Keynote speakers

Daniela Francesca Virdis (she/her) (PhD, University of Genoa, Italy) is an Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Cagliari, Italy, where she teaches Language & Gender, Stylistics, Pragmatics and Structural Grammar in First and Master’s Degree Courses. She is a member of the International Ecolinguistics Association (IEA) Steering Group and the Erasmus Programme Academic Coordinator for the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Cagliari. She was the Secretary of Poetics And Linguistics Association (PALA). She is the author of the books Ecological Stylistics: Ecostylistic Approaches to Discourses of Nature, the Environment and Sustainability (2022) and Serialised Gender: A Linguistic Analysis of Femininities in Contemporary TV Series and Media (2012), which was awarded the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA) Book Prize 2013 for a monograph in the field of English Language and Linguistics. She is a co-editor of the books Language in Place: Stylistic Perspectives on Landscape, Place and Environment (2021) and The Stylistics of Landscapes, the Landscapes of Stylistics (2017). She is also the author of the book “A spectacle of strangeness”: Diavoli e Streghe nel Teatro Giacomiano (Devils and Witches in the Jacobean Theatre, 2004), the author and editor of the Italian translation of B. Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass (2003), and a co-editor of the volume Ricerca e Didattica nei Centri Linguistici di Ateneo (Research and Language Teaching in University Language Centres, 2006). She has also published widely on language & sexuality in Victorian erotica, national-ethnic stereotypes, and Late Modern fictional and non-fictional prose from a historical pragmatic perspective. She is currently researching ecostylistics and metaphor theory.

Katarzyna Więckowska is Associate Professor in the Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies, at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, and member of the Lab for Exclusion and Alienation Research (LEAR). Her research interests include environmental criticism, critical studies on men and masculinities, feminist criticism, discourses of exclusion, and contemporary Anglophone literature. Her most recent work focuses on hauntology, post-anthropocentric ethics of care, solarpunk, climate witnessing, and displacement. She is the author of Spectres of Men: Masculinity, Crisis, and British Literature (2014) and On Alterity: A Study of Monstrosity and Otherness (2008), editor of The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space (2020), and co-editor of the themed issues of Theoria et Historia Scientiarum (Spectrality and Cognition: Haunted Cultures, Ghostly Communications, 2017) and AVANT. Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (Haunted Cultures/Haunting Cultures, 2017, and  Altering Authorships: The Author Function in Contemporary Cultural and Literary Practices, 2021).