Speakers

Introduction Programme Speakers Abstracts Practical Information Blog Video and Audio

Keynote Speaker

Claire Taylor 

Claire Taylor is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is a specialist in Latin American literature and culture, and has published widely on a range of writers, artists and genres from across the region. Her particular geographical areas of interest are Colombia, Argentina and Chile, although she also worked on literature, art and culture from other regions. Within Latin American Cultural Studies, she takes a particular interest in the varied literary and cultural genres being developed online by Latin(o) Americans, especially hypertext novels, e-poetry and net art. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics, and is the co-author of the recent volume Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 2012), and author of the recent monograph Place and Politics in Latin America Digital Culture: Location and Latin American Net Art (New York: Routledge, 2014).She recently held an AHRC Follow-On Funding grant for a project on Latin(o) American Digital Art, which included a series of impact and engagement events, and a book entitled Cities in Dialogue (LUP 2016).

Panelists

Tori Holmes

Tori Holmes is Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her main research interests are in digital culture and the texts and practices of urban representation in Brazil, particularly relating to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. She has worked on blogging by favela residents, and her current research focuses on webdocumentaries relating to urban change in Rio de Janeiro. Tori has broader interests in digital ethnography, and ethical and methodological issues in interdisciplinary research on digital culture. She is a member of the Digital Latin American Cultures Network and one of the founders of REBRAC (European Network of Brazilianists working in Cultural Analysis).

Guyda Armstrong

Guyda Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in Italian and Faculty Academic Lead for Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. Her research is primarily focused on materiality and translation, and she has published extensively on early Italian literature and its translation and transmission across languages, cultures, and media from the medieval period to the present day. Her wider research interests include early modern print cultures, visual design, digital humanities, and gender. She is the author of The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (UTP, 2013, paperback edition 2015), and co-editor of the recent Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio (2015). She is currently completing a new edition of the 1620 English translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron for the MHRA, and has just begun work as Co-I on a new major collaborative research project with colleagues in Warwick and Leeds, the AHRC-funded Petrarch Commentaries and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c. 1350-1650, directing the digital outputs of the project.

Inma Álvarez 

Inma is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the Open University. She has published on language teaching and learning as well as on dance and performance documentation and reconstruction. Her work has been mostly interdisciplinary. She has researched on intercultural competence in language education in relation to teacher training and learners’ skills development, learning in the digital era as well as on expression in the performing arts. She is a member of the CLAP (Cultures, Languages and Performance) special interest group at the Open University. Her current research is on the links between the performance of language(s) and culture(s) and the arts in different contexts and practices. She has participated in a number of national and international research projects including most recently the European project (2011-2014) Modularising Multilingual and Multicultural Academic Communication Competence for BA and MA level (MAGICC) funded by the Education and Culture DG (Lifelong Learning Programme); the Contexts, Culture and Creativity: Enriching E-Learning in Dance at the University of Surrey in 2012; and the European project (2011-2013), Performing Languages, on drama, language and intercultural learning, funded by the Education and Culture DG (Mobility projects).

Presenters

Thea Pitman

Thea Pitman is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies and Director of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research career started with work on Mexican literature and she has published a monograph entitled Mexican Travel Writing (Lang, 2009). Over the last 12 years it has evolved to focus on the subject of Latin American digital cultural production, and digital cultures more broadly conceived, including the co-edited anthology Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature(Liverpool University Press, 2007) and the co-authored monograph Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production (Routledge, 2013). Together with Claire Taylor (Liverpool) and Tori Holmes (QUB), she maintains the Digital Latin American Cultures Network blog (https://latamcyber.wordpress.com/), Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/dlacnet/) and Twitter account (@latamcyber).

Emanuela Patti

Dott. Lett. Urbino, MA UCL, PhD University of Birmingham – is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham for the project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: interart/intermedia.  Her research interests range across a variety of areas, including modern and contemporary Italian culture, intermediality, comparative literature, digital cultures. Recent publications in the field of digital cultures include the co-edited book Transmedia: Storia, memoria e narrazioni attraverso i media (Mimesis, 2014), the guest-edited the special issue Experimental Narratives: From the Novel to Digital Storytelling for the Journal of Comparative Critical Studies (13.3, 2016) and the special issue Reading Practices in Experimental Narratives for the Journal of Romance Studies (16.1, 2016). She is currently working on a new monograph entitled The Digital Turn in Italian Culture.

Ewan Cass-Kavanagh

@ewanck

Ewan Cass-Kavanagh is creative technologist and digital artist working in the field of interactive documentary and digital social innovation. His background combines fine art training from Central St Martins and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, through the course of which he picked up knowledge of computer programming. He regularly collaborates with practitioners from other fields including academia, journalism, filmmaking and computer science, and his first major work – Quipu Project – has been screened at festivals worldwide and was recognised as one of the Nominet Trusts 100 most inspiring social innovation projects of 2015.

Clare Hooper 

Clare Hooper is Head of Journals at Liverpool University Press. LUP is the UK's third oldest university press and one of its fastest growing publishers in recent years. It publishes approximately 70 books a year and 28 journals, specialising in literature, modern languages, history and visual culture.

Saskia Huc-Hepher

Dr Saskia Huc-Hepher is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Westminster. Her teaching specialisms range from applied French and translation to on-line international e-collaboration and contemporary French culture. Her research interests revolve around these three areas, focusing on cultural, linguistic/semiotic and digital practices, particularly among London’s French community. Saskia is the curator of a Special Collection of London French Web objects in the UK Web Archive, hosted by the British Library, which was made available to the public in 2015. Additional Web archiving projects in which Saskia has been involved include the JISC-funded Analytical Access to the Domain Dark Archive (AADDA) and the IHR-led Big UK Domain Data in the Arts and Humanities (BUDDAH). Her publications include sole-authored articles in Big Data and Society (2015) and Modern Languages Open (2016), together with co-authored chapters in Employability for Languages: A Handbook (2016) and A History of the French in London: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity (2013). She has also recently presented papers at international conferences at the French Institute in London, Senate House, the Oxford Internet Institute and Wuyi University in Guangdong, China.

Caroline Ardrey

Caroline is Research Associate on the AHRC-funded Baudelaire Song Project, directed by Professor Helen Abbott at the University of Birmingham. In December 2016 she received a Europeana Research award to conduct Visualising Voice, a digital-humanities research tool which allows users to visualise and analyse spoken performances of nineteenth-century French poetry. In September, she will take up a lectureship in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, specialising in French poetry and culture, and the digital humanities.

Katia Chornik

Katia Chornik is a cultural historian and ethnomusicologist, with main specialisms in music and human rights, music and literature, cultural memory, oral history, digital humanities and applied research. She is working on the project ‘Common Ground: Migration in/to Europe since 1945’ (led by Prof Peter Gatrell), focusing on cultural aspects of migration and on personal testimonies. She directs and edits the bilingual digital archive Cantos Cautivos (Captive Songs), compiling testimonies on musical experiences under political detention in Chile. She developed this project as part of my 2013-16 Leverhulme research ‘Sounds of Memory: Music and Political Captivity in Pinochet’s Chile (1973-1990)’, in collaboration with ex-prisoners and the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights. She is the author of the book Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text (Legenda, 2015) and co-editor of the Handbook Don Juan in Music and Other Arts (under contract with OUP). Her academic publications have appeared in the journals The World of Music, Leonardo Music Journal, IASPM@Journal, International Journal of Cuban Studies, Working With English: Modern and Medieval Language, Literature and Drama, and Resonancias, as well as in edited volumes.