University European Cooperation Officer Noemi joined Central European University in 2009. Her professional career started when she graduated from Pázmány Péter Catholic University and completed her MA degree in Humanities and Liberal Arts with two specialisations, one in Romanic Studies/Italian Language, History and Literature and another in English and American Studies/English Language, History and Literature. During university, she worked as a language teacher and freelance translator. Later on, as a fresh graduate, a book publishing house hired her as the in-house editor. Before joining CEU, Noemi had been working on large EU- and state-funded research projects for an independent, interdisciplinary research institute, Collegium Budapest – Institute for Advanced Studies. At CEU, Noemi’s portfolio ranges from individual postdoctoral fellowships to large multi-beneficiary EU-funded research and educational projects. Her responsibilities include pre- and post-award management of such grants and projects, be it legal or financial matters or the development of dissemination, communication, and cooperation strategies.

Jaya Jacobo Coventry University Researcher Jaya Jacobo is a transfeminine thinker and artist based at Coventry University where she currently does work on trans feminist pedagogies in literature, art and performance. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, scholars and community workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as with trans, queer and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and Filipino diaspora abroad. Jacobo was a former Board Member of the Society of Trans Women of the Philippines (STRAP), a former President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle (YCC) of the Philippines, a Founding Co-Editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Transgressive Journal of Literary Art and Co-Editor of BKL: Bikol/Bakla, Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing . Jaya is the author of Arasahas , her debut volume of poetry in Filipino from Savage Mind Publishing House. Publications: Jacobo, Jaya. 2024. “A Love That Burns Hot Enough to Last: Scenes from Trans Tropical Love”. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics 23 (1):18-24. Adriany, V, Bong, SA, Curtin, B, Jacobo, J & Luther, JD. 2022. "Pedagogy of queer studies beyond empire." in S Tang & HY Wijaya (eds), Queer Southeast Asia. 1 edn, Taylor and Francis - Balkema, pp. 243-265.