IAFOR > The IAFOR International Conference on the City (CITY) > CITY2018 > Speakers

Speakers

The IAFOR International Conference on the City 2018 (CITY2018) is a multidisciplinary conference held concurrently with The IAFOR International Conference on Global Studies 2018 (GLOBAL2018). Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. Registration for either conference will allow participants to attend sessions in both.

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

  • Dr Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz
    Dr Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz
    University of Delaware, USA
  • Phil Ball
    Phil Ball
    Author and Journalist
  • Gloria Montero
    Gloria Montero
    Novelist, Playwright & Poet
  • Dr Sue Ballyn
    Dr Sue Ballyn
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Michael Strubell
    Michael Strubell
  • Associate Professor Liz Byrski
    Associate Professor Liz Byrski
    Curtin University, Australia
  • Dr Montserrat Camps-Gaset
    Dr Montserrat Camps-Gaset
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Professor Donald E. Hall
    Professor Donald E. Hall
    University of Rochester, USA
  • Dr Bill Phillips
    Dr Bill Phillips
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
    Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
    University of Barcelona, Spain

Additional speakers will be announced here shortly.

Previous Speakers

View details of speakers at past CITY conferences via the links below.

CITY2017 CITY2016
Dr Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz
University of Delaware, USA

Biography

Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz is Director of the Center for Global and Area Studies at the University of Delaware and Associate Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. At the University of Delaware, she has also served as Director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program and acting chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

She earned her PhD in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her professional interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and culture, with a specialization in the short story and crime fiction. She teaches courses on Latin American literature and culture as well as courses in Portuguese language.

Her books include a monograph on the short stories of Argentine writer, Julio Cortázar, entitled Mothers, Lovers and Others: The Short Stories of Julio Cortázar (State University of New York Press); an edited volume of poetry, photography, and essays addressing the 2001 crisis in Argentina, Crisis in Buenos Aires: Women Bearing Witness (Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs); and Argentina Noir: New Millennium Crime Novels in Buenos Aires (State University of New York Press, forthcoming). Professor Schmidt-Cruz’s articles have appeared in Hispanic Review, Latin American Literary Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Letras Peninsulares, Chasqui, College Literatures, and MACLAS Latin American Essays, among other periodicals, and she has presented her research at conferences in Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, France, Canada, and the U.S.

Keynote Presentation (2018) | Writing the City: Buenos Aires in New Millennium Crime Fiction
Phil Ball
Author and Journalist

Biography

Phil Ball is an author and journalist, based in San Sebastián. His book about Spanish politics and football, Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football was recently voted into the 50 Greatest Sports Books of All Time by 442 Magazine and was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in England. He wrote the first English-language history of Real Madrid ('White Storm') for the club’s centenary, and his weekly column on Spanish football culture, written for ESPN, ran uninterruptedly from 2001 to 2014.

He also works as an educational consultant for the Federation of Basque Schools and the University of the Basque Country (UPV). He is the co-author of the recent book about Content and Language Integrated Learning, Putting CLIL into Practice (Oxford University Press 2015), and his textbook series for the Basque competence-based curriculum was nominated for the ELTONS Innovation Award in London, in 2016. His comedy about education, 'The Hapless Teacher’s Handbook' (Ebury Press 2007) documents the trials and tribulations of being a young teacher in the English state system, and he is currently writing a work of fiction for children with a major UK publisher.

Keynote Presentation (2018) | Football, Politics and the City
Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | How can writers respond when the future looks fearful?
Gloria Montero
Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography

Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.

Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.

She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".

With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.

Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).

Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).

She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.

Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.

Photo by Pilar Aymerich.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | How can writers respond when the future looks fearful?

Previous Presentations

Featured Presentation (2017) | My Barcelona – The City as Answer to a Personal Question
The 14th Doireann McDermott Lecture (2016) | Filling in the Lonely, Empty Places
Dr Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25th 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times - Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Michael Strubell

Biography

Michael Strubell was born in 1949 in Oxford (UK). His father was English and his mother was and still is Catalan. They met during her family´s exile in England following the Spanish Civil War.

He has a degree in Psychology and Physiology (PPP) from Oxford University, an M.Sc. in Psychology of Education from the Institute of Education, London University, and a degree in Psychology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he also received a Diploma in Advanced Studies.

His main fields of research have been language policy and planning and related topics, especially in the field of European minority languages.

He taught at international schools for eight years, before moving to Barcelona to work for the restored Catalan government (1980 to 1999), where he held several posts in the language planning agency, devoted to the promotion and recovery of Catalan. He is a member (and former secretary) of the Consell Social de la Llengua Catalana.

From 1999 to his retirement in 2014 he lectured at the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) in Barcelona in language planning and sociolinguistics. He was deputy director of the Estudis d'Humanitats i Filologia, and from 2001 to 2004 he was the director of the Humanities degree programme. He was a co-author of the White Paper on the Humanities degree (2005) written for ANECA, Spain’s Universities quality agency. He was executive Secretary and later Director of the Linguamón-UOC Chair in Multilingualism (2009-2014).

He is author (or co-author) of dozens of academic papers, and of eight books, as well as several Reports for European institutions. He has sat on the editorial boards of four academic journals in the fields of language policy and sociolinguistics.

He has been a consultant for the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, for language-policy-related missions to Kazakhstan, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, the Russian Federation and other countries. He helped draft several sets of “Recommendations” on the rights of National Minorities, for the OSCE, and coordinated half a dozen European research projects.

Outside the academic world he is a board member of several private foundations in the fields of language, culture and the handicapped.

