Neil Mann (nationality: British and Spanish, place of work: Finland) is an independent researcher and an authority on A Vision (1925, 1937) by Yeats. He taught at Escuela Diplomática de Madrid till 2022, when he moved to Finland. He got his doctorate at Oxford University (Oxford, UK) in 2003 with a thesis entitled "Yeats’s A Vision: Ideas of Man and God". He created and maintains the website on Yeats' A Visions (https://www.yeatsvision.com/), and published the book A Reader’s Guide to Yeats’s “A Vision,” with Clemson University Press in 2019. He previously co-edited Yeats A Vision: Explications and Contexts (2012) and Yeats, the Occult, and Philosophy (2016), with Matthew Gibson and Claire Nally, published by Clemson University Press. He has also published chapters in reference books such as The Oxford Handbook of W. B. Yeats, ed. Matthew Campbell and Lauren Arrington, Oxford University Press, 2023, and articles both at International Yeats Studies and the Yeats Annual. His presentation on Yeats's mature worldview will be the opening lecture of the conference.
Emilie Sugai (nationality: Brazilian; place of work: São Paulo) is a choreographer, performer, and butoh dancer, who developed research related to the memory of the Japanese-Brazilian body and to collaboration with artists of the dance, theatre, and cinema. She produced and created many spectacles, like: "Tabi", "Totem" “Hagoromo”, “Lunaris”, and recently, “Aka” (2021) and the movie “O Monge e o Touro” (2022). She counted on awards, grants, and other financial supports, among them, Bolsa Vitae de Artes, UNESCO-Aschberg, Rede Stagium, Funarte de Dança Klauss Vianna, Dança em Pauta do Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Fundação Japão. She received the awards Prêmio APCA for Best Conception in Dance in 2008 and Prêmio Denilto Gomes for Best Solo in 2013 by Cooperativa Paulista de Dança. As a guest artist, her qualifications are the works she developed in the field. She ministred the artistic residency "O poço da Mulher-Falcão" along with Fabio Mazzoni, resulting in the spectacle of theatre-dance of the same name, presented in three sold-out seasons till April 2024, at Centro de Pesquisas Teatrais, the space CPT_SESC Consolação. She'll be interviewed, alongside her colleague Fábio, about the process of adaptation and formation of participants (acting, lighting, scenography, and wardrobe crew) of W. B. Yeats’s play, At the Hawk’s Well (1917).
Fábio Mazzoni (nationality: Brazilian; place of work: São Paulo) is a theatre director, illuminator, and cultural manager. He has more than 25 years of experience in theatre and dance, being a disciple of Antunes Filho and a member of CPT – Centro de Pesquisa Teatral for six years. He has worked with the famous director Gabriel Villela in many productions, including Gota D’Água, Saltimbancos, Esperando Godot [Waiting for Godot], Leonce e Lena, Sonho de uma Noite de Verão [Midnight Summer's Dream] and Don Carlo. Moreover, he integrated the crew of SP Escola de Teatro – Centro de Formação das Artes do Palco for four years and was the artistic co-director of Balé da Cidade de São Paulo in partnership with Ismael Ivo. In 2019, Mazzoni liderated artistic activities in the creative warehouse of Luiz Fernando Carvalho, in São Paulo, in collaboration with Academia de Filmes. From 2018 to 2021, alongside Ismael Ivo, Mazzoni idealized and led the project SP Escola de Dança in partnership with the Culture and Creative Economy Secretary of the State of São Paulo. As a guest artist, his qualifications are the works he developed in this field. He ministered the artistic residency “O poço da Mulher-Falcão” alongside Emilie Sugai. He'll be interviewed about the process of adaptation and formation of participants (acting, lighting, scenography, and wardrobe crew) of W. B. Yeats's play, At the Hawk’s Well (1917).
