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Dr. Gabriele Biotti is a film theorist and a multidisciplinary researcher. He obtained a PhD degree in Film Aesthetics at Lille3 University (Doctoral School “Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société”), jointly with the University of Siena, his scholarly areas are Film Studies, Memory Studies, Historiography and the Anthropology of Representations. His PhD thesis is a research work on the anachronism in cinema and on the essay film practice.

Gabriele has explored questions of film aesthetics, film history writing, epistemology of history of film theories, memory practices and forms of memory telling and writing. He has published books and articles on film aesthetics, film styles and the relationships between film form and the practice of history writing and memory telling. Some of his publications are about the cinema of David Lynch, Samuel Beckett’s films for television, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, the cinema of Edgar Reitz, the cinema of Chris Marker, Giuseppe Bertolucci’s nonfictional works and Cesare Zavattini’s idea of cinema and the audiovisual.

Dr. Biotti has given courses of “Teorie e Tecniche del Linguaggio Cinematografico” and “Metodologia della Critica Cinematografica” at the University of Siena, where he has also given seminars and lectures for the courses of “Storia delle Teorie del Film” and “Storia e Critica del Cinema”, with seminars on New German Cinema, film aesthetics and the epistemology of history, film and experience and a lecture on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. His focus has been on a group of films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, Michael Haneke, Alexander Kluge, Ingmar Bergman, Chris Marker, Wim Wenders and Stanley Kubrick.

Gabriele has presented papers in conferences such as the International Film Studies Conference (Udine), Avanca Cinema Conference (Avanca, Portugal), the Festival “Jeunes chercheurs dans la cité” (Brussels), the III International Conference on Myth Criticism (Madrid), the Arts in Society Conference (London), the “Mirror, Mirror: Perceptions, Deceptions, and Reflections in Time” Conference (London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research) and the “International Conference on Film Studies: Identity, Projection and the Other” (London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research). In 2018 he created and co-organized the “Play, Masks and Make-Believe” Conference (London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research). Currently he is developing a research project on ritual processes of remembering through the analysis of Uruguayan documentary cinema.

Dr Elena Nistor is a graduate of the English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, and teaches English at the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest. Between April 2015 and April 2016 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

She is also a translator and an essayist, and a member of the Romanian Association of Literary Translators (ArtLit), the Royal Society of Literature (UK), the Literary London Society (UK), and the Association of Adaptation Studies (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK). Her thematic research areas include: contemporary British poetry; poetics and literary criticism; British and American culture and civilisation; gender studies; post-postmodern theories; translation from/into English (literature, particularly poetry).

Elena’s main publications include Sultry Summer Jottings. 111 Poems, a bilingual anthology for which she received the 2009 LiterArt-XXI Translation Prize from the International Association of Romanian Writers and Artists, and ‘A Blossom of Words in a Dusty Ray of Light’: Contemporary British Women Poets (1950-2005) based on her PhD thesis that received the summa cum laude distinction from the English Department of the University of Bucharest. She is currently working on two studies: one about images of London in contemporary British women’s poetry, and the other about the representations of Senate House London in British and American cinema.

Dr. Aleksandra Tryniecka has a PhD from Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. Her PhD thesis concerns the female characters in the selected Victorian and neo-Victorian novels. During her studies, she was a trainee at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Currently she is a volunteer in London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and a Research Fellow in Athens Institute for Education and Research. While carrying out her research, she had a possibility and pleasure to work in several international teams. She is especially interested in the Brontë sisters’ and Oscar Wilde’s writings. In 2017 she illustrated the poetry volume Full Stop published by IRF Press. Aleksandra is also a co-editor of Crossing Borders: Gender and Culture, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. In her free time she writes poetry in order to accommodate her life with appropriate words.

Dr. Konstantinos D. Karatzas has a PhD in Modern History from the University of Zaragoza in Spain (2017). He is specialized in American history with a particular interest in African American history and political and racial violence. His work focuses on the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race War, the Civil Rights Movement, the interpretation of violence and race in the United States along with the examination of massive memory, areas that has also explored during his MA studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He has received the first-ever scholarship for doctoral studies in American History by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY).

