Plenary Speakers
Professor Nóra Séllei
Nóra Séllei is Professor at the Department of British Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary, and at the Department of English, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia. She gained three postgraduate degrees: PhD (1996), “habilitation” (2001; both from the university of Debrecen), and Dr.Sc (2013; from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). Her main teaching and research areas include gender studies, feminist literary theory, and 19th-, 20th-century and contemporary women’s literature, primarily novelists and autobiographers. Her publications include five monographs: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond (Peter Lang, 1996), and four monographs in Hungarian: one on 19th-century English women writers (1999), one on 20th-century women’s autobiographies (2001), one on Hungarian feminist theory and criticism (2007) and one on the cultural self-reflexivity in Woolf’s writings of the 1930s (2012). She is the author of about one hundred and thirty scholarly articles published not only in Hungary but also internationally (including journals like Modern Fiction Studies, the Journal of Gender Studiesand presses like Routledge, Ashgate, Palgrave, Bloomsbury, Salem Press, Susquehanna University Press, Gale, Continuum, Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté or Dakar University Press). The authors discussed in these articles range from Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen through all the three Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Plath and Mary McCarthy to contemporaries like Doris Lessing, Janet Frame, A.S Byatt, and also some Hungarian women authors (including Hungarian chick lit). She has also done research on film, particularly (but not only) in the context of adaptation studies.
Apart from publishing academic articles, she has also done extensive translation and editing work. She is the Hungarian translator of Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, Jean Rhys’s Smile Please, and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. She was the series editor of the Hungarian feminist book series Artemis Books (1999-2007; seven volumes); also edited a volume for the Hungarian Journal of English Studies (HJEAS) on Femininity and Subjectivity (2003.1), a collection of essays in Hungarian on female subjectivity (2006), two other book volumes: She’s Leaving Home: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context (Peter Lang, 2011) and Presences and Absences: Transdisciplinary Essays (Cambridge Scholar, 2013), and she is also the co-editor of a volume on Transmissions for the journal Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philologia(Cluj-Napoca, Romania; 2024.3). She also edited and translated a reader on postmodern feminist theory (2007).
She has held several offices in various professional bodies at the University of Debrecen, at the national level in Hungary, and also at the international level. Currently, she is the chair of the Habilitation Committee at the Faculty of Humanities and the head of the Gender Studies Centre (both at the University of Debrecen), and also the president of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English (2011-2015; 2019-), and as such the board member of the European Society for the Study of English.
Professor Susana Onega
Susana Onega is Emerita Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and a member of the Research Institute of Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability (IEDIS). She was granted the title of Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College (Univ. of London) in 1996, and the Miguel Servet Award for Research Excellence by the Government of Aragón in 2021. She is the former president of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN), the former Spanish Board Member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and is currently a member of the Academia Europaea (AE), the International Association of University Professors of English IAUPE); the ESSE Gender Studies Network; and the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists (AMIT). She has been leader of various competitive research projects and teams and has written extensively on contemporary British fiction, narrative theory, ethics and trauma and the transition from postmodernism to transmodernism. She is the author of five monographs, including Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (U.M.I. Research Press, 1989), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Candem House, 1999), and Jeanette Winterson (Manchester UP, 2006). She has written various monographic sections including “John Fowles in Focus.” Anglistik. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Anglistenverbandes 13.1 (Spring 2002, 45–107), “Special Focus: Intertextuality.” Symbolism. An International Journal ofCritical Aesthetics 5 (Spring 2005, 3–314), and “Structuralism and Narrative Poetics” (Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, 2006, 259-279). She has edited and translated into Spanish The Collector (Cátedra 1999); edited “Telling Histories”: Narrativizing History / Historicizing Literature (Rodopi 1995; 2006); and has co-edited, with José Angel García Landa, Narratology: An Introduction (Longman 1996, 2014; (Translation into Turkish of “Introduction” as Anlatibilime Giriş 2002); with John A Stotesbury, London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis (Winter 2002); with Christian Gutleben, Refracting the Canon in Contemporary Literature and Film (Rodopi 2004); with Annette Gomis, George Orwell: A Centenary Celebration (Winter 2005), with Constanza del Rio and Maite Escudero-Alías, Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature (Palgrave 2017); and with Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Publishing2007), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction (Rodopi 2011); Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Fiction (Routledge 2013); Liminality and The Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives(Routledge 2014); Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st-Century Fiction (Routledge 2017); The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest (Routledge 2018); Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm (Routledge 2020); The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (Routledge, 2023); and The Ethics of (In-)Attention in Contemporary Anglophone Narrative(Routledge 2025) She is currently co-editing, also with Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Brill Handbook of Literary Criticism and Ethics.
