Jamal Bahmad is an Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Mohammed V University. He earned his PhD degree from the University of Stirling in the UK in 2014 with a dissertation on contemporary Moroccan urban cinema. The dissertation won the Best PhD Thesis Prize of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies in 2015. He held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leeds and, prior to that, had been a Research Fellow at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Bahmad was most recently a research fellow at the University of Exeter on the AHRC-funded project: “Transnational Moroccan Cinema.” He specialises and has published widely in the field of North African cultural studies with a focus on cinema, youth cultures, cities, literature, and memory. He co-edited a special issue of French Cultural Studies (SAGE, August 2017) on trash cultures in the Francophone world. Bahmad is also the co-editor of a special issue of The Moroccan Cultural Studies Journal on Moroccan cinema (November 2017). He is also the co-editor of English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (Springer, UK 2020). In addition to working on his first monograph on Moroccan cinema and globalization, Bahmad has recently co-authored with Will Higbee and Florence Martin a landmark book entitled Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
Btisam Akarkach holds a Master's degree in Communication Studies from the VUB and a Master's degree in Film Studies and Visual Culture from the University of Antwerp. She is a lecturer at the Karel de Grote Hogeschool Antwerp and teaches among others International Child and Youth Policy. She is artistic coordinator of MONA Film Festival and wrote the book Opstand in de Rif (Revolt in the Rif).
