UTAD Conference

Siân Adiseshiah joined Loughborough University as Senior Lecturer in English and Drama in June 2018 as part of its Excellence 100 campaign. She was promoted to Reader in December 2020 and Professor in June 2023. She previously worked at the University of Lincoln (2004-2018), and has taught at the Open University and the University of Birmingham. Her PhD (on the plays of Caryl Churchill) was funded by the AHRB, undertaken at the University of Birmingham, and awarded in 2003. Her research interests lie mostly in contemporary theatre and literary studies, utopianism, and age studies.

Siân is Editor-in-Chief of the Open Library of Humanities journal C21 Literature, Editor of new book series 'Playwriting and the Contemporary: Critical Collaborations' (Liverpool University Press), and sits on the Editorial Boards of Cambridge University Press’ Elements in Contemporary Performance Texts, Bloomsbury’s book series New Horizons in Contemporary Literature, and the Journal of Gender Studies. She was appointed to the AHRC Peer Review College in 2020. She also co-founded the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) and was an elected executive committee member of BACLS from 2017-2019, and re-joined as an ex-officio member in 2023.

As an intellectual historian and philosopher with areas of expertise in 20th and 21st-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and in the cinema of West Africa and its diaspora, Dr. Frieda Ekotto concentrates on contemporary issues of law, race and LGBTQIA2S+ issues. Her primary research to date has focused on how law serves to repress and mask the pain of disenfranchised subjects; her intention in this work is to trace what cannot be said in order to address and expose suffering from a variety of angles and cultural intersections and reassess the position and agency of the dispossessed.

Dr. Ekotto is the author of multiple books, and numerous book chapters as well as many articles in prestigious literary journals. She is currently working on LGBTQIA2S+ issues, with an emphasis on Sub-Sahara African cultures within Africa as well as in Europe and the Americas. In addition to her academic work, she is also a creative writer.

Dr. Ekotto received the Nicolàs Guillèn Prize for Philosophical Literature in 2014 and in 2015 she was awarded the Benezet Award for excellence in her field. In 2016, she was awarded the John H. D’Arms Faculty for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2018, she was awarded an Honorary Degree at Colorado College. She has produced two documentaries, Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters (2017) and Zurura Zurura: A Smile Blooms (2021) as part of the ongoing research on Vibrancy of Silence: Images and Cultural Production of Sub-Saharan African Women. She is the president of the Modern Languages Association (2023-2024) and served as chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies from 2014-2018, among other leadership roles.