Over the past week Dr Norbert Bugeja, currently a Research Fellow in Postcolonial Studies at the Mediterranean Institute, has delivered two keynote addresses. At King’s College London, Dr Bugeja addressed the first plenary session of the ‘Seeking Refuge’ conference held within the Department of Comparative Literature with a presentation on constitutional politics and the prosthetics of asylum, party-formation and the afterwardly politics of memory in Tunisia after the October 2014 elections. Dr Bugeja’s plenary address at the University of Padua focused on the question of economic vulnerability and its dialectical affinities with the Maghreb’s and Tunisia’s post-independent narratives of governance and their memorialisation, with specific focus on the continued impact of fin de siècle social reformism on the region’s more recent political trajectories.

Dr Bugeja’s publications on questions of alienation and retrieval of political memory in Tunisia include the essay ‘Hyper-Despotism of the Bullet: Post-Bardo Tunisia and its (Unforgiving) Memorial Communiqué’, published in Parlati, Marilena ed., ‘Unforgiving Memory: Dynamics, Rhetorics, Paradoxa in Literary Representations of Trauma’, in Prospero Vol. 20 (EUT, December 2015), as well as another essay on Tunisia forthcoming in a few weeks’ time. Two new articles on the postcoloniality of contemporary Turkish writing are scheduled to appear later this year with major international academic publishers.