SPEAKER BIOS (alphabetical by surname)

Simla A. Altan is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, working on her dissertation promoted by cultural narratologist Prof. Mieke Bal. She works as an “Instructor of English” in Beykoz Lojistik Meslek Yuksekokulu (Beykoz Vocational School of Logistics). Her research areas include postcolonial studies, postmodernism and cultural analysis.

David Cedric Bennette graduated from universities in South Africa and France where he obtained a double masters in literature and linguistics and a DEA with distinction in arts. He currently teaches at Bilkent on the FAE program and was previously on the staff of the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan. He has often presented at international conferences, mainly in the field of language education.

Elleke Boehmer is Professor in World Writing in English at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, having previously been Hildred Carlile Professor in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She currently works on questions of migration, identity and resistance in both postcolonial literature and writing of the colonial period, in particular of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Among her many publications are Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995 and second edition, 2005), Empire Writing (Oxford World's Classics, 1998), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890-1920 (2002), and Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming 2008). Elleke Boehmer is also the General Editor of the new Series, Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures.

Alberto Fernández Carbajal was awarded a Licenciatura from the University of Oviedo (Spain), and an MA from the School of English, University of Leeds (UK), where he currently is a PhD candidate. He studies under the supervision of Dr John McLeod, and his thesis deals with the legacy of E. M. Forster in postcolonial writing. His research encompasses the work of Paul Scott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, J. G. Farrell, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith.

Marion Engin is responsible for the English Teacher Education Programme at Bilkent University. She also taught for many years as an 8^th Grade English teacher. Her area of research interest is the construction of teaching knowledge by pre-service teachers.

Candace Fertile (Ph.D.) teaches at Camosun College in Victoria, BC, Canada. She has published and/or presented papers on several topics including Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Laurence, and First Nations literature. She is a regular book reviewer for several Canadian publications and is a member of the collective that publishes Room Magazine, Canada's oldest journal of work by women.

Meltem Gürle is currently a member of the School of Foreign Languages at Boğaziçi University. She received her masters degree in philosophy, and completed her Ph.D in the department of Western Languages and Literatures, where she wrote a comparative thesis on modern novel. Her research interests include nineteenth century philosophy, theory of the novel, modernism, and European literature.

Trevor Hope teaches American Culture and Literature at Ankara University.  His background is in comparative literature, and he has publications in the fields of feminist and queer theory and psychoanalysis.  His current research interests are questions of nation, national identification and memory.

Valerie Kennedy has been teaching in the department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey since 1997. Her publications include Edward Said: A Critical Introduction, published by Polity Press in 2000, and since translated into Chinese Complex Characters and Simplified Chinese, with a Korean translation in press. Her most recent essay, ‘Dickens and Savagery at Home and Abroad’, will appear in the Summer and Winter numbers of the The Dickensian in 2008.

Gaurav Majumdar is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Whitman College, USA.  His research focuses on cosmopolitan impulses in modern British and postcolonial literatures.  His book--titled Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray--will be published by Peter Lang in 2009.

Nisha Manocha recently completed her MA at the University of  Toronto. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures and global modernisms.

Koray Melikoğlu studied at universities in Bochum, Cardiff, and Berlin and graduated with a Magister Artium degree in English and Linguistics from the Freie Universität Berlin. He worked at Istanbul University and Yeditepe University and is currently pursuing his PhD thesis on Kazuo Ishiguro. He has presented papers on Ishiguro, Flann O’Brien, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox, edited the proceedings of a conference entitled Life Writing and co-edited the collected volume Formal Investigations on late-Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction.

Don Randall is Associate Professor in Bilkent’s Department of English Language and Literature, where he began teaching in 1999. His main research areas are postcolonial literature and British imperial literature. He has published numerous articles and is the author of two books: Kipling's Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (Palgrave, 2000) and David Malouf (Manchester University Press, 2007).

Kuğu Tekin has been lecturer at Atılım University for eight years, in the Department of English Language and Literature. Among the courses she teaches are 17th. century English poetry, 20th. century American drama, Translation courses, and a number of elective courses like Selections from postcolonial literature and The city in literature. Her special area of interest is postcolonial studies.Her MA thesis is on Naipaul. She is doing her Ph.D at METU and is writing her thesis on Salman Rushdie.

Gökçe Sert Tokdemir is a full-time instructor in the Modern Languages Department of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She has been teaching compulsory English courses on reading, writing and presentation skills for freshmen and sophomore. She has recently completed her Master of Arts degree in the Middle East Technical University on English Literature.

Övgü Tüzün’s main areas of interest are postcolonial writing and discourses associated with colonialism, modern literature, travel writing and the political novel. Her most recent publication is "The Dual Vision: Compassion and Cruelty in the Writings of Naipaul" published in the South Asian Review (2005). She is currently a member of the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bahçeşehir University, İstanbul.

Daryl York has worked in Turkey for 20 years, as a teacher, teacher trainer and school administrator. Before joining the Bilkent Graduate School of Education he was Head of Tarsus American School. Research interests include school identity and internationalism in national schools.