Transnational Representations of the Region, 1840-1940

Giulia Bruna holds a PhD from University College Dublin, Ireland, and works as an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at the University of Macerata, Italy. She previously lectured in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where she was also postdoctoral fellow (2020-2023) for the Dutch Research Council nwo project Redefining the Region: The Transnational Dimensions of Local Colour. She is the author of J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival (Syracuse up, 2017) and her research on Synge, the Irish revival, travel writing, periodicals, and the European reception of nineteenth-century regional fiction is published in Irish Studies Review, Studies in Travel Writing, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Translation and Literature, Open Library of Humanities, English Studies, and in several edited collections.

Marguérite Corporaal holds a chair in Irish Literature and Culture in Transnational Contexts at Radboud University. She was the principal investigator of Relocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847–1921, for which she obtained a Starting Grant for Consolidators from the European Research Council (2010–15). Corporaal was awarded an NWO-VICI grant for her project Redefining the Region (2019-24). Furthermore, Corporaal is the PI of Heritages of Hunger, which is funded as part of the Dutch research council nwo’s nwa programme (2019-24). Among Corporaal’s recent international publications are her monograph Relocated Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1847–70 (Syracuse University Press, 2017); A Stage of Emancipation: Change and Progress at the Dublin Gate Theatre (co-edited, Liverpool up, 2021); The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture (co-edited, Liverpool up, 2018); Travelling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (co- edited, Palgrave, 2017), The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women’s Writing (co-edited, Palgrave, 2024) and Famines and the Making of Heritage (co-edited, Routledge, 2024).

Christopher Cusack is an assistant professor at Radboud University, where he was awarded his PhD in 2018. He recently completed a postdoctoral project on local colour in Irish American and German American writing. His research has appeared in a wide range of edited volumes and journals, including Irish Studies Review, New Hibernia Review, Open Library of Humanities, and Atlantic Studies and he has co-edited several books, most recently The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature (Liverpool up, forthcoming). His first monograph, The Great Famine in Irish and North American Fiction, 1892-1921, is under contract with Liverpool University Press.

Sophie van Os is an Information Specialist at the School of Management as well as a PhD Candidate at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her thesis, which is part of the nwo-funded vici project Redefining the Region: The Transnational Dimensions of Local Colour examines the transnational dimensions of the region in European illustrated periodicals from the long nineteenth century. Van Os, moreover, is involved in the European Society for Periodical Research and the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals, and she is the International Representative (Europe) of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland. She has published in Victorian Periodicals Review, De Moderne Tijd and Review of Irish Studies in Europe.

Anneloek Scholten is a lecturer in English Literature at Utrecht University. She wrote her PhD dissertation at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, as part of the nwo-funded vici project Redefining the Region: The Transnational Dimensions of Local Colour. Her dissertation considers the transregional and transnational dimensions of Dutch regional fiction from the period 1843-1919. She is co-editor of a special issue of De Moderne Tijd (2022) which concerns representations of soil in the nineteenth-century Low Countries, and has published in Dutch Crossing and Journal of European Periodical Studies. For her MA thesis on modernist print drama, entitled ‘The Periodical as a Playhouse: Modernist Drama in the Little Magazines’, she was awarded the 2020 Herman Servotte Prize.

Stephanie Palmer holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan and is presently a Senior Lecturer in nineteenth-century American literature at Nottingham Trent University. Her research recovers and scrutinizes women’s writing in the context of place, social class, and national and transnational cultures. Her monograph Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lexington Books, 2009) traces a motif of ‹regional travel accident› through texts by Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, Rebecca Harding Davis, Thomas Detter, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to show how writers scripted their contradictory relation to provincial places. Palmer’s second monograph, Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers, is the first major study of British reviews of American women’s fiction, essays, and poetry between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. Her current work examines new voices in the revolt from the village movement of the 1910s and 1920s, showing how the movement was led by white women and supported by African American men and women.

Tim van Gerven obtained his PhD in European Studies at the University of Amsterdam in 2020. His dissertation Scandinavism: Overlapping and Competing Identities in the Nordic World, 1770 -1919 was awarded the Nordic History Book Award and the nise Award. He is currently associate professor of Nineteenth-Century History at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway.

