On December 8, 2020 Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellows Justine Feyereisen and Coraline Jortay participated in the launch of the Southern Lives Network convened by Professor Elleke Boehmer at the Oxford Center for Life Writing. With more than forty members, the network seeks to explore questions such as: what does it mean to view the world from a southern hemisphere perspective? What perspectives do global southern writing and story-telling offer to northern imaginative norms, including that of the ‘Global South’? How might the postcolonial and world literature fields be approached from a consciously antipodean or about-face viewpoint? How do we build comparative and lateral links across southern spaces and lives, and what is the epistemological and environmental traction of doing so? Through this network, Justine and Coraline hope to expand cross-comparative dialogues building on their expertise of Francophone literature from Sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritius and the Caribbean (for Justine) and contemporary literature from Taiwan (for Coraline). The first in-person conference of the Southern Lives Network should take place in December 2021 in Oxford. More information about the network is available here.

Justine Feyereisen, PhD in Languages, Literature and Translation Studies (ULB) and French and Francophone Literature (University of Grenoble), is currently carrying out a second year of research on her project “Poetics of Cosmopolitical Utopias: Challenging Borders with Literature”, under the supervision of Professor Matthew Reynolds (Faculty of English). On February 2, she presented a paper entitled “Afrotopia: Leonora Miano’s Utopian Poetics of Repair for a Postcolonial Politics of the Living” at the French Graduate Seminar organised Prof. Catriona Seth at All Souls College (abstract). She is co-organising the international conference “Utopia and Migration: Renewing the Imagination of Borders in the 21st c. ”, which will take place in April. Please visit this website to access the provisional programme, the list of speakers (including the philosopher Achille Mbembe and the writer Louis-Philippe Dalembert), as well as practical information on how to register to this online event.

Coraline Jortay, PhD in Languages, Literature and Translation Studies (ULB), has undertaken a research project entitled “You, (Un)gendered: Literary Fates of China’s Most Popular ‘Useless’ Pronoun (1927-1956)”, under the supervision of Dr Jennifer Altehenger (Faculty of History). She has recently contributed to the translation of a collection of short stories by Taiwanese authors, Formosana: Histoires de démocratie à Taiwan (L’Asiathèque 2021), offering Francophone readers “an insight into the historical and social trajectories of an island in stark contrast with the community of Nation-States”. Coraline translated a short story written by Walis Nokan in 1990, about two primary school children from the Atayal tribe denounced for not having greeted the statue of Chiang Kai-shek. Another book to which Coraline contributed as a translator, Perles (L’Asiathèque 2020) by Taiwanese author Chi Ta-wei, has been nominated for the French literary award Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire ( in the Foreign Short Stories category). Congratulations!