Eva Darias-Beautell (BA, MA, PhD) is Professor of American and Canadian literatures at the University of La Laguna (Canary Islands, Spain). She is the author of the books Division Language and Doubleness in the Writings of Joy Kogawa (University of La Laguna, 1998), Shifting Sands: Literary Theory and Contemporary Canadian Fiction (Mellen, 2000), and Graphies and Grafts: (Con)Texts and (Inter)Texts in the Fictions of Four Canadian Women Writers (Peter Lang, 2001). Dr. Darias-Beautell has directed three research projects on Canadian and American literatures and cultures of the last quarter of the 20th century, with a focus on the issues of multiculturalism, literary theory, gender and the canon.
Coral Ann Howells is Professor Emerita of English and Canadian Literature, University of Reading, England. She has lectured and published extensively on contemporary Canadian women’s fiction in English. Her books include Private and Fictional Words (1987), Margaret Atwood (1997) 2nd edition (2005), Alice Munro (1998) and Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction: Refiguring Identities (2003). She is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (2006) and co-editor with Eva-Marie Kroller of the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (forthcoming). She is a former President of the British Association of Canadian Studies and former associate editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies.
Ana Ma Fraile-Marcos teaches postcolonial and Canadian literatures at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Having initially specialized in African American literature, her current focus of research is African Canadian literature. She has edited Dialogues on Richard Wright’s Native Son, forthcoming in 2007 (Rodopi). Her more recent publications include the book Planteamientos estéticos y políticos en la obra de Zora Neale Hurston (2003); bilingual editions on the works of Langston Hughes, Zora N. Hurston and Jacob A. Riis; chapters about Hurston, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker and Joy Kogawa (ed. Michael Meyer. Rodopi); and articles in journals such as MELUS and Atlantis. In the field of Canadian studies, she has co-edited the volume The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: European Perspectives (2003).
Belén Martín-Lucas teaches postcolonial literatures in English at the University of Vigo, Spain, where she coordinates the Research Group Feminario de Investigación Feminismos e Resistencias (Teorías e Prácticas). She has published extensively both in English and Spanish on Canadian women’s fiction, on feminist perspectives on nationalisms, and on the use of new literary genres by feminist authors. Her co-edited work with Dr. Ana Bringas includes, among others, Global Neo-imperialism and National Resistance: Approaches from Postcolonial Studies (Universidade de Vigo 2004), Nacionalismo e globalización: lingua, cultura e identidade (Universidade de Vigo 2003), National Literatures in English and the Global Market (Special Issue of The Atlantic Literary Review, New Delhi, 2001) and Challenging Cultural Practices in Contemporary Post-Colonial Societies (Universidade de Vigo, 2001). She is also the author of a book-length study on Canadian short story cycles by women, Género Literario/Género Femenino. 20 años de ciclos de cuentos en Canadá (Oviedo: KRK Ediciones, 1999). http://webs.uvigo.es/h04/bmartin/
María Jesús Hernáez Lerena teaches at the University of La Rioja (Spain). She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and contemporary Canadian fiction. She teaches Canadian Literature in a doctoral program that has been awarded the Quality Distinction for Doctoral Programs by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. Her main fields of research are short story theory (applied to contemporary Canadian writers) and the impact of the landscape of Atlantic Canada on contemporary Canadian fiction. Her dissertation on Alice Munro was awarded the “Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado” (award for outstanding doctoral thesis) in 1996. She was the editor of Journal of English Studies until 2004. Her publications include Exploración de un género literario: los relatos breves de Alice Munro (1998), Story Time: Exercises in the Study of American Literature for Advanced Students of English (1999), written in collaboration with Julieta Ojeda Alba and James R. Sullivan, and Short Story World: The Nineteenth-Century American Masters (2003).
