Dr Daný van Dam joins us from the University of Utrecht, where she has taught postcolonial literature for the past three years. A native of Haarlem, Dr van Dam was educated at Leiden before completing her PhD at Cardiff University, where she specialised in neo-Victorianism. With wider interests in gender studies and postcolonialism, her recent work has been published in Neo-Victorian Studies and Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. She has also co-edited a special issue of the journal Assuming Gender, and she serves as a European representative on the committee of the British Association for Victorian Studies. Currently researching the international significance of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Dr van Dam will be teaching academic writing and nineteenth-century literature here at the UvA.

Dr Marc Farrant recently completed his PhD on Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee at Goldsmiths, University of London. Hailing from Sussex in the UK, he has previously taught at the universities of London and Bonn, as well as Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Dr Farrant combines his expertise in modern and contemporary literature with wider interests in politics and philosophy. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, LA Review of Books and openDemocracy, and he serves as Senior Editor at Review 31 and a co-convenor of the ASCA reading group on “Aesthetics and Politics in Critical Theory”. Dr Farrant also currently teaches at Amsterdam University College. At the UvA he will be teaching academic writing, literary theory, big books and two courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.

Dr Emelia Quinn recently completed her DPhil, titled The Monstrous Vegan: Reading Veganism in Literature, 1818 to Present, at the University of Oxford. A native of London, she taught at the University of Birmingham before coming to Amsterdam. Her interests in vegan theory, animal studies, queer theory and postcolonial literature are reflected in recent publications in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Society & Animals, with further work forthcoming in PMLA. She co-edited the book Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Dr Quinn will be teaching established courses on academic writing and nineteenth-century literature. She will also have responsibility for two new courses that reflect the department’s focus on English as a world language: Literature, Empire and the Postcolonial World and Contemporary World Literature.

We are thrilled to welcome Daný, Marc and Emelia to the English Department, where they will enrich our teaching across all stages of the programme.