keynote speakers
Edna Longley
Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita at Queen's University Belfast. Her books include Poetry & Posterity (Bloodaxe, 2000) and Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She has edited Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008), and her most recent book is Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English Lyric (Enitharmon, 2017).
MAnuel Portela
​
Manuel Portela directs the FCT PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature at the University of Coimbra. He is the author of Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (MIT Press, 2013), the general editor of LdoD Archive: Collaborative Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet https://ldod.uc.pt/ (CLP, 2017), and one of the contributors to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2017). He has published widely on digital literature and digital media, including articles in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and electronic book review. He is cofounder and current general editor of the journal MATLIT: Materialities of Literature.
Martin Halliwell
Martin Halliwell is Head of the School of Arts and Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK. Prior to this role, he was Director of the Centre for American Studies (2005-9), Head of the School of English (2008-13) and Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor International (2013-16). He is a specialist in American cultural, intellectual and literary history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and also in the health humanities within a North American context. He is the author of ten monographs, most recently Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970–2000 (Rutgers University Press, 2017), and three co-edited volumes, including Reframing 1968: American Politics, Protest and Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He is currently Co-Chair of the Arts and Humanities Alliance and the President of the English Association, having been Chair of the English Association (2014-18), Chair of the British Association for American Studies (2010-13), and the UK Representative for the European Association for American Studies (2013-18).
Michael Longley
Michael Longley has published eleven books of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2006. His most recent collection, Angel Hill, came out in June 2017, as did Sidelines: Selected Prose 1962-2015. His previous collection The Stairwell (2014) won the Griffin International Prize. In 2001 Longley received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and he has won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is a Freeman of the City of Belfast. Michael Longley was appointed a CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 he was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal: an international poetry prize awarded by Toyama Prefecture, Japan.
