Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb

William J. Spurlin is Professor of English and Director of Teaching and Learning for Arts & Humanities at Brunel University London. Previously, he was Professor of English at the University of Sussex and directed the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence & Cultural Change from 2006-2011. Professor Spurlin has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence in Africa in his book, Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (2006), which examines the politics of sexuality that emerged in the years following apartheid in South Africa; in numerous articles in academic journals, such as Research in African Literatures (forthcoming), Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (2013), Feminist Review (2010), and Études Anglaises (2008); and as chapters in edited collections, most recently in The Future of Postcolonial Studies (2015), The Wiley Companion to Translation Studies (2014), and Gendering Border Studies (2010). His other monograph is Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), and he has co-edited, with Jarrod Hayes and Margaret Higonnet, Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures (2010). Professor Spurlin chairs the Comparative Gender Studies Committee at the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), and he is a Section Editor for the journal Postcolonial Text.