Afterword: "Nothing Can Be Changed until It Is Faced"

Originally from Singapore, Christine Vogt-William studied English, German and Psychology at the University of Essen, Germany. She completed her doctoral thesis at the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York, England as a Marie Curie Gender Graduate Fellow.

She is the author of Bridges, Borders and Bodies: Transgressive Transculturality in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Novels (2014) and is co-editor of Disturbing Bodies (2008), an essay collection on artistic and literary representations of “deviant” bodies. She has published on South Asian and African diasporic and mixed race literatures, queer and critical race approaches to Tolkien’s works, literary representations of transracial adoption and transnational surrogacy in postcolonial women’s writing. She is a guest editor of a special issue on ‘Shame in Anglophone Literatures’ for the European Journal of English Studies.

Vogt-William was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA from 2008 to 2010. She has taught in the Postcolonial and North American Studies departments at the universities of Münster, Freiburg and Frankfurt am Main. Vogt-William was Interim Professor for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at the English and American Studies Department, Humboldt University, Berlin from 2014 to 2017, where she taught literary and cultural studies.

She is currently working on her second book on cultural representations of biological twinship in Anglophone literatures. Vogt-William is the Director of the Gender and Diversity Office with the Africa Multiple Cluster (funded by the German Research Council) at the University of Bayreuth.