Lisa Suhair Majaj

“Writing into the Maelstrom”

Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian-American living in Cyprus, is an internationally-published poet, writer, scholar, editor and children’s author. Her writing has appeared across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and India. She holds a BA from the American University of Beirut, and an MA in English Literature, an MA in American Culture, and a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her creative work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her 2009 collection Geographies of Light won the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. She has read poetry and lectured at universities and other venues across the US and in the UK, Cyprus, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Bahrain, Sharjah, Egypt, Germany, Tunisia, Spain and India. Her poetry was displayed in the exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East (Harn Museum of Art, 2016) and was used in the limited edition art book Passport of Witness. Her scholarly work includes articles on Arab American literature and culture as well as the co-edited volumes Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse University Press), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland Publishing), Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland/Routledge) and the forthcoming The Companion to Contemporary Arab American Literature (Routledge). Her most recent creative publications can be found in Black Warrior Review, Massachusetts Review, Literatura Scripta. Escrita de autoria feminine contemporanea, Writers Resist, Poets Respond,Vox Populi, Writing in a Women’s Voice, and Adi Magazine. She may be reached at lisamajaj@gmail.com.

Magdalena Zira

“Nicosia as a Stage: Crossing Boundaries Around Us and Within Us, Through Theatre”

Dr Magdalena Zira is a theatre director, classics scholar and playwright, based in Cyprus. She has written plays, the scripts for short films and has adapted and directed several contemporary re-workings of canonical texts, including Roman epic, Renaissance texts and Greek drama. Her theatre work with company Fantastico Theatro explores site-specific staging in the urban landscape. She is co-founder of Project Season Women, a feminist theatre collective which gives a platform to the voices of women theatre makers through interdisciplinary collaborations. Her areas of research and interest include classical reception, new writing for theatre, feminist theatre and site-specific performance. In 2019 she was awarded the artist of the year award by the Cyprus Theatre Organization and in 2020 she directed an all-day reading of Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships at the British Museum as a promenade performance. In 2022, the play she co-authored and directed, Women Walk Home, a verbatim docu-drama that sheds new light on historical events in 1980s Cyprus, won the Union of Cypriots award and was selected to participate in the prestigious Athens and Epidaurus festival in 2023. In the summer of 2024, she directed Euripides’ Phoenician Women for the Cyprus Theatre Organization. Read More

Stephen Linstead & Garance Maréchal

“Border Crossings: Art in Pursuit of Peace
(Belfast 1969-2025)”

Stephen Linstead is Emeritus Professor of Management Humanities at the University of York. He is a former Secretary and Chair of SCOS, former editor of Culture and Organization, and has organised two SCOS conferences, in Lancaster (1992) and Athens (2000). His transdisciplinary work across the arts, humanities and social sciences has been evocatively realised in text, poetry, performance, music and award-winning film exploring new avenues to social “impact”. He makes lots of mistakes, and tries to enjoy them serendipitously. 

Garance Maréchal is Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer in Strategy at the University of Liverpool Management School. Her PhD from Paris-Dauphine University was an ethnographic and autoethnographic study of decision-making, learning and strategizing processes at a major global management consulting firm. She has helped to develop “dark side” approaches, the subfield of organizational territoriality, and has published on research methods, including the use of “metropoems” and photography. Her current cultural research encompasses memorial spaces, art and identity, heritage and food cultures.