Dr Norbert Bugeja who lectures at the Junior College and the Department of English at the University of Malta, has been awarded his Ph.D. by the University of Warwick with no corrections to his doctoral thesis. The examining board hailed Dr Bugeja’s thesis as a rare work of outstanding brilliance and expressed great optimism in view of his budding academic career.

Examining Dr Bugeja were two literary scholars of international renown. Professor Joe Cleary is the prominent former student of the late Edward W. Said (author of Orientalism) and the author of Literature, Partition and the Nation State – Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge UP, 2002) among others. Professor Pablo Mukherjee is a foremost voice in post-colonialist thought and the author of Crime and Empire – The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (Oxford UP, 2003) and other studies.

Dr Bugeja’s doctoral thesis, Rethinking the Liminal – Threshold Consciousness in the Mashriqi Memoir, is a groundbreaking study in the dynamics of the concept of liminality within post-colonialist thought and literature, as well as an indispensable commentary on the contemporary memoir form. His next article, addressing the work of Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti, will appear in the March edition of The Warwick Review.

As a Commonwealth scholar, Dr Bugeja pursued his doctoral studies within the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and was supervised by Professor Benita Parry, Professor Neil Lazarus and Professor Rashmi Varma.