JAMES M. BURNS teaches African history at Clemson University. He is the author of Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (2002) and co-author of A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2007). He has published several articles on the role played by cinema in colonial Africa, and is currently working on a comparative history of cinema spectatorship in the Black Atlantic.

MATTI BYE is a silent film musician and composer whose work has been described by the Swedish Film Academy as “giving new life and a new dimension to an almost forgotten tradition”. Active internationally since the mid-1980s, he has performed with the classical piano as well as Farfisa organs and even sheets of metal. His numerous compositions for Swedish film classics include Victor Sjöström’s Körkarlen (Phantom Carriage) and Mauritz Stiller’s Herr Arnes Pengar (Sir Arne’s Treasure), and he has composed theatrical music for Ingmar Bergman and Robert Lepage at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre as well as for film directors Jonas Åkerlund, Stig Björkman, and Peter Cohen. His music for Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments (2008), the recipient of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, was awarded a Guldbagge by the Swedish Film Institute in 2009.

PETER DAVIS is a film-maker and writer whose credits include the historical study In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa (1996), a 1993 documentary of the same name, and some seventy documentaries on a wide range of social and political subjects. During the apartheid period, he produced a number of documentaries and exhibitions on apartheid, and he maintains an interest in South African film history. His archive of fifty years of work is housed at Indiana University’s Black Film Archive, and he distributes his own work and that of others through his company, Villon Films.

STEPHEN DONOVAN is a Lecturer in English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, and, during 2009, a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta. His publications include Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (2005) and the online periodicals archive Conrad First. He is working on a book on representations of Rhodesia in British culture.

YLVA HABEL holds a Research Fellowship funded by the Swedish Research Council at the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University, where she also teaches. She completed her doctoral dissertation Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish Welfare State in 2002. Her current book project focuses on the Swedish reception of Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.

ASHLEIGH HARRIS is a Guest Lecturer at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Senior Lecturer of English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her postdoctoral research has focussed on postcolonial literature, particularly of the Southern African region, and she is currently completing a book provisionally entitled “Postcolonialism on Edge: Zimbabwe as Trans-nation”.

STEFAN HELGESSON is Director of the SALT Forum for Advanced Study, Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published widely within postcolonial studies, theories of world literature and, more recently, translation studies. Much of his research has focused on anglophone and lusophone literature from southern Africa. His latest book is Transnationalism in Southern African Literature: Modernists, Realists and the Inequality of Print Culture(2009). He is also the editor of Literary Interactions in the Modern World, Volume 2 (2006).

VRENI HOCKENJOS completed a dissertation titled Picturing Dissolving Views: August Strindberg and the Visual Media of His Age at the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University in 2007. Her publications include articles on nineteenth-century media culture, photography, and Swedish film. With Stephan Michael Schröder, she has co-edited a book on Scandinavian literature and intermediality, Historisierung und Funktionalisierung: Intermedialität in den skandinavischen Literaturen um 1900 (2005). She is currently working as a translator in Berlin, where she is also researching a book on amateur photography.

JACQUELINE MAINGARD is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on South African cinema, including South African National Cinema (2007).

NHAMO ANTHONY MHIRIPIRI recently completed a doctoral thesis on cultural production, tourism, and contemporary Zulu and Bushmen identities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. His publications include journal articles in Visual Anthropology, Journal of Literary Studies, and Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, and book chapters in The Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera (ed. Flora Veit-Wild and Anthony Chennells, 1999) and The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina (ed. Maurice Vambe, 2008). His fiction has been anthologized in Roof to Repair (2000), No More Plastic Balls: New Voices in the Zimbabwean Short Story (2000), Creatures Great and Small (2005), and Dreams, Miracles and Jazz: New Adventures in African Writing (2008). His current projects include a book on copyright and the Zimbabwean music industry, and a volume of essays reappraising the late Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera.

NEIL PARSONS has been Professor of History at the University of Botswana since 1996. During 2009 he will hold a three-month research fellowship in African Studies at Leiden University in The Netherlands. His most recent publication is a showbiz biography titled Clicko the Wild Dancing Bushman (2009).

BERNARD PORTER is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle. He has also taught at Cambridge, Hull, Yale, Sydney, and Copenhagen Universities, the last three as Visiting Professor. His publications in the field of British imperial history include Critics of Empire (1968, reprinted 2008), The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism (1975, 4th edn. 2006), and The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Culture and Society (2004); and regular contributions to The London Review of Books. He lives mainly in Stockholm.

TERENCE RANGER has been working on the history of Zimbabwe since the 1950s and has published seven monographs on it, the most relevant to The Rose of Rhodesia being Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97(1967) and Voices From the Rocks: Nature, Culture & History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (1999). Together with Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor he has published Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the “Dark Forests” of Matabeleland (2000). He is currently completing a social history of Bulawayo, to be entitled “Bulawayo Burning, 1893 to 1960”. After retiring from his Chair at Oxford University in 1997, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Zimbabwe until 2001.

Created on: Sunday, 30 August 2009