 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Invited Keynote Speakers
Professor Peter Davidson, Aberdeen University, UK
Séamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate in Literature 1995, Ireland
Professor William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., University of Georgia, USA
Professor Gerard J. Steen, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
 |
Professor Peter Davidson
Professor Davidson's research focuses on the inter-relations of the arts in the early-modern period: symbols and emblems, festivals, gardens, the applied arts. He is particularly interested in baroque internationalism and in the literary and visual arts of the Counter-reformation. With reference to the conference theme, Professor Davidson is the author of the book The Idea of North which was published by Reaktion Books in London in 2005. He is Honorary Curator of Aberdeen University's Manuscript, Rare Book and Museum Collections from the Renaissance and Baroque periods and is writing the history of the collections for publication in 2008. He has supervised original research on those collections at Doctoral and Post-Doctoral levels. For more information see Professor Davidson's website:
|
 |
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939. His first collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1966. Since that he has published poetry, criticism and translations, including the book North (1975). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). His eleventh collection of poems, District and Circle, was published in 2006 and was awarded the TS Eliot Prize. In 2009 Heaney was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature for his lifetime's achievement in literature. See The Official Web Site of the Nobel Foundation
for Heaney's biography and bibliography: Note: Although, for personal reasons, Seamus Heaney has had to cancel his reading at the Conference, he has sent us his personal selection of poems for inclusion in 'North Revisited' along with a specially written commentary. This will be presented, in a musical setting, as 'North Revisited: A Celebration of the Poetry of Seamus Heaney’ on Friday 11th June at 14.30 (Hall L6).
|
Professor William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.
Professor Kretzschmar has published numerous articles on medieval literature, American English, language variation, and humanities computing. Currently Professor Kretzschmar is pursuing his research and teaching on American English, language variation, and computer methods for description, analysis, and presentation of language data from literary and non-literary sources. His current grant-funded research includes a major NEH grant to preserve thousands of hours of audio-taped spoken interviews by conversion to computer storage, and local funding for community language research in Roswell, GA. Professor Kretzschmar's latest book, The Linguistics of Speech, was published in March 2009 by Cambridge University Press. Professor Kretzschmar serves as editor for three Linguistic Atlas projects and a board member for several others; as Georgia's institutional representative for the international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium; as an advisory board member or consultant for various professional journals and dictionaries; and as the President of the American Dialect Society (2007-2009). For more information, see:
|
 |
Professor Gerard J. Steen
Professor Steen's research interests include metaphor in discourse, by genre; style, register, rhetoric; discourse analysis; psycholinguistics; applied linguistics; pragmatics; stylistics; cognitive linguistics; cognitive poetics; empirical poetics. Professor Steen is director of several research programmes, such as NWO Vici-programme 'Metaphor in discourse: Linguistic forms, conceptual structures, and cognitive representations'. For more information on the research programmes, and other professional activities, see Professor Steen's website:
|
