Notes on Contributors

AMINA AZZA BEKKAT is a professor at the University of Blida, Algeria and holds doctorates from the Sorbonne Nouvelle ( 3) and Cergy Pontoise. Her field of research is African literatures. She has participated in many conferences in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, , Canada, Spain, and the USA. Among her publications are the introduction to Conver- gences critiques II, with Christiane Achour (2003), Lire, relire Moham- med Dib, with Afifa Bererhi (2003), and Regards sur les littératures d’Afrique (2006). THOMAS DE BRUIJN is currently attached to Leiden University in an ad- ministrative position. He pursued his studies in modern and medieval Hindi at the University of Leiden, where he obtained a doctorate in 1996 on the poetics of Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat. He worked as postdoc- toral fellow at the IIAS in a project on Nayi Kahani, the post-independence modernist movement in Hindi literature. He was a guest lecturer at INALCO in Paris in 2004–2005 and continues to publish on Hindi litera- ture. MATTHEW ISAAC COHEN is senior lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London. He holds a doctorate in anthropology from Yale University and performs on occasion as a wayang kulit puppeteer. Publications include Demon Abduction: A Wayang Ritual Drama from West Java (1998) and The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (2006). He is currently researching the history of intercultural Indonesian performance. RASHEED EL-ENANY is Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. His books in- clude Arab Representations of the Occident (2006) and Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (1993). 382 CHEWING OVER THE WEST W ⏐ X

KEITH FOULCHER is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Indo- nesian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has been a student and teacher of modern Indonesian literature since the late 1960s, and has published widely in this field, both in Indonesia and internationally. With Tony Day, he is joint editor of Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature (2002). SADDIK M. GOHAR has been Associate Professor in the English Depart- ment at United Arab Emirates University since 2002. He holds a doctorate in English literature and criticism from Indiana University. He has pub- lished numerous articles on Arabic poetry and various intercultural aspects of Arabic literature. RACHEL HARRISON is a senior lecturer in Thai cultural studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she teaches courses on both modern Thai literature and Thai cinema. Having published widely on issues of modern women’s writing and sexuality in Thailand, she has just completed a major research project in collaboration with Peter Jackson (ANU, Canberra) entitled The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Power, Aesthetics and the Making of Thai Identities. Harrison’s and Jack- son’s forthcoming edited collection on the topic investigates Siam/Thai- land’s cultural interactions with the West from 1850 to the present day, while Harrison’s own monograph on the subject deals specifically with the field of literature and film. DORIS JEDAMSKI specializes in comparative literary and cultural studies with a regional focus on Indonesia and Malaysia. Since the early 1980s she has published on various aspects of interculturality, (post)colonialism, (popular) literature, the culture of travelling women, language policy, and translation history. She has held academic positions at, among others, Ham- burg University, NTU Darwin, and University. Her current research is centred on the cultural constitution and representation of the de- colonizing Self in the Dutch East Indies; a monograph which is close to completion. Jedamski currently teaches at the University of Leiden, where she also works as subject librarian for Southeast Asia and Oceania. URSULA LIES is a graduate in Vietnamese from Humboldt University, Berlin (1970–75) and the University of Hanoi (1976–77, PhD). She has spent many short and long-term periods of time in Vietnam and taught Vietnamese at Humboldt University. Her publications cover Vietnamese