A Special Guest Of Text Matters. Mieke Bal: “Writing With Images”

Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3rd edition 2009). She is also a video artist, her internationally exhibited documentaries on migration include Separations, State of Suspension, Becoming Vera and the installation Nothing is Missing. With Michelle Williams Gamaker she made the feature film A Long History of Madness, a theoretical fiction about madness, and related exhibitions (2012). Her current project Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, also with Michelle, is exhibited worldwide. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Her co-curated exhibition 2MOVE has travelled to four countries.

Dorota Filipczak teaches contemporary literatures in English and cultural studies in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź. Her publications have appeared in Literature and Theology, The Malcolm Lowry Review, Routledge and Springer. She has delivered papers at universities in Durham, Beer-Sheva, Glasgow, Sheffield, York, Coleraine, Winnipeg and Barcelona, and conducted research at universities in Strasbourg, Berlin, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Peterborough. Her postdoctoral book was Unheroic Heroines: The Portrayal of Women in the Fiction of Margaret Laurence (2007). In 1999–2002 she was on the board of Literature and Theology, a journal published by OUP. She has published five volumes of poetry.