Keynote speakers

Sarah Ogilvie

Photo credit: Robert Taylor

Uncovering unheard voices: the Oxford English Dictionary and beyond (Read the abstract)

Sarah Ogilvie teaches at the University of Oxford and specializes in language, dictionaries, and technology.

As a lexicographer she has been an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and was Chief Editor of Oxford Dictionaries in Australia. As a technologist she has worked in Silicon Valley at Lab 126, Amazon’s innovation lab, where she was part of the team that developed the Kindle in languages other than English. She originally studied computer science and mathematics before taking her doctorate in linguistics at the University of Oxford, and then taught at Cambridge and Stanford. She writes a regular column, “The Joy of Lex”, for Prospect magazine.

Her latest book is The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto and Windus).

Lawrence Venuti

Photo credit: Karen Van Dyck

Algorithms of interpretation: redefining translation in a machine age (Read the abstract)

Lawrence Venuti, professor emeritus of English at Temple University, Philadelphia, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan.

He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995; 2nd ed., 2008), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013), and Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019). He has also edited Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), The Translation Studies Reader (5th ed., 2026), and Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies (2017).

His translations include, most recently, Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold (2023) and The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories (2025).