Prof. Dr. Hsu-Ming Teo

Hsu-Ming Teo is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Macquarie University, Australia. Her publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012); the edited book The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (2017); and the volumes Travel and Colonialism in 21^st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories? (2025), and Conflict and Colonialism in 21^st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History (2024), both co-edited with Paloma Fresno-Calleja; The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020), co-edited with Jayashree Kamblé and Eric Murphy Selinger; and Cultural History in Australia (2003), co-edited with Richard White. Her first novel Love and Vertigo (2000) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for several other awards. Her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Hsu-Ming is an editorial board member of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. She judged the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize and is currently on the judging panel of the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Dr. Ida Baizura Bahar

Dr. Ida Baizura Bahar is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, with a research focus on English and Malay literary works, particularly within the context of colonial Malaya and Comparative Literature. Her academic interests span the intersections of English and Malay literary traditions, alongside the exploration of global themes in contemporary literature. Dr. Ida’s scholarly development has been shaped by extensive academic training at renowned institutions, namely the University of Warwick, the University of Nottingham, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. These formative experiences have profoundly influenced her approach to interdisciplinary literary studies and comparative analysis. In addition, Dr. Ida spent nine months (2024-2025) as a Visiting Scholar at the School of English, University of Leeds, UK. There, she contributed to collaborative research on the contemporary British author Anthony Burgess, focusing on literature’s engagement with colonial memory. Her work has offered deeper insights into these themes within contemporary literary discourse. Dr. Ida’s research continues to enrich the field of literature by exploring the complex narratives that bridge diverse cultures and regions, promoting cross-cultural understanding through her comparative approach. She is honoured to be an Invited Speaker at MICOLLAC 2025, where she will share her expertise on the literary traditions of colonial fiction, particularly in relation to collective colonial memory and their global relevance.

🎤 Plenary Talk by Dr. Ida Baizura Bahar:

“How Does Anthony Burgess Navigate Colonial Memory and The Tension between Personal and Collective Memory In The Malayan Trilogy?”

Read more here…

Dr. Maya Kóvskaya

Maya Kóvskaya (Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2009)  is the founder and head of the Amor Mundi Institute and Amor Mundi Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab and teaches Multispecies Anthropocene Studies, Semiotics, STS, and Theory at Chiang Mai University in the Faculty of Social Science. They have published widely on the intersection of the political, linguistic, and ecological with performative, semiotic, and visual culture. Their ecophilosophical work elaborates what they call the “Anthroposupremocene,” interrogating the workings of the invidious, hierarchical, dualist division between humans and the more-than-human world,”and their multispecies ethnographic work explores what they call “feral agency,” “more-than-human speech acts,” “multispecies language games,” “eco-performativity,” and eco-semiosis, to investigate the extralinguistic ways that nature “speaks.” Understanding how nature “speaks” can help us “rethink the human in a more-than-human world,” better conceptualize a “politics beyond the human, and imagine “multispecies polities” as shared sites of symbiopoiesis—symbiotic shared world-making practices against the Anthropocene.