Keynote speakers

David Bellos

Photo copyright: David Bellos

Translation rights: from past riches to present poverty (Read the abstract)

David Bellos was born in the UK and educated at Oxford. He taught French language and literature at Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester before moving to Princeton, where he is now Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative Literature. He focused initially on nineteenth-century French fiction before an encounter with Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi turned him into a translator. At Princeton he was the founding director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, which gave rise in its turn to Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (2011). His most recent books are The Novel of the Century. The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables (2017) and Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, with Alexandre Montagu (2024).

Julia Molinari

Photo credit: Julia Molinari

On re-imagining academic writing as an act of love (Read the abstract)

Julia Molinari is a Lecturer in Professional Academic Communication in English at the Open University (OU) in the UK, an Academic Consultant and an Academic Mentor. At the OU, she leads the Graduate School’s Academic Literacies programme. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a PhD on Academic Writing (University of Nottingham). Most recently, Julia has authored What Makes Writing Academic: Re-thinking Theory for Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022), which argues for diversifying and re-imagining academic texts and practices. Currently, her scholarship is on the ethical and epistemic impact that generative artificial intelligence may and will have on writing and knowledge creation. Julia is bilingual in English and Italian and fluent in French.

Professional social media: Open University and ResearchGate
Personal social media: Mastodon and Bluesky