Keynote Speakers

 

Marco Codebò

Marco Codebò is professor of Italian and French at Long Island University, in Brookville, New York. He published Narrating from the Archive (2010) and Novels of Displacement (2020). He also coedited Fermammo persino il vento (2021). His essays have appeared in MLN, Italian Studies, Annali d’Italianistica, Archive and Social Studies, and Forum Italicum. He is presently investigating practices of resistance in the larger Italian context, from WWI to the present.

 

 

Paul Benzon

Paul Benzon (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Skidmore College, where he also teaches courses in the Media and Film Studies Program. He is the author of Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), and his writing has appeared in PMLA, Narrative, Media-N, College Literature, and electronic book review. His current project considers how contemporary literary and artistic experimentations with print textuality, the book as an object, and textual and alphabetic design reckon with questions of historical trauma and social justice.

 

 

Patrícia Portela

Patrícia Portela is a writer and performance maker born in 1974, living between Belgium and Portugal. She studied set and costume design in Lisbon and in Utrecht, film in Ebeltoft, Denmark, and Philosophy in Leuven, Belgium. Since 2003 she has worked on her own performances and installations in collaboration with international artists. She has achieved national and international recognition for her unusual work and is considered one of the most daring artists and innovative writers of her generation. She won the Revelation Prize in 1994 for her creative work in performance and cinema, the Prize Teatro na Década for T5 in 1999, the Gulbenkian Foundation Prize Madalena de Azeredo Perdigão for the performance Flatland I in 2004 and a special mention for Wasteband in 2003, and she was one of the 5 finalists of the Sonae Media Art Prize 2015 with her installation Parasomnia, amongst other prizes. She has been invited to participate in the prestigious International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa in 2013, and was the first literary resident in Berlin in 2016. She is the author of several novels (Banquet was a finalist of the Novel and Novella Big APE Prize 2012) and short stories. She is a founder member of the Prado cultural association since 2003 and a curator at the collective editions Prado since 2008. Patrícia Portela writes chronicles for Jornal de Letras and for Coffeepaste.

 

Isabela Figueiredo

Isabela Figueiredo nasceu em Lourenço Marques, Moçambique, hoje Maputo, em 1963, filha de portugueses oriundos da zona Centro-Oeste de Portugal. Após a independência de Moçambique, em 1975, rumou a Portugal. Licenciou-se em Línguas e Literaturas Modernas, variante de Estudos Portugueses, na Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Especializou-se em Estudos sobre as Mulheres, na Universidade Aberta. Trabalhou como jornalista, no Diário de Notícias, entre 1988 e 1994, onde foi também coordenadora do suplemento DN Jovem. É professora de português no ensino secundário. Escreveu, entre outras obras, Caderno de Memórias Coloniais, A Gorda e Um Cão no Meio do Caminho.

 

Jonathan Boulter

Jonathan Boulter, whose attendance had been confirmed, will not be able to attend due to compelling reasons.

Jonathan Boulter is Professor of English at Western University, London, Canada. His publications include Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose (2019), Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience (2015), Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel (2011), Samuel Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed (2008), and Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (2001).