All Blog Posts

ESSE Statement on the Invasion of Ukraine

The Board of the European Society for the Study English expresses its shock and dismay at the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine and the devastating escalation of violence. We fully support the statements published by UNESCO and by FILLM, the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Litératures Modernes, of which ESSE is a member association. We would like to convey our sympathy and solidarity to the people of Ukraine.

Book Announcement – Digital Genres in Academic Knowledge Production and Communication

Digital Genres in Academic Knowledge Production and Communication
Perspectives and Practices

By María José Luzón and Carmen Pérez-Llantada

 

Finally a definitive guide to academic genres online! Covering an impressive range of digital practices, this insightful and inspiring book masterfully demonstrates the connection between the affordances of digital media and the exigences of scientific communication.

– Christoph A. Hafner, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

 This book presents an overview of the wide variety of digital genres used by researchers to produce and communicate knowledge, perform new identities and evaluate research outputs. The book explores what researchers can do with these genres, what meanings they can make and what language(s) they deploy in carrying out all these practices.

 María José Luzón is Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her research interests include genre analysis, digital genres, academic discourse, and English for Academic Purposes.

Carmen Pérez-Llantada is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her research interests include genre analysis, English for Academic Purposes, academic writing, and rhetoric and composition.

 Get 75% off when you order on our website before 31st March with code DGAKPC75https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781788924719.

Conference Report – 29th CDE Conference, “Critical Theatre Ecologies”

29th CDE Conference
“Critical Theatre Ecologies”
June 03-06, 2021, University of Augsburg, Germany

The 2021 CDE conference officially opened with the welcoming words by the conference organiser Martin Middeke (University of Augsburg), followed by a welcome by Christiane Fäcke, the Dean of the Faculty of Philology and History at the University of Augsburg. The President of the society Ute Berns thanked the conference organisers for their work and commitment. Martin Middeke and Martin Riedelsheimer then introduced the conference theme.

The evening continued with the conference’s first keynote: London-based playwright Ella Hickson in interview with theatre critic Aleks Sierz (London), chaired by Martin Middeke and followed by Q&A. Hickson spoke about her path to becoming a playwright, and the provenance of her 2016 play Oil.

The second day of the conference started with the first panel (chaired by Ute Berns). Helen Gilbert (Royal Holloway, University of London) spoke on “Climate Change Theatre and the Conundrum of Time”. She traced instances of plays chronicling climate change in the Antarctic, such as the large-scale E. M. Lewis’s Magellanica (2018) on the one hand and the microdramatic short plays emerging from Chantal Bilodeau’s Climate Change Theatre Action project (2015-ongoing). Patrick Lonergan (NUI Galway) then spoke on “Staging the Great Acceleration: Carly Churchill’s Far Away on Spike Island, 2017″, suggesting to see the final act of the play as the current stage of the Anthropocene, and the first two acts as a kind of archaeology of how we arrived there.

The panel was followed by the second keynote, by Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow), who spoke on “Ecologising Theatre” (chaired by Martin Riedelsheimer) in the context of agency, politics and ethics.

In the afternoon, the second panel was chaired by Dorothee Birke. Christian Attinger (University of Augsburg) spoke on “An Ecology of Plants: the Post-Manufacturing Age in Philip Ridley’s Shivered and David Eldridge’s In Basildon“, discussing the way in which theatre points at the corporate social and ecological responsibilities of transnational corporations and might offer counter-reactions to the “Capitalocene”. Julia Rössler (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) then spoke on “Embodiment, Atmosphere, and Materiality: Ecological Aesthetics in the Theatre of Adam Rapp”, giving an overview of Rapp’s body of work by historically deriving it from Gertrude Stein and Richard Schechner and then focussing on Rapp’s 2004 play Faster.

The third panel (chaired by Anette Pankratz), brought together Kerstin Howaldt (University of Erfurt), Anna Street (Le Mans University) and Ramona Mosse (FU Berlin). Howaldt spoke about “Diffracting ‘Stabilized/Stabilizing Binaries’ of Climate Change Theatre (Plays)”, Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London and Richard Bean’s The Heretic in the context of Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. In their paper “To Be Like Water – Material Dramaturgies in Unthinkable Environments”, Street and Mosse used three case studies of performing water to argue for fluidity and connectivity relate to notions of the unthinkable.

The day closed with the conference’s third keynote, chaired by Martin Middeke: London-based playwright Martin Crimp in interview with Aleks Sierz, followed by Q&A. Crimp spoke on theatres as an ecology, as a trans-European network.

The CDE Annual General Meeting took place in the morning of the third day.

