Conference Speakers
We are pleased to announce an exciting lineup of speakers at Postcolonial Transfers GAPS 2026, including scholars and writers from around the world.
Keynote Speakers
Leila Neti
Leila Neti is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She specializes in Victorian literature, postcolonial theory, and law and literature. Her book Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2021) explores the shared cultural logic of both colonial legal opinions and novels during the Victorian era. Currently, she is co-editing (with Marco Wan) The Cambridge Handbook of Law, Literature, and Postcolonialism and working on a monograph on the Indian Penal Code. Her published articles have appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Law and Literature, Law and Humanities, Pòlemos: Journal of Law, Literature and Culture, and in various edited collections.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a fiction writer of The First Woman (2020), which won the Jhalak Prize 2021 and was shortlisted for The Diverse Book Award 2021, the Encore Prize 2021 and the James Tait Black Prize 2021. Her novel, Kintu (2014), won the Kwani? Manuscript Project 2013, the Prix Transfuge Du Meilluer Premier Roman Francais (2019) and was shortlisted for Edward Stanford Awards (2019). Her collection of short stories, Manchester Happened (2019), was shortlisted for The Big Book prize: Harper’s Bazaar 2019. A recipient of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize 2018, Writer-in-Residence at NIAS-KNAW in 2021, Artist-in-Berlin DAAD in 2022, and a Franke Fellow (Yale University) 2024-2025, Makumbi won the Global Commonwealth Short story prize 2014, has a PhD from Lancaster University and has taught in several universities in Britain.
Chielozona Eze
Chielozona Eze is Professor and Director of Africana Studies at Carleton College. He previously served as the Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. His research centers on cosmopolitanism, empathy, human rights, and social justice. He has published thirty articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa (University of Rochester Press, 2018) and Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans (Routledge, 2021). His most recent book, Zora Neale Hurston and the Legacy of Black Feminism: Desire as Power, was published by Bloomsbury in December 2025. He is currently working on a monograph titled Goodwill as Politics.
Neelam Srivastava
Neelam Srivastava is Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. Her research interests include Italian colonialism, the editorial history of anticolonial thought, in particular Frantz Fanon, postcolonial print cultures, and South Asian literature. Her books include The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures, co-edited with Toral Gajarawala, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, and Jack Webb (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures, co-edited with Francesca Orsini and Laetitia Zecchini (Open Book Publishers, 2022). She is also the author of Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970 (London: Palgrave, 2018) and co-editor, with Baidik Bhattacharya, of The Postcolonial Gramsci (London: Routledge 2012). She is a steering group member of the International Research Network in Postcolonial Print Cultures.