Professor Mukadder Erkan
Mukadder Erkan is professor of English literature at Atatürk University, Erzurum, Türkiye. Her PhD is on William Golding’s early novels (Atatürk University, 1994). Her research interests focus on British novel, poststructuralism, postmodernism, ecocriticism, disability studies, post/trans humanism. She is the author of Samuel Beckett-İfadenin Arayüzeyi/Arayüzeyin İfadesi: Üçleme’ye Postmodern/Postyapısalcı Bir Yaklaşım (2005) and Iris Murdoch: Bir Ahlak Filozofu Olarak Sanatçının Portresi (2011). She wrote many scholarly essays on aforementioned subjects and translated many academic works into Turkish.
Professor Mehmet Ali Çelikel (Professor Talat Sait Halman Lecture)
Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali Çelikel graduated from Hacettepe University, Department of English Linguistics in Ankara, in 1993. He completed his MA in English Language and Literature at the University of Hertfordshire in England in 1997. He got his PhD with a thesis entitled “The Post-Colonial Condition: The Fiction of Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy” at Liverpool University in England in 2001. He has published two academic books in Turkish on post-colonial novel, entitled Sömürgecilik Sonrası İngiliz Romanında Kültür ve Kimlik [Culture and Identity in Postcolonial English Novel] (2011) and Çağdaş İngiliz Romanında Küreselleşme, Göç ve Kültür [Globalisation, Migration and Culture in Contemporary British Novel] (2017). He has published extensively in academic journals on post-colonial novel, poetry translation, and cultural studies.
Prof. Çelikel has edited a collection of essays entitled English Studies: New Perspectives (2015) together with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Baysar Taniyan. He is also the co-editor of another volume of collected essays titled Eski İngiliz Şiiri [Old English Poetry] (2021) in collaboration with Assist. Prof. Barış Ağır.
In 2020, his short story collection, Kimsenin Gidemediği Yere [Where Nobody Could Go], and in 2021, his poetry collection, Su, Taş ve Yosun [Water, Stone and Moss], were published by Mantis Publications.
His translation of This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 [İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915], translated by Irish-Australian poet Robyn Rowland, was published simultaneously in bilingual form by Bilge Culture and Art Publications and 5 Islands Press in Australia in 2015. In 2016, his translation of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Lifewas published by Bilge Culture and Art Publications. In 2022, his translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published by Bilgi Publications. Under This Saffron Sun, which he also translated from Robyn Rowland, was published in Ireland in 2019 by Knocknarone Press in bilingual form. This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 [İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915] was republished in Australia by Spinifex in 2018.
His translations of poems by Robert Frost, Ben Jonson, Thomas Gray, and Robyn Rowland were published in the following literary journals respectively: Sözler, Şehir and Delikliçınar. He also translated Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles into Turkish, which will be published by Bilgi Publications in 2025. He writes and publishes on cultural studies, music, cinema, literature, and book reviews in non-academic journals. Some of his short stories are also published by Adam Öykü, Dünyanın Öyküsü and Nanoist.
He currently works as a Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Marmara University, Turkey.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0402-9858
