Guest Speakers

Laura Brown, John Wendell Anderson Chair of English Literature and Deputy Provost, Cornell University, is an expert on the eighteenth century and the author of Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth Century English Literature (1993), Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (2001), Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (2010).

Stefan Collini, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, is perhaps best known for his polemics against the total monetization of British Universities, collected in What Are Universities For? (2012), but he has published very substantially in nineteenth and twentieth century literature and intellectual history: Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006), Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (2008), That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect (2011).

John Joseph, Professor of Linguistics and Head of Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh, is perhaps mainly known for his monumental and highly acclaimed biography of Saussure (2012), but has also published, among others, Language and Politics (2006) and Language and Identity (2010).