4th International BAAHE Conference in Brussel (Belgium)

Celebrating the association’s 30th anniversary, the interdisciplinary conference Facing Present, Past and Future aims to map the various ways researchers deal with the challenges they are faced with in the research fields of English Linguistics, English Literature, Translation and Interpretation Studies and ELT. The conference will feature plenary, parallel and panel sessions.

Plenary speakers

• Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Laurence R. Horn is Professor of Linguistics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University
• Joybrato Mukherjee holds the chair of English Linguistics at the University of Giessen
• Basil Hatim is a professor in the Department of Arabic Studies at the American University of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates)

Call for papers

Approaches and topics for papers include but are not limited to the suggestions below. Note that contributions that explore interfaces between these disciplines are particularly encouraged.

Linguistics

• Face and politeness from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective;
• The concepts of face and politeness: from an anglocentric to a global perspective;
• The tenses from a synchronic and diachronic perspective;

Literature

• Facing the Other: historical representations of otherness in literatures in English;
• Authorial and narratorial reflections on one's own time/age and its relation to the literary and cultural past and future - whence and whither this present?
• Theory today: current problems and challenges of literary theory (incl. trauma studies, autobiography and autoperformance);
• Stylistics /use of imagery, figures of speech: defacing the other (forms of satire), deformation (different forms of prosopopeia); interrelations between literature and painting (contemporary and other);
• Facing the Continent: British and Irish literature in a European context (e.g. reception and/or translation of British and Irish authors).

Translation and Interpretation Studies

• Facing the tradition: role of translations in the development of a literary tradition or canon;
• Facing the news: role of transediting in the spread of news in a globalised world;
• Facing the unknown: new challenges in Translation and Interpretation Studies (e.g. machine translation);
• Facing the interpreter: role of the interpreter as a neutral conveyor of messages, a(n intercultural) mediator or an involved party in establishing effective communication in various settings.

ELT

• Face-to-face communication in ELT: from traditional classroom discourse to innovative virtual communication;
• Facing each other and facing the other: research on teacher-student interaction and on student-student interaction and collaboration in the classroom both of native speakers of English and of learners of English as a foreign language
• Saving and representing face in different forms of student-student interaction and teacher-student communication both in speech and in writing (e.g. politeness strategies, intercultural perspectives);
• Facing non-native varieties of English in the classroom;
• CLIL: the way forward for ELT?

For any further enquiries please get in touch with the organising committee at: baahe2011[at]hubrussel.be.