Symposium Programme
FRIDAY, 6th JUNE 2025
09:00 – 09:30: Registration / Welcome Coffee
09:30 – 09:45: Welcome Address by Prof. James Corby (Aula Magna)
09:45 – 11:15: Panel 1 (Room 201) and Panel 2 (Room 202)
11:15 – 11:45: Coffee break
11:45 – 13:15: Panel 3 (Room 201) and Panel 4 (Room 202)
13:15 – 14:00: Lunch break
14:00 – 15:00: Keynote address: Prof. Emilio Amideo, University of Naples (Aula Magna)
15:00 – 16:30: Panel 5 (Hybrid Panel – Aula Magna)
18:00 – 20:00: Open Mic (at Wild Honey, Merchant’s Street, Valletta)
SATURDAY, 7th JUNE 2025
09:00 – 09:30: Welcome Coffee
09:30 – 11:00: Panel 6 (Room 201) and Panel 7 (Room 202)
11:00 – 11:15: Coffee break
11:15 – 12:30: Roundtable: Interdisciplinary discussion on communities (Aula Magna) details tba
12:30 – 12:45: Prize-giving ceremony for short story competition (Aula Magna)
12:45 – 13:00: Closing Address by Dr Aaron Aquilina and Dr Marija Grech (Aula Magna)
13:00 – 13:30: Lunch
This symposium will take place in the University of Malta’s Valletta Campus. For any queries or further detail, please feel free to email us on englishpgsymposium@um.edu.mt.
This symposium is part of the Erasmus+ project ‘(Re-)Visiting the Mediterranean: Literature, Culture, Environment’, funded under the HE KA220 Cooperation Partnerships in Higher Education.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
PANEL 1: DIGITAL COMMUNITIES (Room 201)
Chair: MC Grech
Melissa Mawdsley (University of Malta) – Collaborative Communities: An Exploration of Literary Collaboration in the Digital Age
Ulaş Ersezen (University of Malta) – ‘Alone we stand together we fall apart’: A Post-Internet Investigation on İmamoğlu’s Arrest and Türkiye’s Identity Crisis and Inability to Unionise
Francesca Montesin (University of Malta) – The Evolution of the Novel and the Changing Dynamics of Reader Interaction with Physical and Digital Texts
PANEL 2: NATIONAL COMMUNITIES (Room 202)
Chair: Florian Radtke
Noah Galea (University of Malta) – Poisoning the Well – Community’s Deterioration through Imposed Comforts
Rosie Blacher (Kingston University) – The Senses and Community in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
Michael Dineen (University of Malta) – Place and Displacement: The Divided Self in the Writings of Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel
PANEL 3: MARGINAL COMMUNITIES (Room 201)
Chair: Ieva Dambrauskaite
Aisling Timoney (Maynooth University) – The Body Has Memory: Racial Fatigue and Trauma in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
Samuel Blackburn (King’s College London) – Come Join My Camp: A Unifying Queer Style?
Emma Willard (Maynooth University) – Boundaries of the Cloak: Queer Liminality and Ecological Haunting in Global Folklore
PANEL 4: HYBRID COMMUNITIES (Room 202)
Chair: Niki Syngelaki
Bilal Akar (University of Milan) – Dancing Without a Homeland: Leila Bederkhan and the Fluid Communities of Stateless Performance
Cristina Pastor Sanz (University of Malta) – Blurring Artistic Boundaries
Zeineb Amairi (University of Carthage) – Myths We Speak: The Interrelation of Speech and Cultural Identity in Tunisia
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Prof. Emilio Amideo (University of Naples) (Aula Magna)
Communities in/as différance: Fluid Belonging and Identity in the Black Queer Diaspora
Chair: Dr Aaron Aquilina
PANEL 5: EMERGENT COMMUNITIES (Aula Magna)
Chair: Noah Galea, Dr Marija Grech
Florian Radtke (Maynooth University) – (Dis)connecting Communities in the Digital Age: Reading for Human and More-Than-Human communities in Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled and Chen Quifan’s Waste Tide
Aditi Basu (Independent Scholar) – Narratives of Spivak’s ‘Planetarity’ in Community-Formation: Viewing Ecofeminism in Indian Subaltern Movements from a Postcolonial Perspective [ONLINE]
Lina Katsorchi (University of Athens) – Mapping the Posthuman: Transversal Subjectivity and Community in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas [ONLINE]
PANEL 6: CONSTRUCTED COMMUNITIES (Room 201)
Chair: Bilal Akar
Dylan Dineen (Maynooth University) – Who Gets to be a Person? Rethinking the Self through Mind, Gender, and the Other
Emilie Guéneau (University of Malta) – Fast-Food Brands as Cultural and Emotional Symbols in Contemporary Literature
James Moffet (University of Malta) – Wanderer and Warrior: Arthur as Exile in Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur
PANEL 7: OUTSIDE COMMUNITIES (Room 202)
Chair: Samuel Blackburn
MC Grech (University of Malta) – Ghosts, Violence, and the Post-Literary
Niki Syngelaki (University of Cyprus) – Violence as Othering in The Island of Missing Trees and in After the formalities
Oumaima Mhamdi (University of Carthage) – Laughter as Subversion: Humour and Satire in Ali Dou’aji’s The Shepherd of the Stars