Keynote Speakers
The SAUTE2023 organising team is very happy to announce the following line-up of keynote speakers for the event:
Prof. Claire Squires is Professor in Publishing Studies and Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication at the University of Stirling, as well as Director of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities. With a professional background in trade and academic publishing, her research focuses on the history of the book and book cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries, digital publishing, literary prizes and book festivals. She is the author ofMarketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave 2007) co-editor of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Volume 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (CUP 2019), and with Beth Driscoll The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business (CUP 2020). Prof. Squires’ talk will bridge the two disciplines of linguistics and literature by engaging with the notion of trust in the publishing industry.
Prof. Christopher Hart is Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. His research lies at the crossroads of cognitive science and critical discourse analysis and is broadly concerned with the relationship between language, cognition and social/political action. Much of his work has focused on anti-immigration discourses and discourses of civil disorder, which he has approached in terms of the key semiotic resources they build on, be they textual and cognitive (metaphor, trust, objectification, frames, viewpoint, image schemas, etc.) or multimodal (gestures, images, etc.). In his talk, Prof. Hart will offer a view on linguistic resources for trust management in public discourse and discuss their effectiveness as strategies of influence.
Prof. Max Saunders is Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern English Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. An expert in literary modernism (see e.g., Life-Writing, Autobiografication, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford UP 2010), he has published widely on various aspects of autobiography and life-writing. He also led an ERC-funded project “Ego-Media Project” from 2014-2019. Max Saunders recently completed a monograph titled Imagined Futures, in which he explores the “To-Day and To-Morrow book series” – a series comprising 110 volumes (short speculative essays) by authors such as Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Betrand Russell, who all, in the 1920s and 1930s, sought to envision the future. Prof. Saunder’s talk will be based on this project and connect the conference theme to speculative thinking.