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Keywords project members

Sylvia Adamson

Sylvia Adamson completed her undergraduate and postgraduate education at the University of Cambridge, in the English Faculty and the Department of Linguistics, respectively. After an appointment at the University of Strathclyde, where, together with Colin MacCabe and Alan Durant, she founded the Programme in Literary Linguistics, she returned to Cambridge to take up the post of University Lecturer in English Language. In 1999, she joined the University of Manchester as Professor of Linguistics and Literary History, and in 2004 moved to Sheffield as Professor of Renaissance Literature and Early Modern English Language. Further details of career, research interests and publications can be found here.

Kathryn Allan

Kathryn Allan is Lecturer in the History of English at University College London and Deputy Director of UCL’s Survey of English Usage. She previously held a lectureship at Salford University, and has also taught at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow. While a postgraduate at Glasgow, she worked as a part-time research assistant on the Historical Thesaurus of English, now published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Recent publications include two co-edited volumes for Mouton de Gruyter, Current Methods in Historical Semantics (with Justyna Robinson, 2011), and Historical Cognitive Linguistics (with Margaret Winters and Heli Tissari, 2010), as well as a monograph, Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach (Publications of the Philological Society, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). She is currently writing a textbook on historical semantics with Christian Kay, for Edinburgh University Press.

Susan Z. Andrade

Susan Z. Andrade is associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is affiliated with the programs in Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. Her book on gender politics, public sphere politics, and women’s literary traditions, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988, is forthcoming from Duke UP, and she co-edited Atlantic Cross- Currents / Transatlantiques (Africa World Press, 2001). She has published essays on Aphra Behn, Maryse Conde, and Franz Fanon, V. S. Naipaul, and literary and intellectual materials from Africa and the Caribbean in Callaloo, Cultural Critique, Research in African Literatures as well as several edited books.

Jonathan Arac

Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs Pitt's Humanities Center, which he founded in 2008. He also serves on the boundary 2 editorial collective and chaired the Advisory Committee for the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 2002-2012. His most recent book appeared from Fordham University Press, Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (2011). He is completing Against Americanistics and working on a book about "The Age of the Novel" in the US, 1850s-1950s.

Jennifer Davis

Jennifer Davis is a social historian and lawyer. She is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a member of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) at the University of Cambridge. Her books include, with Lionel Bently and Jane Ginsburg, Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique (CUP, 2008) and, with Tanya Aplin, Intellectual Property: Text, Cases and Materials (OUP, 2017). She has a particular interest in trade mark law and unfair competition and has published extensively on these topics both from a legal and historical perspective. She is currently writing a social and political history of trade marks.

Alan Durant

Alan Durant is Professor of Communication in the School of Law at Middlesex University London. He was previously Professor and Head of English at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and before that Director of the Programme in Literary Linguistics, University of Strathclyde (where he worked during the 1980s with Sylvia Adamson and Colin MacCabe). Recent books include Meaning and Power in the Language of Law, co-edited with Janny H.C. Leung (CUP, 2018); Language and Law, co-written with Janny H.C. Leung (Routledge, 2016), Meaning in the Media: Discourse, Controversy and Debate (CUP, 2010), and Language and Media, co-written with Marina Lambrou (Routledge, 2009). With Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge and Colin MacCabe, he co-edited The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature (Manchester University Press, 1987), a collection of essays which includes the Raymond Williams lecture available on this website in video extracts and in audio.

Philip Durkin

Philip Durkin is Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, where he has led the dictionary’s specialist team of etymologists since the late 1990s. He trained as a medievalist and historian of the English language at the University of Oxford, where his doctoral research focused on previously unedited Middle English prose texts. He has published in journals including Transactions of the Philological SocietyEnglish Language and LinguisticsDictionaries, and Critical Quarterly. His monographs The Oxford Guide to Etymology and Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English were published by OUP in 2009 and 2013, and he is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography (2016).

Matthew Eagleton-Pierce

Matthew Eagleton-Pierce is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at SOAS University of London. His first monograph, titled Symbolic Power in the World Trade Organization, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. He is also the author of Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2016), which seeks to critique the common vocabulary associated with neoliberal notions and policies. His current research is focused on two areas: (1) the political economy of managerialism; and (2) the relationship between expertise and civil society groups in the recent history of trade policy struggles. He previously taught at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, and the University of Exeter. He is a Member of the Senior Common Room at St Antony's College, Oxford. He holds a DPhil in International Relations, also from St Antony's College, Oxford.

Stephen Heath

Stephen Heath is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where he is Keeper of the Old Library.

Colin MacCabe

Colin MacCabe is a Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught since 1985. Between 1976 and 1985 he taught the history of Early Modern and Modern English in relation to literature at Cambridge and Strathclyde universities He has also taught at Exeter University, UK, and at Birkbeck, University of London. Between 1985 and 1998 he worked at the British Film Institute, where he produced films by Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien and Terence Davies as well as the 16 part series The Century of Cinema. His most recent productions are Chris Marker’s Owls at Noon: Prelude the Hollow Men (2005), Isaac Julien’s Derek (2008) and Filipa Cesar’s Black Balance (2010). He is the author of numerous books, articles and reviews including Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (2003), and James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (2nd edition 2003). His most recent publications are T.S. Eliot (2004), The Butcher Boy (2007) and a co-edited collection True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (2011). He has edited the journal Critical Quarterly since 1987.

Seth Mehl

Seth Mehl is a Research Assistant in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, where he works on the Linguistic DNA project (Arts and Humanities Research Council). Also at the University of Sheffield, he has worked on Militarization 2.0 (Swedish Research Council) and Ways of Being in a Digital Age (Economic and Social Research Council). He previously worked as a researcher at University College London's Survey of English Usage. He completed a PhD in English at University College London in 2015. He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate English linguistics at the University of Sheffield, University College London, and the University of Winchester. He serves on the council of the Philological Society. 

Arjuna Parakrama

Arjuna Parakrama, poet, scholar, and activist, has had over the last thirty years a distinguished academic career in his native Sri Lanka, and he has also done important work with the UN and major international foundations and NGOs, such as Oxfam, the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, and the United States Institute of Peace. At the University of Colombo, he was Head of the English Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. At the University of Peradeniya, he was also Head of the Department of English. He has taught as Visiting Professor at the National University of Malaysia and in Nepal. As a scholar in sociolinguistics, he is author of many essays and De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post) Colonial Englishes about “English” (London: Macmillan, 1995).

Kellie Robertson

Kellie Robertson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. Her most recent book is Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), which examines late medieval poetry in the context of its physics, arguing that both domains struggled over how to represent nature in the wake of Aristotelian science. She is also the author of The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500 (Palgrave, 2006) and the editor (with Michael Uebel) of a collection of essays entitled The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center.

Holly Yanacek

Holly Yanacek is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at James Madison University. She completed her PhD in German studies and a doctoral-level certificate in cultural studies at the University of Pittsburgh in 2016. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, emotion studies, narrative theory, moral philosophy, and cultural studies. She is a Fulbright alumna whose research has also been supported by the German Historical Institute and the German Academic Exchange Service. She is currently writing a monograph on emotion in fin-de-siècle German novels.