Visiting Scholars

Dr. René Ramírez Gallegos (Quito, Ecuador 1975) is a researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de México in the University Programme of Studies on Democracy, Justice and Society. He is a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen with the Global Encounters scholarship, in the department of Romanistics and under the management of the Baden-Württembergisches Brasilien- und Lateinamerika-Zentrum.

Dr. Edivaldo González received his PhD degree in Latin American Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2022. He has been an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM and at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He is a member of the Contemporary Latin American Narrative Research Seminar (SENALC) at UNAM and is the editor-in-chief of the Hoja Crítica. In 2015, he did a research stay at the Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaires sur les Mondes Ibériques Contemporains (CRIMIC) of Sorbonne University.  Edivaldo González Ramírez's research focuses on Contemporary and 1960s Latin American Literature, particularly exploring the cultural dimensions and political aspects of art. His scholarly interests lie in the intricate relationship between literature and sociopolitical contexts. Through his academic pursuits, he contributes to the deeper understanding of Latin American literary production and its wider societal implications.

Dr. Roberto Robalinho received his Ph.D. in Communications from the Institute of Arts and Communications at Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil. His research focus on the relation between images, political and subjective production during Brazil's 2013 mass street protests. He is particularly interested in the liminal and contiguous relation between the masses on the streets and on the screens and how this affects political and subjective transformations in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Roberto won the "Biblioteca UFF" prize and published a book on the relation between the Iraq war and image based on his Masters research. He has also lectured in the Media and Cultural Studies department at Universidade Federal Fluminense. He has directed a series of short films and is in pre-production of his first long feature film that a won an important public grant, a documentary that visits the geographical and symbolical landscape of João Guimarães Rosa's literature.

Dr. Ivonne Sánchez Becerril received her PhD degree in Latin American Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2016. She also holds a specialized diploma in 20th century Mexican Literature from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Since 2019 she is member of the SNI (the Mexican National Researcher System). Sánchez Becerril researches Latin America Literature with special focus on recent Mexican and post-soviet Cuban narrative; she is particularly interested in the relationship between Esthetic Strategies, Literary Theory and Writing Context.

Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.

Joseph Slaugther is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Columbia University specialized in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). 
He teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and Third-World approaches to International Law. Especially he is interested in the social work of literature — the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.
His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship and the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His first book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, was awarded the prestigious René Wellek prize.
Furthermore, he co-edited a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic (2017), that explores some of the social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a region.

Mark Sanders is a Professor of Comparitive Literature and English at New York University, USA. His research work is on African literatures, literary theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature, law, and philosophy. He is the author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Duke UP, 2002), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory (Continuum, 2006), and Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford UP, 2007). His recent work is Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa (Princeton UP, 2016). He is editor of a special issue of the journal Diacritics on "Ethics" and co-editor of "J.M. Coetzee and His Doubles," a special issue of the Journal of Literary Studies published in 2009. He has held a number of major fellowships, including the American Council of Learned Societies ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies Charles A. Ryskamp research fellowship, and the George Watson fellowship at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Véronique Tadjo is Professor and Head of French and Francophone Studies at WITS, Johannesburg. Prior to joining the University of the Witwatersrand in January 2007, she held a number of positions such as Translator and Consultant in Nairobi, Kenya (1994 - 1998); Assistant Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Abidjan (1988 - 1993); Assistant Lecturer at the French Department of Lagos University (1987 - 1988); Assistant Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Abidjan (1982 - 1984); Assistant Lecturer at the English Department of the École Normale Supérieure of Abidjan (1981 - 1982); and English teacher at the Lycée Moderne de Korhogo in the North of Côte d’Ivoire (1979 - 1981). Between 1999 and 2006, Tadjo was also a full-time fiction writer and visual artist.

Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. His books include the novels The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View and Double Negative, and the story collections 101 Detectives and Flashback Hotel. In 2006, he published Portrait with Keys, a sequence of documentary texts on Johannesburg. He has edited books on architecture and art, and sometimes works with artists and photographers. TJ/Double Negative, a joint project with photographer David Goldblatt, received the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book. His work has also won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Wits University.

Philip Mead is inaugural Chair of Australian Literature and Director of the Westerly Centre. Philip’s research is at the intersections of national and transnational literary studies, cultural history and theory, poetics, literary education, and digital humanities. He has led nationally competitive research and teaching grants, most recently the ALTC funded project, ‘Australian Literature Teaching Survey’ (2009), the ARC Discovery Project grant for 2010-2012, ‘Monumental Shakespeares: an investigation of transcultural commemoration in 20th-century Australia and England' (with Gordon McMullan, King's College London), and the OLT funded Extension project ‘Update and Expansion of the AustLit Resource Teaching with AustLit site’ (2013-2014). He is on the board of management of the ARC LIEF funded AustLIt consortium.

Pashmina Murthy is an Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. She joined the English department in 2012 after having taught in the department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota for several years. She is currently working on a book project on female infanticide in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.

With a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of São Paulo (USP) and Masters in Literary Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Fernando Resende is a Professor of Media Studies in the Graduate Program in Communication, Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). He coordinates the [LAN] Laboratory for the Experimentation and Research of Media Narratives and is vice coordinator of PPGCOM / UFF and Local Coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate – Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones (UFF / Bergamo / Tübingen / Perpignan). He is a researcher for the PQ / CNPq (National Counsel for Technological and Scientific Development) and a FAPERJ Young Scientist (Foundation for Research of the State of Rio de Janeiro) with an emphasis on communication studies, communication theory and journalism, working principally in the areas of: journalism, discourse, narrative, culture, communication, alterity, and conflicts in the Middle East. He is a deputy coordinator of the GT Islam & Media of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR – 2011/2012).