Dr. Christine Vogt-William
Englisches Seminar
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Johannisstr. 12-20
D-48143 Münster
Germany
E-mail: cvogtwilliam@gmx.com
A native of Singapore, Christine Vogt-William studied English, German and Psychology at the University of Essen, Germany. From October 2002 till June 2008, Vogt-William was a junior lecturer and research assistant at the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany. She spent a year (September 2006 to August 2007), at the University of York, England as a Marie Curie Gender Graduate Fellow and completed her doctoral thesis on ‘Women and Transculturality in Contemporary Fictions by South Asian Diasporic Women Writers’. Vogt-William has published on South Asian diasporic women’s literature from the US, Canada, England and the Caribbean. She is the co-editor of and contributor to Disturbing Bodies (Berlin, Trafo Verlag. 2008), an essay collection on artistic and literary representations of deviant bodies, as read by scholars of literary and cultural studies, using contemporary feminist and queer theories. Other fields of academic interest include Indo-Caribbean women's poetry, Bollywood film, Asian diasporic fusion music and J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy works. Vogt-William moved to the US in June 2008 and is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Vogt-William divides her time between Atlanta and the University of Muenster, Germany, where she currently teaches.
Publications
"Transcultural Gendered Interrogations in Bride and Prejudice: Intertextual Encounters of the South Asian Diasporic Kind." In Michael Meyer (ed.). Word & Image in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures. Rodopi: Amsterdam, New York, Atlanta. 2009. 237-260.
"Of Serpents and Swastikas: Transcultural Interrogations in Poems by Two Indian Women Writers of the Diaspora". In Petra Ruediger and Konrad Gross, (eds.) Translation of Cultures. Amsterdam, New York: 2009. 149-168.
"Routes to the Roots: Transcultural Ramifications in Bombay Talkie". In Frank Schulze-Engler et al. Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities. Amsterdam, New York: 2009. 309-322.
"Hijras and Drag Queens: Cross-Dressing Disturbed in Contemporary Stage Musicals". In Sylvia Mieszkowski and Christine Vogt-William, (eds.). Disturbing Bodies. Trafo Verlag. (2008). 89-118.
"Bhangra Babes: Masala Music and Questions of Identity and Integration in South-Asian British Women’s Writing". In Anke Bartels & Dirk Wiemann (eds.), Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. Rodopi: Amsterdam, New York. 2007. 73-88.
"Rescue Me: Anita and Me and A Wicked Old Woman". In Geoff Davis et al., Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a Postcolonial World. Rodopi: Amsterdam, New York. 2005. 378-388.
"Language is the Skin of My Thought". In Christian Mair, (ed.) The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies. Rodopi: Amsterdam, New York. 2003. 394-404.
"Just Call Me Thelma: Reflections on Black British and Other Britons". In Hard Times, Nr. 73, Berlin, Sommer 2001. 12-18.
PhD Thesis:
Women and Transculturality in Contemporary Fiction by South Asian Diasporic Women Writers. University of York, 2007.
Forthcoming:
"Transcultural Tea Times: An Overview of Tea in History". In Hybrid Conditions, Nervous States. Rodopi: Amsterdam, New York, Atlanta.
"Smells, Skins and Spices: Gendered Spaces in the Novels of Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee, Radhika Jha and Preethi Nair." In EACLALS Conference Proceedings, Malta 2005.
"Of Coolies, Cane and the Kala Pani: Addressing Indentureship in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Novels." In David Dabydeen and Letitzia Gramaglia (eds.) Coral Identities.
Conferences
Mai 10-12, 2007 | Hybrid Cultures, Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Presentation: Tea as a Colonial Product in the British Empire
Mai 22-25, 2008 | Commodifying (Post)Colonialism. 19th Annual ASNEL Conference. University of Regensburg.
Presentation: The Commodifying Cuppa: Tea in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Literature
Dec. 26-27, 2008 | Gender and Sexuality. 9th Annual Conference of the South Asian Literary Association, San Francisco
Presentation: Women and Queer Figures in South Asian Diasporic and Bollywood Films
Feb. 21-24, 2009 | Gender and Violence in South Asian Fiction and Film. University of Washington, Seattle
Presentation: Shamelessness, Shame and Honour: Axes of Violence in Contemporary South Asian British Women’s Stories
Feb. 27-28, 2009 | 18th Annual British Commonwealth and Post-Colonial Studies Conference. Savannah, Georgia
Presentation: Comparative Histories of Slavery in African-American and Indo-Caribbean Women’s Fiction
Apr. 9-11, 2009 | Migration, Border, and the Nation-State co-hosted by the United States Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (USACLALS) and Texas Tech University Comparative Literature Program. Lubbock, Texas
Presentation: Names, Naming and Negotiating Diasporic Lives in Lawrence Hill’s Someone Knows My Name and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
May 21-24, 2009 | Postcolonial Translocations. 20th Annual ASNEL Conference, Universitaet Muenster, Germany
Presentation: Of Coolies, Cane and the ‘Kala Pani’: Addressing Indentureship in Contemporary Indo-Caribbean Diasporic Women’s Novels
July 8-10, 2009 | Gendering East/West. International Conference,
Centre for Women’s Studies. University of York, UK
Presentation: Tea, Gender Perceptions, Modernity and Tradition in Ellis Avery’s The Teahouse Fire
July 15-17, 2009 | The Anxiety of Belonging: Partitions, Reunifications, Modernity. Cardiff University, Wales, UK
Presentation: Partition, Private Lives and Co-Wives in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers and Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters
Nov. 15-17, 2009 (upcoming) | Annual Conference of the National Women’s Studies Association, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Presentation: Finding a Bridge to Call Home: South Asian-German-Postcolonial Reflections on Transnational Feminism and Intersectionality
Dec. 26-27, 2009 (upcoming) | The Sacred and the Secular in South Asian Literature and Culture. 10th Annual Conference of the South Asian Literary Assocation, Philadelphia, 2009
Presentation: Reflections on the Sacrosanctity of Names and Naming in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake