Hugo Bujon is a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University for the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. He received his PhD in francophone studies with a certificate in psychoanalysis studies at Emory University. He specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century sub-Saharan literature and philosophy from decolonial, ecocritical, and psychoanalytic angles. Focusing on the writing of childhood in colonial and postcolonial contexts, he is currently working on a manuscript entitled Childhood and The Poetics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Francophone Literature.

Hannah Grayson is Senior Lecturer in French and francophone studies at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on crisis and its aftermath in Frenchlanguage African literature, and her forthcoming book on Tierno Monénembo investigates his fictional depictions of débrouillardise. She has also worked extensively on the testimonies of people who lived through the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Claire Jeantils is a doctoral candidate in French literature and medical humanities at University Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her work is supervised by Alain Schaffner (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) and Catriona Seth (All Souls, Oxford). With Swati Joshi, she co-authored ‘Reading Performances of Illness Scripts, Clinical Authority, and Narrative Self-Care in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies and Jérôme Lambert’s Chambre Simple’ published in the journal Humanités in 2022.

Cristina Robu is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of French & Francophone Studies at Davidson College. They hold a PhD in French and Francophone Studies from Indiana University-Bloomington and a second PhD in Literary Theory from the Academy of Sciences of Moldova. Their work focuses on the narrativization of sickness in contemporary Quebec literature and film from an interdisciplinary and intermedial perspective. Cris’ research interests are mainly Medical Humanities, Quebec studies, and literary and critical theory.

Avril Tynan is an associate researcher at the Open University, UK and visiting researcher at the University of Turku, Finland. She has held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, Germany, and at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, Finland. Her research takes a critical perspective on the role and representation of illness, ageing, and death in contemporary literature. She has published widely on the ethics and aesthetics of dementia, trauma, and old age in francophone and anglophone literature in journals such as The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Modern Language Review, and Narrative Works. She is co-editor of Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies and a regular contributor to The Polyphony and Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal.

Caroline Verdier is Lecturer in French and francophone studies at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). Her research interests include contemporary French and francophone literature, in particular Belgian women writers. She is also interested in issues surrounding cultural identities in francophone countries and currently works on contemporary illness narratives in relation to trauma and gender. She has published several articles on women writers such as Delphine de Vigan, Elisa Brune, and Amélie Nothomb. She is co-editor of Francographies: Identité et altérité dans les espaces francophones européens with Susan Bainbrigge and Joy Charnley (2010), As Time Goes By: Portraits of Age with Joy Charnley (2013), and Solitaires, Solidaires: Conflict and Confluence in Women’s Writings in French with Elise Hugueny-Léger (2015).

Ninon Vessier is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. Her research is at the nexus between environmental humanities, twentieth and twenty-first-century French-speaking literature and art from Africa, and postcolonial studies. She has published articles in Expressions Maghrébines (2022) and Etudes Littéraires Africaines (2023), and is currently working on the translation of the play Je, soussigné cardiaque by Sony Labou Tansi.

Steven Wilson is Senior Lecturer in French studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of The Language of Disease: Writing Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France (Legenda, 2020) and co-editor of The Languages of COVID-19: Translational and Multilingual Perspectives on Global Healthcare (Routledge, 2023). He has also edited medical humanities-themed journal special issues on French Autopathography (2016), French Thanatology (2021), and Cultural Languages of Pain (2022).