Notes on Contributors

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

AYAD A. ABOOD AL- SAYMARY graduated from Shat Al-Arab University, Basrah, Iraq, the College of Education for the Humanities, Department of English, in 1998. He completed his M.A. in Linguistics/ Stylistics in 2002, University of Basrah. His thesis was entitled Paralinguistic and Quasi Paralinguistic Analysis of G.B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man. He enrolled in the Doctoral School for the Humanities at Ovidius University in 2019. The title of his PhD thesis is The Representation of Trauma in Some Selected Contemporary Novels: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Ayad A. Abood Al- Saymary has been teaching English drama in Shatt Al-Arab University College, Basrah, since 2002. His main fields of interest are Stylistics and Critical Discourse Analysis.

JAMES E. AUGEROT is Professor Emeritus, University of Washington, Seattle. He has dedicated his life to the study and teaching of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Romanian language and culture. His primary interest has been in language acquisition. To this purpose he has published teaching materials for Russian, Bulgarian, and Romanian. His area of expertise has extended to Balkan Linguistics and the investigation of the common characteristics among Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and other neighboring languages. He was Fulbright Lecturer at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania, 1966-1967, and at Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, Bulgaria. He also served as President of South East European Studies Association (2001-2005), Secretary-Treasurer Washington Association of Foreign Language Teachers (1978-80) and Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Romanian Studies (1993-2010). His publications include The Sounds of English and Romanian (Bucharest University Press, 1984), a study co- authored with Dumitru Chitoran and Hortensia Pârlog, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Academy of Sciences, Bucharest, 1968), “Romanian” in Encylopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Ed. (660-663), edited by Keith Brown (Elsevier: Oxford, 2006).

ANDREEA-VICTORIŢA CHIRIAC (BECEANU) holds a BA in English and Spanish Language and Literature and an MA in Anglo-American Studies at Ovidius University of Constanţa. During her studies she has taken part in an Erasmus mobility at Universidad Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which enabled her to develop cultural awareness and to enlarge her academic and linguistic knowledge. She is currently enrolled at the Doctoral School of Humanities at Ovidius and is writing her thesis titled Literary Representations of Education in the Nineteenth-Century England and in the Romanian Principalities under the supervision of Professor Adina Ciugureanu. Her research interest covers education and comparative education, British and Romanian culture.

ADINA CIUGUREANU is Professor Emerita of British and American Culture at Ovidius University Constanta, Romania. She was the Dean of the Faculty of Letters between 2004–2012, the President of the RAAS between 2012–2016 and has been the treasurer of the EAAS since 2012. She was Director of the Institute for Doctoral Studies at Ovidius University between 2016- 2019 and Director of the Doctoral School of Humanities between 2006-2012 and 2014-2016. Her

research ranges from nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American culture to feminist studies and popular culture. She has published six books (among which Modernism and the Idea of Modernity, Constanţa: Ex Ponto, 2004, Post-War Anxieties, Constanţa: Ovidius University Press, 2007, Efectul de Bumerang, Iaşi: Institutul European, 2008) and over 40 articles in edited volumes and prestigious academic periodicals. She has co-edited a few studies among which National and Transnational Challenges to the American Imaginary (Peter Lang, 2018) and Ideology, Identity and the US: Crossroads, Freeways, Collisions (Peter Lang, 2019). She is the winner of two Fulbright grants and is currently writing a book on city space in fiction from urban studies and geocritical perspectives for which she did research during her second Senior Fulbright grant awarded in 2017 at UCSB, California.

FATIMA FARHOUD graduated from the Applied Science University, Amman, Jordan. In 2016 she earned her MA degree in Linguistics from the University of Bucharest. She is currently a PhD student at Ovidius University of Constanta where she is doing research on critical discourse analysis. Since 2014 she has been working as a translator and as a teacher in private schools. At the moment, she is teaching at Jerusalem school in Bucharest.

