Keynote Speakers

Cristina Bacchilega (Professor, University of Hawai'i, USA)

Cristina Bacchilega's research and teaching focus on fairy tales and their adaptations, the translation and adaptation of traditional narratives in colonial and decolonial projects, gender and fairy tales, and mo'olelo in translation. In Fall 2015, Bacchilega co-organized the symposium, "Creating Futures Rooted in Wonder: Bridges between Indigenous, Science Fiction, and Fairy Tale Studies," at UHM and served as Graduate Program Director in the Department of English.

In Spring 2016, she is a Fulbright Fellow teaching at the Universita' L'Orientale in Naples, Italy and conducting research on the 2015 film The Tale of Tales. She is the co-editor with Anne E. Duggan of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. Her most recent book is Fairy Tales Transformed? 21st-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (Wayne State University Press, 2013). Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) was also issued in paperback in 2013. The author of Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997) and the co-editor of Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, she has published essays on Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, Nalo Hopkinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dacia Maraini, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and fairy tales in Hawai'i.

With historian Noelani Arista and Sahoa Fukushima, she has studied nineteenth-century translations of The Arabian Nights into Hawaiian. With Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and Donatella Izzo, Bacchilega co-edited “Sustaining Hawaiian Sovereignty,” a special issue (14.2) of Anglistica, a journal of international interdisciplinary studies (2010). Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema co-edited by ku'ualoha ho'omanawanui, Noenoe Silva, Vilsoni Hereniko, and Cristina Bacchilega (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Library, 2010). Having served as an editorial board member of the journal Folklore (UK) since 2009, Bacchilega recently joined the editorial board of Gramarye (journal of the Sussex Centre for Folktales, Fairy Tales and Fantasy), Estudis de Literatura Oral Popular/Studies in Folk Oral Literature (a multilingual electronic journal published in Catalonia, Spain), and the new journal Narrative Culture. She has long been involved in the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, and is an elected Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

Vanessa Joosen (Professor, University of Antwerp, Belgium)

Vanessa Joosen is professor of English literature and children's literature at the University of Antwerp. She is the author of Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales (Wayne State University Press, 2011), which won a Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Publication, and Wit als sneeuw, zwart als inkt (LanooCampus, 2012; White as snow, black as ink), a study on the Dutch reception of Grimm's fairy tales.

Vanessa Joosen is also a co-editor of Grimm's Tales Around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception (Wayne State University Press, 2014, together with Gillian Lathey), which received a Children's Literature Association Honor Award for Edited Book, and of the new history of Dutch children's literature, Een land van waan en wijs (Atlas Contact, 2014, together with Rita Ghesquiere and Helma van Lierop). In addition to her research interests in fairy tales, children's literature and translation studies, she has recently specialized in age studies and the construction of childhood and adulthood in literature, as well as in the genetic study of children's literature.