Bio: Anjali Nerlekar is Associate Professor of South Asian literature and Chair of the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research interests include multilingual Indian modernisms; modern Marathi literature; Indian English literature; Indo-Caribbean literature; world literatures; translation studies; Caribbean and postcolonial studies; Indian print culture; Indian visual studies; and archipelagic studies. She is the author of Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (2016), which shows how the genre of poetry emerged in Bombay in the post-60s (the sathottari period) as the instrument of radical protest and experimentation at the multiple junctures of regionalisms, new publishing spaces, national politics and transnationalisms. She is also the co-editor of a special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (“The Worlds of Bombay Poetry,” Spring 2017) and is currently co-editing a special issue of South Asia: A Journal of South Asian Studies on "Postcolonial Archives." In collaboration with Dr. Bronwen Bledsoe at Cornell University, Nerlekar has an ongoing project building an archive of multilingual post-1960 Bombay poetry at Cornell University titled “The Bombay Poets Archive.”

Bio: Barbara Cooper is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research explores the intersections between culture and political economy, in particular, the intertwined histories of gender, law, health, religion, agriculture and family life. Cooper focuses on the former French colonies of the Sahel, particularly Niger, where she has conducted fieldwork for thirty years. She is the author of Countless Blessings: A History of Childbirth and Reproduction in the Sahel (2019); Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (2006), which won the Melville J. Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association for the best book published in 2006; and Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989 (1997). She is also the author of numerous articles and chapters on the history of Niger and the Sahel. Cooper is the co-editor of La Honte au Sahel: Pudeur, Respect, Morale Quotidienne (2018) and of Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present (2018).

Bio: Paulina Maria Barrios is a graduate student at the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She holds an M.A. in Asian and African studies, special subject Africa, from El Colegio de México, and has experience working in translation and feminist resource mobilization. For her Ph.D. she currently aims to analyze the use of literature by grassroots feminist and queer organizations in Latin America and Africa.

Bio: Ouafaa Deleger is currently a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the French Department at Rutgers University. She grew up in Paris where she studied law and graduated with a Master from the University of Paris XII. Taking advantage of expatriation in Louisiana, she also holds a Masters in Political Science from the University of New Orleans where she focused on her thesis on the Emancipation of Muslim women in Muslim societies. French culture is diverse and keeps enriching French literature. For this reason, she is interested in studying the questions of language and identity through the lens of Maghrebian, African and Caribbean literature, but although through the lens of literature written by women in this part of the world.

Bio: Dena Seidel an award winning filmmaker, anthropologist, educator and interdisciplinary program developer. Seidel is the founding director of the Rutgers Center for Digital Filmmaking and the Rutgers Film Bureau in the Mason Gross School of the Arts. Seidel also served as the director of Digital Storytelling in the Rutgers English Department. Seidel is the director/producer
of the original Rutgers feature documentary films “Antarctic Edge: 70 Degrees South”, “Atlantic Crossing: A Robot’s Daring Mission”, “The War After” and “Generation at Risk”. Seidel designed the Rutgers BFA in Digital Filmmaking approved by the New Jersey Board
of Governors in 2015. Seidel has a Masters degree in Anthropology with a specific focus on Pacific cultures and served as the director of the Okeanos Foundation for the Sea overseeing the implementation of sustainable sea transportation in several Pacific island nations. Seidel isthe Ambassador-at-Large for Academic and Research Partnerships for Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia. She is also a visiting scholar in the Rutgers Plant Biology Department and a member of the Rutgers Center for Agricultural Food Ecosystems.

Bio: François Cornilliat is Distinguished Professor of French at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, and a specialist of 15th- and 16th-century French poetry. He works on the evolving, unstable relations of poetry and rhetoric across a variety of genres and forms, from verse to prose and from history to fiction. His publications in this field include“Or ne mens.” Couleurs de l’Éloge et du Blâme chez les “Grands Rhétoriqueurs” (Paris: Champion, 1994), and Sujet caduc, noble sujet. La poésie de la Renaissance et le choix de ses “arguments” (Geneva: Droz, 2009). He is currently finishing, in collaboration with the historian Laurent Vissière, a critical edition of Jean Bouchet’s Panegyric du Chevalier sans reproche (1527), a large poetic and didactic biography of the military commander Louis de La Trémoille, written in part in the ornate style of the “rhétoriqueur” tradition.

Bio: Genese Marie Sodikoff is an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. Her earlier research examines labor relations in Madagascar’s biodiversity conservation effort, and the entwinement of cultural and biotic extinctions. More recently, she has been studying the anthropology of zoonosis. Her new book project is a multispecies ethnography of the bubonic plague and its effects on Malagasy funerary practices and kinship. She is the author of Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere, and the editor of The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death.

Bio: Olabode Ibironke. Currently Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, New Brunswick, and Chair of the National Association of African Studies Programs (AASP). Ibironke was twice the recipient of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Award, among other awards for excellence and outstanding scholarship. He is the Journal of Commonwealth Literature Bibliography contributor for West Africa. He serves on the Editorial Board of the African Studies Review. His book Remapping African Literature challenges our understanding of African literary history. His current research on Àwàdà is an exploration of the social and critical work of comedy in Africa that focuses on the interconnected roles of television and comedy in shaping the popular imaginary.

Bio: Mary Shaw is a professor of French at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Along with such critical works as Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé (1993), The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry (2003), and Visible Writings: Forms, Cultures, Readings (co-edited with Marija Dalbello, 2011), she has edited and translated Entangled - Papers! - Notes, a bilingual volume of poetry by Claude Mouchard (2017), and published two bilingual children’s books and a collection of poems, Album Without Pictures (2008). Fragments of her fiction and poetry have regularly appeared in the online journal Transitions, and have also appeared in Hyperion: The Future of Aesthetics (2017) in Romanic Review (2018, 2021) and in the journals Po&sie (2015) and Versants (2015) in French translations. She is currently working on gathering a first volume of these texts.

Bio: Stéphane Robolin is Associate Professor of English and the former director of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His research interests include African literature, African American literature, African diaspora studies, postcolonial literature and theory, and spatial theory. He is the author of Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing (2015), which was awarded the African Literature Association’s 2017 First Book Award in Scholarship. He has published essays in Research in African Literatures, Modern Fiction Studies, Safundi, Literature Compass, and the anthology Global Circuits of Blackness. Robolin is currently working on a study that examines the underground movement of banned books in apartheid South Africa entitled “Subterranean Circulations.”

Bio: Tajudeen Mamadou Yacoubouis a Ph.D. student in the Rutgers Department of Linguistics. He is primarily interested in the abstract representation and processes of natural language sounds (Phonology) and their physical realization (Phonetics). More specifically, he studies the prosody (tones, stress, intonation) of West African languages, including but not limited to Yoruba (and derived dialects), Baatonum, Fongbe, Dendi, and Zarma. In fact, he is currently working on the interaction of narrow focus with the different levels of the prosodic hierarchy, along with its phonetic cues in Zarma. The study was built on fieldwork he conducted in summer 2018 in Niger and supported by the Center for African Studies’ Graduate Enhancement Grant. His near-future project consists of building a computational model for autosegmental (tone) representations. When he is not figuring out the prosody of natural languages, Dine enjoys writing poetry, spoken words, and playing soccer.