Organisers

Martina Biavati is a PhD Student at the University of Reading and Cardiff, funded by the SWWDTP. Her project is a comparative analysis of the commemoration of communist women in Italian and French post-war society, focussing specifically in the years of the French Fourth Republic (1944-1958). She is interested in questions of memory, martyrdom and agency in these narratives, as well as broader questions of gender and political action and how these ideas interacted in the landscape of post-war and early cold-war Italy and France.

Shehana Gomez was a solicitor in local government before returning to university to complete a LLM in Environmental Law and Sustainable Development. She is currently a PhD candidate at Cardiff University where the themes of her research are Indigenous Peoples, the development of their rights in international law, and the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 (the CBD). In particular, she is focusing on biocultural community protocols in the CBD’s system of access and benefit-sharing. She has also been a tutor at the Open University and a PGR tutor at Cardiff University.

Anna Maslenova is a Postgraduate Research Student on ERC-funded research project: ‘The Dark Side of Translation’ at the University of Exeter, UK. Her academic interests lie in the field of Russian fiction, religious and philosophical texts translated into English at the second half of the 19th – at the beginning of the 20th centuries. Since 2020, Anna has been co-running the Anglo-Russian Research Network.

Anna Milon (she/her) researches at the juncture of environmental humanities, modern pagan studies, and speculative fiction studies, with a thesis on the Horned God as an environmental figure. She teaches at Advanced Studies in England, Bath, and at Greene’s College, Oxford. Additionally, she is a translator and peer reviewer for a number of academic publications. Her work appears in Folklore, Antikenrezeption im Horror, Fictional Practices of Spirituality, and Mapping the Impossible. You can follow Anna on twitter @hexnhart.

Abbie Pink is a SWW DTP funded PhD student at the University of Exeter and Cardiff University. Her thesis considers the representation of urban spaces in contemporary science fiction and their generative multispecies potential in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Her broader research interests include ecocriticism, new materialism, contemporary science fiction and fantasy, and utopian studies.

Iona Ramsay is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her thesis investigates memory of spiritual resistance to communism, and its political instrumentalization in anti-liberal movements in Romania, France and the US. She is interested in transnational Eastern European memory politics, the relationship between religion, martyrology and cultural memory, and the global politics of secularism. You can follow Iona on twitter @IonaELRamsay