Eric Storm is associate professor in General History at Leiden University. His investigations focus on the history of regionalism and nationalism from a comparative perspective. Among his publications are Nationalism: A World History (Princeton up 2024) and The Culture of Regionalism: Art, Architecture and International Exhibitions in France, Germany and Spain, 1890-1939 (Manchester up 2010). He also co-edited with Joost Augusteijn Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building, Regionalism and Separatism (Palgrave 2012), with Xose-Manoel Nunez Seixas Regionalism and Modern Europe: Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day (Bloomsbury 2019), with Stefan Berger Writing the History of Nationalism (Bloomsbury 2019) and with Joep Leerssen World Fairs and the Global Moulding of National Identities: International Exhibitions as Cultural Platforms, 1851-1958 (Brill 2022).

Christian Drury holds a BA from the University of York, an MA from University College London and a PhD from Durham University, where he is presently based. His current research looks at British exploration, travel and tourism in the Arctic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly representations of modernity and landscape. His work also focuses on how the Arctic was imagined in European travel writing, as well as relationships between travellers and indigenous people in the Arctic.

Sophie Horrocks David is an Associate Fellow at Durham University, UK. Her research explores the artistic, social and political contexts of theatre production in provincial nineteenth-century France. She has recently published on touring adaptations of French grand opera in Cambridge Opera Journal,  and has contributed chapters on Napoleonic military dramatics and on regional theatrical competition in edited volumes published by Helion and Ergon.

Peter George holds a BA in French and History from the University of Oxford and a Research MA degree in History from the University of Leiden. Currently, he is completing the PhD project ‘Discourses of Identity and Dialect Writing in the Press, c. 1890-1940’, at the University of Oxford. His research is funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom, with additional support from the Millennium Fund of the Societe Jersiaise and States of Jersey.

Aurélie Marks Toitot holds an MA from the University of Birmingham and previously studied in France. She is currently completing a PhD at Brunel University London, with funding from Techne AHRC doctoral training partnership. Her PhD project, ‘The politics of memory in Alsace: Nationalisation and gender in the aftermath of the Second World War’, investigates memory in Alsace, specifically the use of gender representations and their role in supporting the integration of Alsace into France, as well as Franco-German reconciliation.

Frank Mehring is Professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and currently serves as the President of the Netherlands American Studies Association. His research focuses on cultural transfer, migration, intermediality, and the function of music in transnational cultural contexts. In 2012, he received the Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap (2014). His publications include Sphere Melodies (2003) on Charles Ives and John Cage, Soundtrack of Liberation (2015) on WWII-sonic diplomacy, Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music (2018, with Erik Redling), The Politics and Cultures of Liberation (2018, with Hans Bak and Mathilde Roza), Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus (2020, with Elena Furlanetto) and The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (2022). Frank is the co-founder of the European Digital Studies Network and the online journal AmLit – American Literatures (with Stefan L. Brandt and Tatiani Rapatzikou). Mehring organized the first performance of the Marshall Plan opera La Sterlina Dollarosa (2019), and co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, Joseph Beuys, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in New York, Nijmegen, and The Hague.

June Howard is Full Professor Emerita in the Departments of English and American Culture and holds a courtesy title in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her first book was the widely read and still-cited Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985). The 1996 essay collection on Sarah Orne Jewett that she edited and contributed to, New Essays on Country of the Pointed Firs, was both controversial and influential. Howard’s 2001 Publishing the Family is a microhistory that takes the serial publication in Harper’s Bazaar of a collaborative novel by twelve authors, including Henry James and Mary Wilkins Freeman, as a window into the year 1908 and the “public/private” binary as constitutive of modernity. Her most recent book is on regionalism as a literary movement and cultural force, in the United States and beyond; it is titled The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time, and was published by Oxford University Press in December 2018. Howard holds an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship in recognition of her contributions to undergraduate education. She received the University of Michigan’s Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 2004 and held leadership positions, including serving as Associate Dean at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and chairing the Department of American Culture. She was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, in 2013.