Guest Speakers

Alessia Cogo is a lecturer in applied linguistics/sociolinguistics at Goldsmiths and convenes the MA in Multilingualism, Linguistics and Education.
Her research investigates the diversity of English,  especially transcultural and transnational phenomena like English as a Lingua Franca and translanguaging. She focuses on the tensions between the use of different linguistic resources and the impact of attitudes, identities and ideologies on linguistic practices. She is currently working on super-diversity and internationalization in migration and business contexts, as well as pedagogical  applications and implications.
She is founder and co-convenor of the AILA Research Network on English as a Lingua Franca and Editor of the English Language Teaching Journal.
  Eilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and story writer. She has written several collections of short stories and novels, plays, books for young people, as well as scholarly articles and literary criticism. A bi-lingual writer, she writes in both Irish and English.  Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin in 1954. She attended University College Dublin (UCD), where she studied Pure English, then Folklore. She was awarded the UCD Entrance scholarship for English, and two post graduate scholarships in Folklore. In 1978-9 she studied at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1982 was awarded a PhD from the National University of Ireland (NUI). She has worked in the Department of Irish Folklore in UCD, and for many years as a curator in the National Library of Ireland. Also a teacher of Creative Writing, she has been Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin and is currently Writer Fellow at UCD. She is a member of Aosdána.
  Mário Avelar (Portuguese Open University – ULICES), Professor of English and American Studies. Director of the Chair Cascais Crossroad of the Arts, supervisor of the Thematic Commission of Higher Education, Science and Technology of Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries, member of the Portuguese Academy of History, of Arts Section of the Portuguese Navy Academy, and of the board of the Lisbon Geographical Society. He has translated poetry and prose of Robert Lowell, Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, Sylvia Plath, Mary Renault, G. M. Hopkins, among others. He is the author of several works on his main research fields. His latest book of essays is entitled Poetry and Visual Arts – Confessionalism and Ekphrasis [Poesia e Artes Visuais – Confessionalismo e écfrase (Imprensa Nacional, 2017)]. He is the author of the  Envy – An Academic Novel [Inveja – uma novela académica (Assírio & Alvim)]. His collected poems were published by Imprensa Nacional (2018), under the title Choreographing melodies under the rumor of images (Coreografando melodias no rumor das imagens).
  Rui Carvalho Homem is Professor of English at the University of Porto, Portugal. He is the author of two monographs – Shakespeare and the Drama of Alterity (in Portuguese; 2003); and Poetry and Translation in Northern Ireland: Dislocations in Contemporary Writing (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) – and the editor of several collections, among which Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004) and Relational Designs: Page and Stage, Canvas and Screen (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012). He has published extensively on contemporary Irish poetry, Early Modern English drama, Translation Studies, and intermediality.
As a literary translator, he has published annotated versions of Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard III) Christopher Marlowe (Hero and Leander), Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin.
He is currently the Chair of ESRA, the European Shakespeare Research Association.
  Sherry R. Truffin is an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, where she teaches courses in Rhetoric, Writing, and American Literature. In addition to her monograph, Schoolhouse Gothic (2008), she has published essays on the fiction of James Baldwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Donna Tartt, Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joyce Carol Oates as well as on popular culture topics such as television (postmodern storytelling in The X-Files) and music (the songwriting of The Pretenders’ frontwoman Chrissie Hynde). In addition, she has delivered papers at regional and national conferences on works by Lydia Davis, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.