The conference’s fourth panel took place in the afternoon and was chaired by Merle Tönnies. Leila Vaziri (University of Augsburg) spoke on “Alienation and Disgust – The Capitalocene in Contemporary Eco-Drama”, referring to Dawn King’s 2011 play Foxfinder and Tanya Ronder’s Fuck the Polar Bears (2015) to draw a line from Kristevan abjection theory to the human-animal divide and the alienating effect on the connections between humans and nature. Jill Gatlin (New England Conservatory) then spoke on “Performing Reception Justice: Audience Disturbance and Ecological Toxicity in Cherrie Moraga’s Heroes and Saints“, outlining how the play invites audiences to evaluate their privilege and potential allied action.

The fifth panel followed immediately afterwards (chaired by Clare Wallace). Linda Heß (University of Augsburg) spoke on “Playing the Petrocene: The Toxicity of National Discourse in Leigh Fondakowski’s Spill (2014) and Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016)”, arguing, alongside Judith Butler’s concept of grievability and Timothy Clark’s notion of scale, that both plays allow spectators to explore their own capacity for empathy and their entanglement into the ecological crisis on a global scale. Chukwuemeka Rowland Amaefula (Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike) then spoke on “Eco-Drama, Multinanational Corporations and Climate Change in Nigeria”, exploring the effects of climate change on the country through the lens of Greg Mbajiorgu’s ecodrama Wakeup Everyone (2011).

This panel was followed by the conference’s fourth keynote, by Theresa May (University of Oregon), who spoke on “Kinship and Community in Climate Change Theatre” (chaired by Martin Riedelsheimer). Referring to Marie Clements’ Burning Vision (2002), Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila (2015), and her own play Salmon Is Everything (2018), she argued for ecodramaturgy as a praxis, presenting theatre as a crucial tool of democracy for the Anthropocene.

Sunday morning saw the conference’s fifth keynote, chaired by Martin Middeke. Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University) spoke on “Writing in the Green: Imperatives towards an Eco-n-temporary Theatre Canon”. Angelaki suggested in-betweenness as a key element towards understanding humanities’ contemporary role and responsibilities.

The keynote was followed by the conference’s sixth and last panel (chaired by Eckart Voigts). Jamie Harper (De Montfort University) spoke on “Performing Resilience”, comparing the neoliberal approach to the concept with the one taken by ecological sciences and exploring radical transformation through evaluation of a research residency at a community orchard. Solange Ayache (Sorbonne University) then spoke on the merging of the brain, the stage, and the forest in her paper “‘It’s the Intricacy of the Forest … That’s the Treasure’: Devising Ecological Theatre with Simon McBurney’s The Encounter“. Simon Bowes (University of Greenwich) then gave a paper on “Embodiment, Occupation and Solidarity: Theatre Environment as Territory in three Tim Spooner Performances”, in which he outlined Spooner’s refashioning of the theatre environment as ‘territory’ in his performances The Voice of Nature (2018), Cuteness Forensics (2018), and Dead Nature (2019). Bowes proposed that Spooner occupied nature and, by extension, the theatre.

The conference closed on Sunday mid-day. The next conference will take place in Paris (organised by our sister organisation RADAC) on 23-26 June, 2022.

Book Announcement – Analyzing Multimodality in Specialized Discourse Settings

Analyzing Multimodality in Specialized Discourse Settings

Innovative Research Methods and Applications

Veronica Bonsignori, Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli, Denise Filmer (Eds.)

Contemporary society has witnessed radical changes in the field of communications in terms of how messages and meanings are disseminated. Digitalization and the Internet have signalled an exponential rise in the circulation of multimodal texts in which different semiotic resources are orchestrated together to construct meaning in all areas of social life, across languages and cultures, and in diverse specialized discourse domains. This has foregrounded the need to examine the semiotic functions, affordances, and issues at stake in a range of multimodal discourse forms, while simultaneously highlighting the importance of critical multimodal literacy in audiences and learners.

This volume develops and extends pioneering research on the intersection between multimodality and specialized discourse. Eight newly commissioned studies offer innovative perspectives on multimodal research methodologies and applications in a variety of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts for practitioners and scholars alike. The volume offers a glimpse at future directions in this dynamic and ever-evolving area of investigation focusing on the synergy between verbal and non-verbal modes of communication in the digital age. Each chapter explores an original area of application: academic, economic, scientific, marketing, legal, medical, political, and tourism. The contributors approach multimodality from a range of theoretical and methodological viewpoints including synchronic and diachronic corpus-based and corpus-aided studies, critical discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. Analytical tools such as multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, multimodal transcription, and multimodal annotation software capable of representing the interplay of different semiotic modes – speech, intonation, direction of gaze, facial expressions, gesturing, and spatial positioning of interlocutors – are employed. The diversity of research strands contained in the volume illustrates just some of the vast areas of multimodal knowledge dissemination that are still unmapped. As a cornerstone of communication, multimodality needs exploring in all its facets. These contributions aim to further that cause.  

