Keynote Speakers

 

Isabel Capeloa Gil is Associate Professor of Cultural Theory at the Catholic University of Portugal and Honorary Fellow at the Institute of  Germanic and Romance Studies (University of London). Her main research topics are German modern culture, intermedia studies as well as visuality and violence. Her most recent work discusses strategies of visual fetishism. She is the author of Mythographies. Figurations of Antigone, Cassandra and Medea in German 20th Century Drama (2007) and Visual Literacy. On the Disquiet of Images (2011) and the editor of The Poetics of Navigation (2007) and Fleeting, Floating, Flowing: Water Writing and Modernity (2008). As co-editor, she has been responsible for 12 collections of edited essays, amongst them Landscapes of Memory. Envisaging the Past/Remembering the Future (with Richard Trewinnard, 2004), Rahmenwechsel Kulturwissenschaften (with Peter Hanenberg, 2010), Simone de Beauvoir: Looking at Woman (with M.C.Pimentel, 2010) as well as Plots of War. Modern Narratives of Conflict (with A. Martins, 2012). Together with Catherine Nesci (UCSB) she is the general editor of the series Culture and Conflict with de Gruyter Publishers. She is also the editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Comunicação e Cultura (Communication and Culture) and sits in the editorial boards of several European peer-reviewed journalsIsabel Gil has been a visiting professor at universities in Europe (LMU Munich, U. Hamburg, National U. Ireland, U. London) the U.S. (W. Michigan University, Stanford) and Asia. On the institutional level, Isabel Capeloa Gil is also the Director of the International Ph.D. Program in Culture Studies at UCP and its collaborative research network The Lisbon Consortium. She is currently Vice-Rector for Research at UCP.

Markus Lammenranta is a Docent and Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His areas of research are epistemology, metaphysics and aesthetics. His publications include “Do We Make Worlds with Symbols?” Semiotica 86 (1991), “Goodman’s Semiotic Theory of Art”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992), “Reliabilism and Circularity”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1996), “Is Descartes’s Reasoning Viciously Circular?” British Journal for the History of Philosophy14 (2006) and “The Pyrrhonian Problematic,” The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, ed. by John Greco, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Professor Carol Mavor is the author of four books, all published by Duke University Press: Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (2007), Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess, Hawarden (1999) Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (1995) and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour (2012).  Her essays have appeared in Cabinet Magazine, Art History, Photography and Culture, Photographies, as well as edited volumes. Mavor’s writing has been widely reviewed in publications in the U.S. and U.K., including the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice. She has lectured broadly in the US and the UK, including The Photographers’ Gallery (London), University of Cambridge, Duke University, the Royal College of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. For 2010-2011, Mavor was named the Northrop Frye Chair in Literary Theory at University of Toronto. Mavor’s new book Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Colour (Reaktion Books) has just come out in May 2013.  Currently, Mavor is hard at work on fairy tales and a novel entitled  Like a Lake.

Bo Pettersson is Professor of the Literature of the United States and former Head of English at The Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. He has published widely on Anglo-American literature in relation to literary, narrative and metaphor theory, including The World According to Kurt Vonnegut: Moral Paradox and Narrative Form and – as co-editor – Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice and Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. He serves or has served on the boards of The Fulbright Commission in Finland, The Swedish Literature Society in Finland, The International Association for Comparative Literature’s Committee on Theory and The International Assocation for Literary Semantics as well as on the editorial boards of Nordic Journal of English Studies and Journal of Literary Semantics. He is now Director of the interdisciplinary research community “Interfaces between Language, Literature and Culture” at University of Helsinki and Associate Chair of The Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies. In 2011 he was elected member of The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.