Notes on the Contributors

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her books include: The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (2013), and Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (2018). Apter is co-editor with Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood of the 2014 English edition of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, edited by Barbara Cassin, and editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press.

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Related Literatures at the University of York, UK. Among his books are The Singularity of Literature (2004; reissued 2017), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004), The Work of Literature (2015), and The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019). He co-edited Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970–1995 (1998), Semicolonial Joyce (2000), and The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012).

Lorna Burns is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. Her most recent monograph is Postcolonialism After World Literature: Relation, Equality, Dissent (2019), and she is the author of Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature between Postcolonialism and Post-continental Philosophy (2012). She is co-editor of the collection World Literature and Dissent (2019), Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze (2012), and a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on the author Wilson Harris.

Francesco Giusti teaches Comparative Literature at Bard College Berlin. Previously he held fellowships at the University of York, the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He has published two books devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry, Canzonieri in morte: Per un’etica poetica del lutto (2015) and Il desiderio della lirica: Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (2016), and co-edited, with Christine Ott and Damiano Frasca, the volume Poesia e nuovi media (2018).

Benjamin Lewis Robinson is University Assistant in the Department of German at the University of Vienna. He is the author of Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization (2019) and is currently engaged in a project on biopolitics and literature titled States of Need / States of Emergency. Ben is also preparing a book on J. M. Coetzee’s fiction. ‘Passions for Justice: Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Coetzee’s Michael K’ appeared in Comparative Literature (2018).

Rashmi Varma teaches postcolonial and world literature and transnational feminism at the University of Warwick. She is the author of The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (2011) and co-editor of Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Reflections on Benita Parry (2019). She is a member of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) and a founding editorial collective member of the journal Feminist Dissent.

Dirk Wiemann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Potsdam. He is spokesperson of the DFG-funded research training group Minor Cosmopolitanisms. His research interests and publications range from postcolonial theory with a special focus on South Asia to theatre and politics in the English Republic and genre transformations in contemporary world literature. He is co-author of Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (2019).

Jarad Zimbler is Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. He is author of J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (2014), as well as editor of The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee (2020), and, with Ben Etherington, of The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (2018). His current research project, Literary Communities and Literary Worlds, addresses the nature of and relationship between literary community, literary labour and literary belonging.