Ana Sobral is Assistant Professor of Global Literatures in English at the University of Zurich. She studied English and German Literatures and Languages at the University of Porto, Portugal, and went on to do a PhD in American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Sobral's teaching and research interests include postcolonial studies, cultural globalization, intermediality, narration through new media (the Internet, popular music) and memory studies. She has published articles and chapters on rap and poetry in the Global South, Islamic feminism, the performative aspects of the Arab Spring, and the links between popular music, migration and cosmopolitanism, and is the author of Opting Out: Deviance and Generational Identities in American Post-War Cult Fiction (Rodopi 2012). Sobral's current research project deals with the performance of transculturality and reflections of globalization in popular music.