ISBN: 978-1-64889-103-8

https://vernonpress.com/book/1128

HJEAS Books, New Series

The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) will launch a series of books to be published by Debrecen University Press beginning in 2022 that will reflect scholarship in the areas covered by the Journal, which include but are not limited to the literature, film, art, history, and religion of the United States, Canada, Ireland, England, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. All books will be published as Open Access ebooks and as printed using Print on Demand. They will be kept in print. Continue reading “HJEAS Books, New Series”

The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS)

ROLLING CALL FOR PAPERS

The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) is

  • devoted to literary, historical, film and cultural studies of the English-speaking world
  • an international scholarly journal with an international audience available at major research centers and libraries throughout the world
  • the oldest continuously published Central European scholarly journal in its field
  • published twice a year by the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary.

Continue reading “The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS)”

New ESSE Jobs

New ESSE Messenger Editor

Starting from January 2022, The ESSE Messenger will have a new Editor. Her name is Dr. Laura Estaban Segura from the University of Malaga, Spain. Her email address as Editor is the known one, namely esse.messenger [at] uma.es.

New ESSE Webmaster

In parallel, the new ESSE Webmaster will be Dr. Adrian Radu (the former ESSE Messenger Editor) from Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His email address is essenglish.webmaster [at] gmail.com.

Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies

Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies is an open access peer-reviewed academic journal that serves as a forum for multi- and interdisciplinary discussions across Literature and Drama Studies, providing academicians, scholars, professionals, and students with the opportunity to disseminate their research to a diverse audience of peers and professionals.

Scott Fitzgerald proposes that “[t]hat is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” Literature is unique but it is limitless in its extent, for “literature is life,” as Robert A. Nimmo puts it. ‘We belong’, as literature is human. Human narrates the story and is told in the story. Human makes hi(s)tory and is told in hi(s)tory. Literature is human/ities and it “is the question minus the answer” for “the birth of the reader,” as Roland Barthes suggests. We come to set sail for new articles, new writers, and new readers. We come to take responsibility for the space we belong to.

Continue reading “Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies”

REIIT Revista Educación Investigación, Innovación y Transferencia

It is a pleasure to announce the creation of the Journal REIIT Revista Educación Investigación, Innovación y Transferencia, which is structured around three main sections: Research, Innovation and Transfer. This is an annual publication where each contribution will follow a double-blind peer review. Each issue will comprise three research articles, three articles dealing with innovative practices and one or two revolving around knowledge and society transfer. All the articles must contribute to research on the area of education at the national or international level and they can deal with different education stages and levels from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The submissions will take place online and the deadline for this first issue is April 15, 2021. It is necessary to be registered and logged in on the following website: https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/eiit/submission/wizard in order to send any article and check the submission status. The submissions will not exceed 9,000 words, including footnotes, references and graphics, charts or images. Submissions are accepted in Spanish, English and French. They should be original and they should not be undergoing any process of revision for other publications. In addition to this, the authors have to send another document indicating the name of the responsible author as well as the postal address, ORCID, telephone number and email address of all the co-authors (if any). More information regarding the publication guidelines, the recommended format for the articles and the nature of the journal can be checked on our website https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/eiit.

IDEAS: Journal of English Literary Studies

It is an honour for the IDEA Association to launch its academic journal: IDEAS: Journal of English Literary Studies.

IDEAS is an international, electronically published and peer-reviewed journal devoted to English literary studies. The journal aims to supply a highly qualified academic platform for the exchange of diverse critical and original ideas on any aspect of literatures written in English, cultural studies, and literary theory. The first issue will be published in April 2021.

Original articles, interviews and book reviews will be considered for publication.

Papers will be submitted through the submission system available on the website.

The deadline for the submission of papers for the first issue is 15 January 2021.

Please visit the journal website for further information about the journal: https://www.idea.org.tr/ideasjournal

ESSE Positions of Secretary and Treasurer: Call for Applications and Nominations

The Nominations Committee of the ESSE Board seeks applications for the positions of Secretary and Treasurer, which fall vacant in January 2023. The usual term of office is three years. Candidates, who should preferably have been involved in ESSE affairs or have had similar positions in their national associations, should submit, as e–mail attachments:

  • a letter of application
  • a short (2–3 page) CV
  • letters of support from two national associations.

