Please find bios for the AAS Trustee candidates below.
Note: Deborah Cartmell will remain as ex officio Trustee responsible for the Association and as its representative for the Association journal, Adaptation.
Anna Blackwell
Anna Blackwell is a senior lecturer and Programme Leader for the BA English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester and a member of the Centre for Adaptations. Both her teaching and research focus on the adaptation of Shakespeare within contemporary culture and her first monograph, Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age, was published in 2018 by Palgrave. Other publications include chapters in edited collections such as The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018); Variable Objects (2021) and The Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and Adaptation (2022). She has also been published in the journals English Literature, Adaptation, Shakespeare Bulletin and the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. Anna’s next project will be on craft adaptations of Shakespeare and the precarity of creative employment in neoliberal economies. Anna currently serves as the AAS Treasurer.
Colleen Kennedy-Karpat
I’m honored to be nominated to serve on the AAS Board of Trustees. If elected, my primary goal would be to expand the geographic diversity of the field, aiming beyond Anglophone texts and environments to incorporate a more global sense of adaptive practice and scholarship.
As an Associate Editor at Adaptation, I have seen firsthand our upward trajectory of submissions and readership from around the world, demonstrating that our discipline already has worldwide resonance. My own perspective – as a US citizen, degreed in French studies, with more than a decade of academic work in Turkey – has revealed an array of concerns particular to scholars working outside Anglophone cultures and/or in institutions located outside Europe and North America. As a scholarly organization, AAS could offer more inclusive professional support to these communities, which I believe would not only be enthusiastically received, but also result in tremendous benefits for the Association.
We must respond to the expansive energy in adaptation studies by decentring the Anglophone focus of our publication(s) and conference(s) and by enticing a wider range of international scholars to formally join our ranks. It would be my privilege to develop this strategy with my fellow Trustees.
Colleen Kennedy-Karpat is an Associate Editor of Adaptation, where she published an article on Marjane Satrapi (vol. 8 no. 1), and edited a special issue dedicated to Adaptation and Nostalgia (vol. 13 no. 3). She has also co-edited the volumes Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (2017, part of the series Adaptation and Visual Culture from Palgrave Macmillan) and, most recently, The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her monograph Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013) won the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award. A new essay on Varda is forthcoming in Short Film Studies; other work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Camera Obscura, and a number of edited volumes, including A Companion to the Biopic (2019, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek) and The Films of Wes Anderson (2014, ed. Peter C. Kunze). Her research focuses on adaptation across media and cultures; national cinemas in France and Turkey; film genres; and mediated nostalgia. She holds a PhD in French from Rutgers University, and since 2010 she has taught film and media studies at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
Thomas Leitch
Thomas Leitch is Andrew B. Kirkpatrick Chair in Writing at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies and The History of American Literature on Film. He has played active roles in both the Association of Adaptation Studies and the Literature/Film Association since their beginnings and has organized adaptation events at the Modern Language Association, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and the virtual joint conference of the LFA and the AAS.
Kyle Meikle
Kyle Meikle is the AAS Secretary and Associate Professor of English and Communication at the University of Baltimore. He has published essays in Adaptation (for which he serves as both Film Reviews Editor and Associate Editor), Literature/Film Quarterly, and the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, and has authored chapters for The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies and the Routledge Companion to Adaptation. He is the co-author, with Thomas Leitch, of the Oxford Bibliographies guide to adaptation, and the author of Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001-16, part of Deborah Cartmell’s Bloomsbury Adaptation Histories series. In addition to serving as Secretary, Kyle has helped organize two virtual AAS roundtables—one on new media, the other on childhood studies—with hopes to continue doing so over the next three years. Kyle is especially committed to bringing junior, precarious, and underrepresented scholars into the AAS fold.
