Plenary Speakers

The Humanities Conference will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners. This year's plenary speakers include:

Erzsébet Barát | Anna Gács | Patricia Leavy | Jasmina Lukić | Katalin Orbán |
Antal Örkény | Claire Warwick

Erzsébet Barát is Associate Professor in the Department of English, at the University of Szeged and since 2000 Recurring Visiting Professor at CEU. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Social Sciences Faculty, Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests include feminist critical theory, relational models of identity, and the relationship between language, power and ideology. She is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Hungarian journal, TNTeF: Interdisciplinary Electronic Journal of Gender Studies. She launched and has organized the annual gender studies conference in Szeged since 2005. She is a regular contributor to edited volumes and journals. She has been invited to run courses in PhD programs, most recently at the University of Vienna and Masaryk University, Brno. She is currently co-editing the volume "Ideological Conceptualisations of Language: Discourses of linguistic diversity" to be published by Peter Lang in 2012.

Exemplary Lives and the Omnipresence of Autobiography

Anna Gács is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. She studied Literature and Art Theory and wrote her PhD about the problem of authorship in literature, which was published in 2002. In 1999-2000 she worked as the Hungarian lector at School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College of London. Her research interest covers contemporary literature and culture, digitalisation and literary culture, literary and media theory, construction of authority in contemporary culture. Beside reviews and essays, she’s published translations from English (e.g. Germaine Greer, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes).

Research-Informed Fiction: New Innovations

Patricia Leavy is a well-known author and arts-based researcher with a dozen books to her credit. Among her publications she is the author of Fiction as Research (Left Coast Press), Essentials of Transdisciplinary Research: Using Problem-Centered Methodologies (Left Coast Press), Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research (Oxford University Press), Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice (Guilford Press) and the research-informed novel Low-Fat Love (Sense Publishers). Oxford University Press hand-picked Dr. Leavy to serve as editor for their book series: Understanding Qualitative Research. Dr. Leavy is also the series editor for the cutting-edge Sense Publishers book series Social Fictions which publishes novels, plays and short story collections that are informed by research and teaching experiences. She recently announced the development of a third book series she is editing: Teaching Gender (also with Sense Publishers). In an effort to make research more accessible to the public Dr. Leavy has appeared as a guest on national news programs in the United States (for example, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN) and is regularly quoted in international, national and local print news (such as The New York Times, USA Today and The Boston Globe). She regularly contributes articles to the Huffington Post and other online and print newspapers and magazines.

After receiving several prestigious awards and fellowships Dr. Leavy earned her PhD in Sociology at Boston College in 2002. Dr. Leavy was a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology at Stonehill College from 2002-2012 where she also served as Founding Director of the Gender Studies Program and the Chairperson of the Sociology & Criminology Department. Dr. Leavy previously taught at Boston College, Northeastern University and Curry College. She now writes full-time and offers a variety of book talks, invited lectures and workshops. In recognition of her extraordinary contributions to the discipline of sociology The New England Sociological Association named Leavy the 2010 “New England Sociologist of the Year.” Dr. Leavy has also been nominated for the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Please visit www.patricialeavy.com for more information.

Jasmina Lukić, is an Associate Professor, Head Department of Gender Studies (since 2009) and the CEU coordinator for Erasmus Mundus MA Program in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies GEMMA (since 2005). She has been a co-founder and the editor in chief of the journal for feminist theory Ženske studije (Beograd 1996-1999) and an associate editor of The European Journal of Women’s Studies (1999-2009). She is a member of the editorial board of Aspasia International Yearbook on Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender history (since 2006). Her research interests are in literary and cultural studies, and in South-Slavic literatures. She has published a number of articles and book chapters in English, Serbian and Croatian. Her publications include a collection of critical studies Drugo lice (The Other Face, Beograd 1984), and a monograph Metaproza: čitanje žanra (Metafiction: Reading the Genre, Beograd 2001). Together with Joanna Regulska and Darja Zavirsek she has edited a volume Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe (2006). She has also edited a Special Issue of European Journal of Women’s Studies on Women, Identity, and Identification: “Who are I” (2003) and a Special Issue of European Journal of Women’s Studies on Writing across Borders (with Paola Bono, 2009).

Katalin Orbán, PhD, writes on the ethics of representation and narrative, issues related to trauma and memory studies, and visual narrative. Her article "Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman's Comic Books about the Holocaust and 9/11" (2006) was published in Representations. Her book Ethical Diversions: The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman (Routledge, 2005) discusses narrative form, memory, and posthumanist ethics.

Prior to joining the Art Theory and Media Institute of Eötvös Loránd University as an Assitant Professor, Katalin Orbán taught in the interdisciplinary honors program of the National University of Singapore and in the Writing Program of Harvard University among others.

Antal Örkény is professor of sociology at the Social Sciences Faculty of the Eotvos Loránd University of Budapest.  Since 1996 Antal Orkeny is the chair of the ELTE-UNESCO Minority Studies Department which offers an MA program in ethnic and minority studies, from 2006 he is the director of the Institute for Social Relations including three departments (Minority Studies, Social Psychology, Cultural Anthropology), and from 2011 he is heading the Post Graduate (PhD) Program in social sciences at the ELTE.

His major research fields are cross-national surveys on popular perceptions of social Justice, national identity and national stereotypes, and inter-ethnic relations. Two books of him were published in English: one in 1992 with Gyorgy Csepeli, titled Ideology and Political Beliefs in Hungary. The Twilight of State Socialism. London and New York: Pinter Publishers, and the other in 2000 with Gyorgy Csepeli and Maria Szekelyi, titled Grappling with National Identity. How Nations See Each Others in Central Europe. Budapest, Akademiai Kiadó. He has also published ten monographs in Hungarian language including his two new releases in 2011: one of social integration of different migrant groups into the Hungarian society, and the other on social justice and generational equity in contemporary Hungary.

Claire Warwick is a Professor of Digital Humanities and Head of the Department of Information Studies at University College London; Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities; and Vice-Dean for Research for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Her research is in the area of digital humanities, and she is particularly interested in the way that digital resources are used in the humanities and cultural heritage; in the use of social media in these areas; and in reading behaviour in physical and digital spaces. She has led, or collaborated on several digital humanities research projects, for example the INKE project and the QRator project.

She supervises PhD students at UCLDH working on various topics in digital humanities and social media. She also serves on various advisory boards, for example Digital Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E), and is a member of the Comite Scientifique du Fondation Campus Condorcet . She was chair of the International Programme Committee for the Digital Humanities 2009 conference and a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College for Librarianship, Information and Museum Studies from 2009-2012.