ESSE 2026

Academic Programme

1. Plenary Speakers

Karen Corrigan is an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Newcastle University, UK. She has also held a number of visiting positions, most recently as Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Kyoto (2025). She has research interests in corpus creation, digitization and open science leading to Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, Volume 1: Synchronic Databases (2007, Palgrave, co-edited with J.C. Beal & H.L. Moisl); Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, Volume 2: Diachronic Databases (2007, Palgrave, co-edited with J.C. Beal & H.L. Moisl); Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement (2016, Palgrave, co-edited with A. Mearns). Her most recent projects, though, have focused on two themes with particular reference to the languages and dialects of Ireland: (i) Language, migration and identity; (ii) Contact, change and variation. This research has been published internationally in journals such as Language and Society, English Language and Linguistics and English World-Wide. She is author of the monographs Irish English, Volume 1: Northern Ireland (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Linguistic Communities and Migratory Processes: Newcomers Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation in Northern Ireland (de Gruyter Mouton, 2021).

A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee. She lived for almost 30 years in Glasgow and now stays in various places. She has won a variety of UK and international book awards, including a Lannan Award, the Costa Prize, The Heinrich Heine Preis, the Austrian State Prize for Literature, the Honorary Prize of the Austrian Book Trade, the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rees Prize. She has twice been included on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. She has written 10 novels, 8 short story collections, 3 books of non-fiction and 4 books for children. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Akademie der Kunst. She also writes for the stage, screen, TV and has created an extensive body of radio work including documentaries, monologues, dramas and essays. She also performs occasionally in one person shows and as a stand-up comic.

2. Parallel Lectures

There will be 15 parallel lectures at ESSE 2026. They are listed below in alphabetical order.

1. James Corby (University of Malta, Malta). After Literature: The Post-Literary Condition, Creative Criticism and the Question of the Common
2. Elena Di Giovanni (University of Macerata, Italy). Audiovisual Translation and Accessibility: New Languages, New Forms of Linguistic and Cultural Transfer
3. Ovidiu Ivancu (Vilnius University, Lithuania). Shifting Boundaries: Posthumanism and the Reimagining of Human Identity in Literature
4. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). Memefying the English Canon: Literature Interacting with Contemporary Politics
5. Lívia Kortvelyessy (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Slovakia). On the Typology of Onomatopoeia: Sound Events and their Onomatopoeic Patterns
6. María Losada Friend (University Pablo de Olavide, Spain). New Perspectives on Travel Literature: Emotionology and Women Travelling at the Outburst of the Spanish Civil War
7. Minna Nevala (University of Helsinki, Finland). From the Glamorous White Plague to the Grim COVID-19: On the News Representation of People during Pandemics
8. Natália Pikli (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary). 'Why Shakespeare?' Scholars and Playwrights Serving 21st-Century Communities
9. Marzanna Pogorzelska (University of Opole, Poland). 'Not as innocent as they seem': English Textbooks and their Ideological Entanglement in Neoliberal Reality
10. Christine Reynier (University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry, France). Material Intimacies in British Interwar Literature
11. Sofia Rüdiger (Free University of Berlin, Germany). Semiotics of Overindulgence: Language and Spectacle in Online Food Performances
12. Hartmut Stöckl (Salzburg University, Austria). 'Been there, done that?': Multimodal Argument Reconstruction Based on the Evidence of Corpus Annotation
13. Lieven Vandelanotte ( University of Namur & KU Leuven, Belgium ). 'Every day I am subjected to images and text': Towards a Grammar of Internet Memes
14. Irena Vassileva (New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria). Academic Integrity in the Post-Plagiarism Era
15. Titela Vîlceanu (University of Craiova, Romania). Reclaiming the Human in Digital Literary Translation. Beyond Stylistic Metrics

3. Seminars

4. Roundtables

No.	Title	Participants
RT1	Late Style, Late Times: Literary Study at the End	Simon Swift (University of Geneva, Switzerland) Rachel Facloner (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) Matthew Scully (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) Nell Wasserstrom (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) Patrick Jones (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
RT2	Reading Transnational Literature in English: Theoretical and Methodological Issues	Isabel Carrera Suárez (University of Oviedo, Spain) Jasmina Lukic (Central European University, Austria) Rita Monticelli (University of Bologna, Italy) Francesco Cattani (University of Bologna, Italy) Adelina Sánchez Espinosa (University of Granada, Spain)
RT3	Texts and Contexts: Teaching English and American Studies in Times of Challenges and Crises	Roberta Maierhofer (Center for Inter-American Studies, University of Graz, Austria) Teresa Requena Pelegri (University of Barcelona, Spain) Hermine Penz (University of Graz, Austria) Vicky Macleroy (Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) Rémi Digonnet (Laboratoire ECLLA, Jean Monnet University (St. Etienne), France)
RT4	Already Posthuman: Artificial and Natural Intelligences in the Literary Future Now	Francisco Collado-Rodríguez (University of Zaragoza, Spain) Miriam Fernández Santiago (University of Granada, Spain) Alexandra Glavanakova Sofia (University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria) Begoña Simal González (University of A Coruña, Spain)

5. Poster Session

6. Doctoral Symposium