We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers will be Prof Diana Taylor, Prof Willard McCarty, Dr Thea Pitman & Dr Claire Taylor.
- Professor Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of the award winning Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997), and most recently The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), which won the Outstanding Book award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association. She is the co-editor of the PMLA’s special issue on WAR, published October 2009. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005-6. She is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, the Henry Luce Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
- Professor Willard McCarty is Professor of Humanities Computing at King’s College London, Professor (fractional), Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney and from 2005-2008 Visiting Professor, University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He took his PhD in Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Toronto in 1984. Currently he is Editor of the British journal, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2008-), founding Editor of the online seminar Humanist (1987-) and founding Convenor of the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship (2006-). In 2006 he received the Richard W. Lyman Award from the U.S. National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation for contributions to humanistic scholarship and teaching through the innovative use of information technology, and in 2005 the Award for Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities, Consortium for Computers in the Humanities / Consortium pour ordinateurs en sciences humaines, Canada. He is editor of a forthcoming volume, Text and Genre in Reconstruction and of the first comprehensive theoretical treatment of his field, Humanities Computing. He has lectured widely in Europe, North America and Australia. More information is available from staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/.
- Doctor Claire Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is actively involved in research on Latin American cyberculture, having been invited to give six papers on this topic to date, having organised three panels at major conferences, and having several publications on this topic. She was awarded an RDF-funded PhD studentship in this area, and is currently supervising the student in question who is conducting research on digital culture in Brazil. She is also the second supervisor for an interdisciplinary PhD student working on transmedia fictions. Dr Taylor is also joint leader on a project on Latin American cyberculture, in conjunction with Dr Thea Pitman (University of Leeds). The project examines cultural products created for the Internet, and new discourses, practices and communities generated by such cultural products. It explores the way Latin American online practice provides for new formulations of cybercommunities, which are reconfigured across and beyond the confines of the nation state, and which propose new ways of negotiating locality. Outputs already achieved include a symposium in 2006, and an edited volume which was published in 2007. Further details of the project are available on the project website: http://www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/research/lacyberculture/index.htm. Dr Taylor is also a leader on a collaborative project with colleagues at the University of Georgia, Athens, entitled Latin American Cybercultural Studies: Exploring New Paradigms and Analytical Approaches, which will include a conference to be held in Liverpool in 2011.
- Doctor Thea Pitman is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Mexican Travel Writing (1998) and has published widely in the areas of Mexican writing, travel-writing and cyberculture. She recently co-edited with Andy Stafford a double special issue of Journal for Transatlantic Studies, dedicated to ‘New Transatlanticisms’ (2009/10) and The Discourses of Latin American Cyberculture (2009) with Dr Claire Taylor. Dr Pitman is a joint leader on a project on Latin American cyberculture, in conjunction with Dr Taylor (University of Liverpool). More information on the project can be found at: http://www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/research/lacyberculture/index.htm.
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