Without ever being a member of a political party, he has been actively involved in the Catalan independence movement. He chaired Catalunya 2003, a political association calling for greater self-government (2002 - 2005). Since 2007 he has been a member of anotherplatform, Sobirania i Progrés, promoting the democratic path towards the freedom of the Catalan people. He was one of the founders, in 2009, of the Assemblea Nacional Catalana, a grassroots organisation working for Catalonia's independence. It grew rapidly to over 30,000 members and, since 2012, has organised historic rallies and marches, particularly on Catalonia’s National Day (September 11) each year.

He is married, has two sons and a daughter, and his main hobbies are mushroom hunting, listening to classical music and hill-walking. He lives with his wife between Barcelona and Palamós (on the Costa Brava).

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | The way and wherefore of Spain’s current political crisis: Catalonia… again
Associate Professor Liz Byrski
Curtin University, Australia

Biography

Liz Byrski is a novelist, non-fiction writer, former journalist and broadcaster, with more than fifty years experience in the British and Australian media. She is an Associate Professor in the in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, at Curtin University in Western Australia, where she is also the Senior Fellow of the China Australia Writing Centre. Her PhD thesis: Visible Signs of Ageing examines representations of ageing women in fiction.

Liz is the author of ten best selling novels including Gang of Four, Family Secrets, and The Woman Next Door, more than a dozen non-fiction books including Remember Me, Getting On: Some Thoughts and Women and Ageing, and most recently In Love and War: Nursing Heroes. Her books have been published in the UK, France and Germany, and her articles and essays have been published in international newspapers, magazines and journals.

During the 1990s Liz was a Senior Policy Advisor to a Minister in the Western Australian Government. She is a former President of the WA Women’s Advisory Council to the Premier, and the Children’s Advisory Council.

Keynote Presentation I (2018) | The Introvert and the City
Keynote Presentation II (2018) | Visible Signs of Ageing: Representational flattery, ageing women and agency in women’s fiction
Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | How can writers respond when the future looks fearful?
Dr Montserrat Camps-Gaset
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Montserrat Camps-Gaset (Barcelona 1958) graduated in Classical Philology at the University of Barcelona in 1980. Her MA thesis on Maleficent Women in Archaic and Classical Greece won the Faculty prize. In 1985, she read her PhD thesis on Ancient Greek Festivals. In 1982, she also graduated in Theology in Barcelona. In 1989, she became Senior Lecturer at the Barcelona University. In 1992 and 1993, she went to the University of Leipzig thanks to a special development program of the DAAD for East Germany universities.

Apart from Catalan and Spanish, her native tongues, she speaks English, French and German fluently, has a good knowledge of Italian and Modern Greek and a basic level of Russian.
Her main interests are Mythology, First Christianism, Early Byzantine authors, and Classical Tradition. Her interests include folklore, women studies and national identity.

She has translated many works from Greek, German and Modern Greek into Catalan. She is currently working on the Catalan edition of Plato’s Laws in four volumes, and on a Catalan version of the Corpus Hermeticum. She has also translated books for children and youngsters from English and German into Catalan and Spanish. In 2013, she taught a Seminar on Literary Translation at the University of Leipzig.

She has published a book in French on Ancient Greek Festivals, and papers on Ancient Greek Religion, Women Studies, Mythology and EarlyChristianism, as well as Classical Tradition in modern writers. In 1998, she published a book of poetry.

At Barcelona University, she has been Head of the Greek Department (2001-2004) and Dean of the Philological Faculty (2004-2008), and has participated on the University Board for many years.
She is a member of several societies for Classical Studies and for Literature, such as the Catalan Pen Club.

Since 2008, she is a member of the CEAT’s Executive Committee. Thinking that academic activity must also include an engagement in communicating with a broader audience, she has undertaken the honour of codirecting the Centre as a new academic challenge for developing its capacity of producing and sharing knowledge.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | The way and wherefore of Spain’s current political crisis: Catalonia… again
Professor Donald E. Hall
University of Rochester, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA. Prior to moving to Rochester, he was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Dean Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of IAFOR. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times: Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Dr Bill Phillips
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Bill Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in English literature and culture at the University of Barcelona and head of the English and German Studies Department. He lectures on British poetry, crime fiction and other contemporary fiction. He has published widely on poetry, focusing particularly on the Romantic period, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postcolonial studies, gender studies and popular fiction, including detective fiction, science fiction and zombies.

He is head of POCRIF (Postcolonial Crime Fiction: a global window into social realities), a research project on postcolonial crime fiction financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competividad. The project’s team are members of the Australian Studies Centre, based at the University of Barcelona, and the group’s research forms part of the wider academic and investigative work carried out by the Centre.

Keynote Presentation (2018) | Catalonia’s Referendum on Independence from Spain

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2016) | Crime Fiction - A Global Phenomenon
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times - Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Cornelis Martin Renes graduated from the University of Barcelona with a BA in 2001, an MA in 2006 and PhD in 2010. He joined the English and German Philology staff in 2001. His main teaching areas have been English poetry from the Renaissance to contemporary times, and postcolonial studies with a special emphasis on the Asia-Pacific area and Australia in particular. He wrote his thesis on indigenous Australian literature and identity formation. He co-directs the Australian Studies Centre at the university, which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Centre in 2000. Since the 2000s his main area of research has been indigenous Australian literature, and more recently he has become a member of a research project, POCRIF, which looks at postcolonial crime fiction and is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. He currently holds the positions of Adjunct Lecturer, Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, and Member of the EASA (European Association for Studies of Australia) Board. He maintains steady contact with Australian academia through visiting fellowships.

Featured Presentation (2018) | ¡A España no hay presos políticos! / In Spain there are no political prisoners!

Previous Presentations

Featured Presentation (2017)
Featured Panel Presentation (2016) | Postcolonial Crime Fiction - A Global Phenomenon