Past Guest Speakers
9-10 July 2026
Universidade de Vigo (UVigo)
Thursday July 9
Noemí Pereira-Ares is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and German Studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her research lines include contemporary literature(s) on migration; postcolonial, transcultural and diaspora studies; and the study of fashion and dress in literature. In line with these interests, she has published articles in various international scholarly journals such as The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature or Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. She is the author of Fashion, Dress and Identity in the Narratives of the South Asian Diaspora: From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and she has co-edited, amongst others, the volume Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction (Brill, 2021), as well as the special issues ‘Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English’ (JSSE, 2019) and ‘Border Politics and Refugee Narratives in Contemporary Literature’ (Humanities, 2024). In addition to participating in other research projects, she currently co-supervises the Research Project “Eco-Refugees: Borders and (Non-)Human Mobility in Literature in English” (PID2024-157339NB-I00).
Friday July 10
Lara Tortosa-Signes is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of València. Her dissertation examines African feminisms and identity formation in contemporary literary production. Lara is a language teacher and writer who collaborates with the research group LENA and who has co-founded the association AIELL for early career researchers. Her research interests lie in decolonial and gender studies. She focuses on Indigenous narratives, memoirs, and historical fiction authored by women and gender non-conforming writers to explore their contributions to African feminist thought. Her work engages with storytelling as a mode of knowledge production and feminist praxis. Her latest academic publications are the article "Intersex Bodies, Literary Representation and Cultural Intersectionality: Gender Bounding Violence in An Ordinary Wonder (2021)", published in English Studies in Africa, and the book chapter "Escritoras Africanas: de las sombras al epicentro de la(s) literatura(s) africana(s)" in Cooperação, Esperança e Outras Formas de Resistença na Literatura Africana (2025).
Friday July 10
María Torres-Romero is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English, French and German at the University of Málaga. She completed her PhD at the same institution entitled Narrating Human and Nonhuman Ecologies: Cognitive and Affective Assemblages in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. María is part of the Research Project “Re-Orienting Assemblage Theory in Anglophone Literature and Culture” (PID2022-137881NB-I00), funded by MICIU/AEI and by ERDF/EU, and has been an active member since 2021 of the research group LITCAE, both led by Professor Rosario Arias. Her main lines of research centre on speculative fiction written in English, posthumanism, relationality, and contemporary explorations of the nonhuman. She has contributed to both national and international academic journals, including publications such as “Encountering the Machine: Towards a Posthumanist Ethics and Relational Moral Paradigm in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me” (2024).
Friday July 10
Sara Tabuyo-Santaclara is Assistant Lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands. She is a member of the research group LITANGLO and collaborates with the research group BiFeGa. She is currently part of the Research Project “Communitas/Immunitas: relational ontologies in Atlantic anglophone cultures of the 21st century” (PID2022-136904NB-I00), funded by MICIU/AEI and by ERDF/EU. Sara completed her PhD at the University of Vigo where she studied representations of girlhood in The Handmaid’s Tale media franchise. Her main research interests are girlhood, gender and feminist theories, as well as post/decolonial theories and utopian/dystopian fiction. Her recent publications include the book chapter “Serena Joy as an Anti-Feminist Ally: Tradwives and Rising Misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale Series” (2025). She has recently co-edited the Special Issue Visibilizing Intersectional Girlhood(s) in Contemporary Anglophone Cultural Manifestations for the Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (2026).
15 -17 April 2026
Universidad de Alcalá (UAH)
Wednesday April 15
Dr Silvia García Hernández is a permanent Lecturer at the University of Alcalá. She holds a BA in English Studies and a PhD in Modern Languages, Literature and Translation from the University of Alcalá. Her main research interests focus on contemporary narrative written by British women, on which she has published numerous articles analysing the work of authors such as Hilary Mantel and Michèle Roberts, as well as on the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). More specifically, her research on the contemporary historical novel examines the perspectives and narrative techniques employed by twenty-first-century British women writers to challenge conventional historical narratives and to integrate women’s experiences into historical fiction.
Thursday April 16
Dr Kathryn Laing is Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick (Ireland), where she teaches and conducts research on late nineteenth-century Irish women’s writing, New Woman fiction, and modernist women writers, among other topics. She holds degrees including a BA (Hons) from Rhodes University and both an MPhil and DPhil from Oxford University. Her academic work is distinguished by its depth, interdisciplinary reach, and commitment to recovering and reframing the contributions of women authors whose voices have been historically marginalised. She has published widely on Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, George Moore and Hannah Lynch. Dr Laing is also a co-founder of the Irish Women’s Writing Network (1880–1920), a dynamic research network that promotes scholarly exchange, digital humanities initiatives, and enhanced access to resources for the study of Irish women writers and their literary networks.
Friday April 17
Once a well-known radio broadcaster in China, Xinran is now a non-fiction writer, journalist, and speaker with a long-standing commitment to advocating for women’s rights. Her acclaimed call-in radio program, Words on the Night Breeze, focused on women’s lives and experiences across China. After conducting extensive interviews with Chinese women between 1989 and 1997, Xinran moved to London, where she began publishing works inspired by the stories she had heard, as well as by the cultural traditions and social realities that shaped these women’s lives. Among her most notable books are The Good Women of China (2002), based on testimonies from her radio show; Sky Burial (2004), a narrative drawn from a true story; and Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother (2010), which portrays the heartbreak and tragedy surrounding the fate of female orphans in China. Xinran has also contributed numerous columns to The Guardian, writing on topics such as Chinese culture and identity, life abroad, and China’s one-child policy, among many others.