Each national association can also nominate candidates for any of these two positions (only one candidate for each position). In this case, national associations will submit, as e–mail attachments:

  • a letter, signed by the association’s President, describing the candidate’s competence for the specific office
  • a short (2–3 page) CV of candidate(s) proposed
  • a letter, signed by another association’s President, seconding this proposal
  • a letter in which the candidate will express his/her agreement with the candidacy.

Applications and nominations must be submitted electronically, by 30 April 2022 at the latest, to the members of the Nominations Committee:

From the applications and nominations received, the Committee will select the best candidates (maximum of three for each office). The two officers will be chosen by vote at the ESSE Board meeting in Mainz, 28–29 August 2022.

ESSE Research and Support

Here is the list of ESSE research support schemes for 2022:

Prof. Liliane Louvel will receive the Grand Prix d’Honneur of SAES

Professor Liliane Louvel, Professor emerita of literature in the English language at the University of Poitiers and former president of ESSE  between 2013-2018, will be awarded the “Grand Prix d’Honneur” on 10th of September. The prize will be awarded on behalf of SAES (the French national association associated with ESSE whose Honorary President Liliane Louvel is). This prize, which is awarded every four years, is a homage to a member of SAES for the totality of his or her exceptional contributions to English studies. Congratulations!

CFP for Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design

Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design,
Volume 1, Summer 2022

Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design is an annual peer-reviewed and open-access journal published by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Nicosia (UNIC).

We are now accepting contributions for the inaugural volume of Zealos due to be published in Summer 2022. Zealos welcomes original and previously unpublished articles that fall within the scope of the journal and follow internationally sanctioned scientific standards. Submissions are free of charge. We welcome contributions in Greek or English. Continue reading “CFP for Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design”

Call for Papers: Journal of Ecohumanism

Journal of Ecohumanism invites contributors to the inaugural issue.

Submission Deadline: 30 September 2021

Journal of Ecohumanism aims to open up new possibilities in reconfiguring the multidimensional internship among humans and the more-than-human world by focusing on the structure, mechanics, functionalities, and representations of this internship manifested across ecohumanist and civil contexts. Since Environmental Humanities ample research has looked at variable aspects of ecological citizenship, we have to focus on globalization’s temporality in the rise of Citizen Humanities. In this sense, we are in the midst of constant transformations and evolutionary processes, contributing to the world defining, even perceiving new planetary narrations. In response, the Journal of Ecohumanism develops conversations to consider how challenging conditions shape the concept of citizenship as form, structure, identity, representation and insight, as well as how ecohumanism affects our civil experience of space and time. Continue reading “Call for Papers: Journal of Ecohumanism”

EJES | Call for Papers for Volume 27 (2023)

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the three issues of the journal to be published in 2023. EJES operates in a two-stage review process. The first stage is based on the submission of detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) and results in invitations to submit full essays from which a final selection is then made. The deadline for essay proposals for this volume is 30 November 2021, with delivery of completed essays in the spring of 2022, and publication in Volume 27 (2023).

Procedure

EJES operates a two-stage review process.

1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2021.
2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a spring 2022 deadline.
3. The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2022 for publication in 2023.
EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html. Continue reading “EJES | Call for Papers for Volume 27 (2023)”

15th ESSE Conference, Lyon / Zoom – Registration now open

The registration to ESSE 2021 online conference is now open. All participants (ESSE members and non-ESSE members) need to register and are kindly asked to do so before July 15th to make sure their registration is validated before the summer break.

The registration procedure is explained here.

For ESSE members, registration is free: you’ll only need to create your account and then accept the terms of the contract in the Pre-register tab. Your registration will then be complete. Please do NOT click on “Complete my registration”, which is only for non-ESSE members.

For non-ESSE members, registration is 35 euros until June 15th (50 euros from June 16th): you’ll need to create your account, accept the terms of the contract in the Pre-register tab, and then click on “Complete my registration” and continue until payment.

Free guided tours of the city center (broadcast live online) and a free lecture on the world-renowned Lyon chef Paul Bocuse will be offered to registered participants (both ESSE members and non-ESSE members) by our partner New Generation Guide. To sign up, please click on the following link:
https://www.newgenerationguide.com/en/guided-tours/ESSE2021

The latest version of conference programme and book of abstracts is available here.

The conference will take place on the Cisco Webex web conferencing platform. You can download the application and test it by clicking on https://www.webex.com/test-meeting.html