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Monika Pietrzak-Franger is Professor of British Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has served as Book Review Editor of Adaptation (2011-2019). Her research is in the fields of adaptation, transmedia, Victorian and Neo-Victorian (science) cultures, Medical Humanities and gender studies. Her books include Adaptations –Performing across Media and Genres (with E. Voigts), Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth-Century (with C. Meyer), Mash-Ups (with L. Krämer), Globalisation: Transnational Dissemination of Nineteenth-Century Cultural Texts (with A. Primorac), Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture, Women, Beauty, and Fashion. Her current projects include Post-Covid-19 Care and Digital Theatre. Monika has helped organize AAS's postgraduate mentoring workshop.
Allen Redmon
My career has been positively impacted by The Association of Adaptation Studies (AAS) and my interactions with its members. I would welcome the opportunity to support the Association as a trustee. I have been delighted to serve as the President of Lit/Film Association (LFA) since 2018 and as a founding member of the Executive Committee for the Adaptations Forum at Modern Language Association (MLA). I have looked to use both roles as an opportunity 1) to create new collaborations between existing groups, 2) to bring new voices into adaptation studies, and 3) adaptation studies into new places. In terms of collaborations, I was thrilled to serve on the planning team that consisted of scholars from LFA and AAS to sponsor a joint conference, “Just Connect,” between the two associations in February 2022. I also submitted a proposal for an MLA 2023 roundtable, “Adapting for Children,” that will be jointly supported by the Children’s and Young Adult Literature forum and the Adaptation forum. I always hope that these collaborations will bring new scholars into adaptations studies, something I also looked to do with my edited anthology, Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process (University of Mississippi Press, 2021). Should I be elected as a trustee, I imagine my service to continue these efforts and others as they support the mission of AAS.
Eckart Voigts
Dr. Eckart Voigts is Professor of English Literature at TU Braunschweig, Germany. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous further books and articles, such as the Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018) and the special issue of Adaptation (vol. 6.2, 2013) on transmedia storytelling, Reflecting on Darwin (Ashgate 2014), and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse (WVT 2015). In 2021, he co-edited the Companion to British-Jewish Theatre since the 1950s (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021) and Filming the Past. Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptation (WVT, 2021).
Role: AAS YouTube channel (cont.)
Christina Wilkins
I am an early career researcher in film and literature, currently teaching at the University of Birmingham. My publications have explored questions around adaptation, including my first monograph, Religion and Identity in the Post-9/11 Vampire, which looked at various adaptations of vampire narratives from a primarily social context. It also offered new thinking on remakes. Subsequent work has developed upon these ideas, exploring adaptations alongside multiple perspectives and issues, including apocalypse, neurodiversity, nostalgia, and questions of medium. I have a book being released later this year as part of the Adaptations and Visual Culture series titled Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body which looks at the question of the physical, and how adaptations can illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our bodies. I have experience in conference management and organisation (running a conference at Southampton, organising an upcoming symposium at UoB, and next year’s AAS conference) so would be interested in a role that encompassed this. I would also be interested in taking on a role that included diversity and inclusion: I was chair for the staff LGBT+ network at Winchester, and as part of the community, inclusion is something I’m passionate about which is also evident in the aspects I explore in my work.
John Williams
Originally from Wales, Williams studied French and German Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and taught languages in a Comprehensive school in north London, before moving to Japan in 1988. He wrote and directed independent films in Nagoya in the nineties and made a documentary about human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. In 1999 he set up his company, 100 Meter Films and shot his first Japanese language feature film, Firefly Dreams (Ichiban Utsukushi Natsu). He has since written and directed three more Japanese language feature films and produced documentaries and features by other directors. His films have won numerous awards at international film festivals and have all been released theatrically in Japan. In 2011 he made a feature-length Japanese language adaptation of The Tempest (Sado Tempest) and in 2017 an adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. He is currently in pre-production on a loose adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, which he will shoot in August 2022 in a remote fishing village on Sado Island with traditional Japanese puppets. In recent years he has also written chapters about adaptation practice and presented at AAS and other conferences. He teaches film production and translation at Sophia University.
Williams is hoping to work towards holding a future AAS Conference in Japan at Sophia University; build up the AAS in Japan; build up the practice side of the AAS, reaching to more artists, filmmakers and the like, building up both the Japanese aspect of that and a more general Asian aspect.