ILEANA MARIN teaches interdisciplinary courses at the University of Washington, Seattle, and at the Center of Excellence in Image Studies of the University of Bucharest. She has published books on tragic myths, Pre-Raphaelite artists, and on Victorian aesthetics of erasure. Her studies on the de-humanizing power of art and the artistic legacy of communism, have drawn praise from specialists as have her articles and conference presentations on the materiality of literary, pictorial, and graphic texts. Most recently, she has focused on E-Literature and digital arts. Winner of several research grants, including a Fulbright Fellowship in 2004, she has explored multimedia dialogues between text and image and the transformation of artworks into cultural icons. Co-founder, and currently the Board Chair, of the Seattle American Romanian Cultural Society, Ileana Marin participates in expanding cultural exchanges and educational programs between the US and Eastern Europe.

SÎNZIANA POPESCU is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities, Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania. Her research focuses on trauma and memory studies in general and on places and sites of memory in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, in particular. She is currently teaching English in Constanţa and writing her dissertation under the supervision of Professor Adina Ciugureanu.

IOANA RĂDULESCU is a Doctoral Student at Ovidius University of Constanta, where she is currently attending the Doctoral School of Humanities. She is involved in the Philology field of research and is mainly interested in Contemporary American Literature. She is also the author of the article “A Case Study on Teaching Skills in a Romanian Middle-School” (2014) and the article “The Public versus the Private in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior” (Peter Lang, 2019).

BIANCA L. IONESCU-TĂNĂSESCU graduated from Law School at “Ovidius” University in 2009. She did an M.A. in Criminal Sciences, from which she graduated in 2010. After that, she enrolled in the Doctoral School for the Humanities at “Ovidius” University in 2013. Her PhD thesis is titled Corporate Culture and Its Discontents in Postwar America. Bianca L. Ionescu-

Tănăsescu lives in Constanţa, where she works as a legal adviser in the field of public services. She is interested in the examination of the impact of the postwar economic and political new order on American society, both on US culture at that time and on its impact on the subsequent decades.

EDUARD VLAD is Professor of British and American Studies at Ovidius University, Constanta. He is currently serving as Director of the Doctoral School for the Humanities there, as well as President of RAAS. Testifying to his interest in both British and American Studies are some of his most recent books, co-authored with F. A. Vlad: Literary Selves and Grand Narratives in the First American Century (2016) and Early British Gothic and Its Travelling Companions (2017). Cultural Studies: Archaeologies, Genealogies, Discontents was published in 2018, while Globalization, Geopolitics and the US appeared in 2019. Previous volumes are: Larkin: The Glory and the Gloom (1997), Romantic Myths, Alternative Stories (2004), American Literature: Responses to the Po-Mo Void (2004), Ironic Apocalypses: The World According to Vonnegut (2004), Authorship and Identity in Contemporary Fiction (2005), Journeys out of the Self (2005), Perspective critice asupra globalizării culturale (2010), Dictionar polemic de cultura americana (2012).

FLORIAN ANDREI VLAD holds an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg and a Ph.D. from “Ovidius” University, Constanta, in whose Faculty of Letters he has been teaching British and American literature for some time now. His first book-length volume on American fiction, based on his Heidelberg MA thesis, Fictional Americas at War, was published in 2006. After defending his PhD thesis, New Flesh, Old Demons, on representations of contamination in American literature, he went on to co-author a book on British literature - British Gothic and Its Travelling Companions - and one on American 19th century: Literary Selves and Identity Narratives in the First American Century. The book based on his PhD thesis was published in 2019.

ADRIANA VOICU graduated from Ovidius University in 2010. She continued her studies and applied for the M.A. program in Anglo-American studies, from which she graduated in 2012. In 2019 she enrolled in the Doctoral School for the Humanities at Ovidius University. The title of her PhD thesis is The Less Deceived and the More Deceived: Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin under the supervision of Professor Eduard Vlad. Adriana Voicu lives in Constanta, Romania, where she has been teaching English and Romanian since 2010. She is particularly keen on exploring hidden meanings behind Hughes’s and Larkin’s poems.