In 2016 and 2017, Konstantinos has been a guest scholar at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, the University of Alcala, Spain, the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland and has presented in international conferences in Europe and the United States. Among others, he organized and chaired the panels: “African American History: Aspects of Racism and Violence”, at the 2016 EAAS International Conference in Romania.

He is the guest editor of the 2017 and 2018 special issues on violence of the European Journal of American Culture (EJAC). He is the head of the Economic History department at the Institute of International Economic Relations (IDOS) based in Athens, Greece. During the 2017 summer, Konstantinos had been a visiting scholar at the Universities of South Florida, Florida-Gainesville and Central Florida where he explored the racial history of Florida.

Dr. Konrad Gunesch is Associate Professor of International Education and Linguistics in the College of Media and Mass Communication at the American University in the Emirates in Dubai. Before his PhD in Education, Language and Cultural Studies from the University of Bath in England, he obtained German undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Law before British and French Master’s degrees in European Politics.

As part of his degrees, he completed studies in seven European countries, and then studied languages in Canada, China and Arabia, before working as a Researcher in departments of Education, Anthropology, Sociology and English in Britain and Hong Kong, and finally as Professor of Global Business in Panama. On that basis, he has taught over 50 courses in Cultural, Liberal, Social, Legal and Ethical Studies, Communication, and Global Business.

The interdisciplinary nature of his education and work continues in his research, with publications and presentations in language learning, cultural identity, global tourism, and sustainable development. A recent focus of his publications and speaking engagements is in media studies, especially the linguistic and cultural identity dimensions of mainstream films, their feminist roles and responsibilities, and their potential for education and inspiration.

Dr. Olena Lytovka has a PhD in British Literature from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin (Poland). She is the author of The Uncanny House in Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction published by Peter Lang Publishing House and the editor of The Place of Memory and Memory of Place published by IRF Press. Olena is particularly interested in European modernist literature, time and space representations in fiction, psychoanalysis and feminist literary criticism. She was an Erasmus intern at the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland (2013) and an Erasmus exchange student at Middlesex University in London (2015). Olena was part of German-Polish-Ukrainian oral history projects: Krasne – Junction Station for Post-War Replacements in Krasne, Ukraine (2012) and Memory and Oblivion: Forced Displacements during and after World War II in Jugów, Poland (2010). Her papers were published in Psychoanalysis: Philosophy, Art and Clinic, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2015), The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present, Routlege (2015), Leitura Flutuante – Revista do Centro de Estudos em Semiótica e Psicanálise, Sao Paulo (2012), Visión del Mundo y Texto, University of Granada (2011) and other books and journals.

Dr. Anna Hamling is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She is the author of four books on the comparative studies of LN Tolstoy’s and Miguel de Unamuno’s religious writings: Introducción a un estudio comparativo entre Miguel de Unamuno y León Tolstoi (Madrid, 2001), Tolstoy, Unamuno and Their Religious Essays. An Introduction. The Yearning for True Faith (Saarbrucken, 2010); Религиозные Воззрения Љва Толстого у Mигеля de Унамуно. Попытка опоставления (OCR Bookshelf, 2016); Poglady Religjne LwaTolstoja i Miguela de Unamuno (Torun, 2017). She has written over fifty diverse articles and encyclopaedia entries covering Spanish and Latin American Women Writers and Artists; Dance and Music (tango, flamenco and Polish folk dances); Icons and Shrines of Black Madonnas; and the concept of non-violence (Gandhi and Khan).

Dr. Melahat Kucukarslan Emiroglu holds a PhD degree in Interior Architecture. She is an Assistant Professor at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul teaching courses on Design Semiotics, Multi-functional and Complex Interiors, Participatory Design, Introduction to Interior (Architecture) and Design, Environmental and Human Factors, Current Design Approaches at undergraduate and graduate levels. Melahat ran several Interior Architectural Design and Furniture Design studios. She is the author of the book ‘Airport Interiors: Intercultural Communication Space Versus Non-place’ (2012). Her current research interests include design and semiotics, people and environment, memory in spatial experience; intertwining concepts of architecture, anthropology, ethnology and psychology, and additionally participatory design and community involvement approaches.

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