Charika Swanepoel (nationality: South African; country of work: Finland) is a PhD researcher at Turku University (Finland) and a University Instructor (permanent position) at Tampere University. Modernist and Romantic literature in English is the primary drive of Charika's research, as is her interest in the existential dilemmas caused by widespread secularization during these periods in society, literature, and philosophy. Her PhD thesis investigates Yeats's syncretism as the mechanism of his larger project of spiritual craftsmanship. Charika published on Yeats in journals like International Yeats Studies (2023), Open Library of Humanities (2022), and English Studies in Africa (2022). Apart from Yeats studies, Charika also pursues pedagogical research in Educational Technologies such as H5P. Charika is the PhD researcher invited to present a chapter of her thesis, significant for the event’s theme. It is a practice of IYS, ratified in the General Meeting of 2023, to give space in the main programme (besides oral communications in panels) to reserachers in training to foment new Yeatsian generations.
Barry Sheils (nationality: Irish; place of work: United Kingdom) is a lecturer in the Department of English at Durham University (Durham, England), and researches the transnationalism aspect of modernist movements, especially Irish ones. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland), and completed his PhD in 2010 at the University of Warwick (Coventry, England). His first book W.B. Yeats and World Literature: the Subject of Poetry was published in 2015 and analyzed Yeats' role in the development of an international literary market and the idea of translated and translational literature in English. His papers were published in the New Literary History, Textual Practice, and the most important English-language journal on modernism, Modernism/modernity. Chapters by him have been published in Technology in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature (2020). He also organized and edited the following collections, with J. Walsh, Shame and Modern Writing (Routledge, 2018) and Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (Palgrave, 2017). Barry is a member of the IYS board, acting as treasurer for the past eight years. At the event, he will lead a roundtable discussion on comparative and transnational perspectives on Yeats' work and legacy. He will not only be the moderator, but also begin the event with an update of his concept of translated/translatable literatures as practiced by Yeats.
Ragini Mohite (nationality and place of work: India) is a lecturer of Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of Humanities and Letters at FLAME University (Pune, India) since August 2020. She has also worked as a post-doctoral researcher on a project about the East India Company in the 19th century. She graduated in English Literature at the University of Mumbai (Mumbai, India) in 2010, and completed both her master’s and PhD at the University of Leeds (Leeds, England), defending her thesis “Constructing the Modernist Self: Nationhood and Domesticity in the Writings of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats” in 2016. Her book Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures: Rabindranath Tagore and W.B. Yeats was published by Clemson University Press 2021, and her papers appeared in International Yeats Studies (2023) and Sculpture Journal (2021). A chapter on the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore’s Fictional Sub-urbans: Theorical Fantasy as Colonial Critique, has been included in the book Cities and Fantasy: Urban Imaginary Across Cultures, 1830-1930, set to publication in 2024 by Liverpool University Press. Ragini will be part of the roundtable on comparative and transnational perspectives along with Barry and Christine. She will talk about the collaboration of Yeats and Tagore in the production of literary networks between countries on the periphery of English-speaking countries, such as Ireland and India.
Bruce Stewart (nationality: Irish and British; place of work: Brazil) has just retired from the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (DLLEM/UFRN), where he joined in 2013 (as a visitor) and 2016 (as a professor) after becoming an emeritus professor of the University of Ulster (Coleraine, Northern Ireland). He graduated in English Literature at Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland), returning for his PhD in Literature, defended in 1979 and entitled “Excomologosis: A Survey of Epistemological Elements in the Changing Art of James Joyce”. His master’s was on T. S. Eliot under the mentorship of Hugh Kenner at the University of California (Santa Barbara, USA) years earlier. Bruce is the author and editor of several reference books, including The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (Oxford University Press, 1996), That Other World: The Supernatural and Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts (Colin Smythe, 1998), Hearts and Minds: Irish Culture and Society Under the Act of Union (Colin Smythe, 2002), as well as Oxford’s 2007 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He published papers in Brazilian and international journals such as the New Hibernia Review (Dublin, 2021) and the ABEI Journal (São Paulo, 2016). He created and manages the website Ricorso, an extensive reference database on Irish studies presented as a bio-bibliographical dictionary by authors. Bruce will deliver the event’s closing lecture, in which he will explore his idea of the “skeptical mysticism” practiced by Yeats—how he combined his work as scholar of occult and mystical practices and his pragmatic work as a political agent, thus uniting the two sides of a magician Yeats: the conjurer of images, and the rebel, conjured with other activists for Irish independence.