Dr. Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. She is the author of The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (2025) and Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic (2023). She is also one of the editors of the six-volume Longman edition of The Poems of Shelley (1989-2024) and has published articles on translation, ekphrasis, creative/experimental criticism, and the racist history of hair. Her research explores the entanglements between European culture and the Black Atlantic world: her current project, called Nordic Noir, examines Scandinavian involvement in the transatlantic slave economy from the seventeenth century onwards.
Dr. Nabugodi will deliver the virtual keynote during our pre-conference event.
Dr. Eleanor Jones Harvey is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her research interests include 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century American art, notably landscape painting, southwestern abstraction and Texas art. Her most recent exhibitions are “The Civil War and American Art” (2012), “Variations on America: Masterworks from the American Art Forum Collections” (2007) and “An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection” (2006). Her current work supports an exhibition on the considerable impact of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on American art and culture.
Dr. Arun Sood is a Lecturer in Global Pre-1800 Literatures at Exeter University. His research and creative practice are underpinned by varied interests including the intersections between postcolonial and environmental writing, oral cultures, sound, practice research, the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and cultural memory studies. He is currently the Project Lead on the AHRC Catalyst project, “Plants, Plantations, and the Anglophone Caribbean: Exploring Indigenous and African-Descendent Knowledge through Text, Archive, and Orality,” which explores the relationships between natural history texts and indigenous and African-descendent knowledges.