Birgit Neumann is Professor of English Literature/ Anglophone Studies at the University of Duesseldorf and member of several international research networks; she had guest professorships at the Universities of Cornell/Ithaca and Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
Her research is dedicated to the study of the poetics and politics of Anglophone literatures, to world literatures and transcultural exchange, to postcolonial ecocriticism as well as to intermedial configurations in postcolonial fiction. She is author, co-author and editor of a range of books and articles that explore post/colonial modes of articulation in literature and film.
Her current research projects focus on the polycentric network of Anglophone world literatures and on postcolonial ekphrasis/ literary visuality. Together with Juergen Reulecke she is general editor of the series Forms of Remembering/Formen der Erinnerung (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, since 2004). Recent publications include co-edited volumes on Anglophone World Literatures (Special Issue Anglia, 2017) and on Literary Environments: Ecocritical Theories and Ethics in Anglophone Literatures (anglistik & englischunterricht, 2018) as well as a number of articles on verbal-visual configurations in Anglophone Literatures. She is currently writing a monograph on Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Anglophone Literatures – Contacts, Contests and Translations.
Rachel Dikul Baker is a Yolŋu woman from Galiwin’ku. She is a registered and very experienced Interpreter and she is also founder of Australian Woven Connections.
Dikul provides cultural and linguistic support to many researchers and projects. She is a passionate mentor of young people and delivers suicide prevention and awareness programs across North East Arnhem Land. Dikul is also an accomplished Pandanus weaver and regularly teaches these Yolŋu skills to small groups.
She is also a student at the University of Southern Queensland studying Bachelor of Arts with a Major in Anthropology. She is passionate about sharing perspectives through Yolngu kinship structure and Yolngu cosmology. She also teaches cultural competency training through Aboriginal resource development ARDS. Her language is Djambarrbuyngu and she is learning her mother’s language which is Warramiri. She is accomplished at weaving using pandanus fibers and natural native bush dyes. Rachel is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.
Dr. Ji works on the development of advanced analytical instruments for translation studies, with a focus on developing research instruments for effective environmental and health translation and communication.
She established the Sydney Knowledge and Language Translation Lab which hosts a dozen research students working on environmental, health, literary translations. Dr Ji has published over 70 research papers/book chapters and is the author/editor of two dozen books (with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Springer, John Benjamins, Waseda University Press, University of Montréal Press, Canada), the editor of two special journal issues published by the MIT Press (Leonardo), USA and University of Montreal Press in Canada (Meta: Journal des traducteurs). Dr Ji is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices (2020), New York: Oxford University Press (with Sara Laviosa, Italy) (2020); the editor of Advances in Empirical Translation Studies: Developing Translation Resources and Technologies, Cambridge University Press (with Michael Oakes, Wolverhampton) (2019). Her books are reviewed in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics; Journal of Specialised Translation; International Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press); The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press); Australian Journal of Linguistics; Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Technology; Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction; Target: International Journal of Translation Studies; Languages in Contrast; Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science; Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford University Press). The 2012 book Quantitative Methods in Corpus Translation Studies (John Benjamins) has been reviewed in numerous academic journals and yearbooks of applied linguistics with leading publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press. Dr Ji is the founding series editor of the Cambridge Studies in Language Practices and Social Development, Cambridge University Press; founding editorial board member of the book series of Cambridge Elements of Translation and Interpreting, Cambridge University Press; and the founding editor of Routledge Studies of Empirical Translation and Multilingual Communication, New York/Oxon: Routledge. Her research has been supported by the British Academy, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences, Australian Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, Toshiba International Foundation, Worldwide University Networks Research Development Fund, and a number of universities in Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil. Dr. Ji is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.
Katherine Russo is an Italo-Australian scholar who has lived her entire life in between Italy and Australia. She received her PhD at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) with a thesis that investigated the use of Aboriginal English varieties in Indigenous Australian Literature, but also Indigenous/Non-Indigenous editorial and artistic collaborations.
Her research in Australian Studies ranges across the fields of Language Variation and Change, Audio-visual and Translation Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, World Englishes and Learning, Media Discourse, Ecocritical, Post-colonial, Whiteness and Gender Studies. She is Associate Professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and since her first appointment as a lecturer in 2007, she has worked towards creating strong ties with Australian Universities and cultural institutions, hosting several events in the field of Australian Studies with renowned scholars such as Bill Ashcroft, Anne Brewster, Brigitta Olubas, Behrouz Boochani and many others.
She is the author of Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (2010), which won the ESSE Book Award in 2012. The book investigated the appropriation of the English language taking place in the Australian literary contact zone between an official ‘white’ Australia – the apparent owners of both the land and the English language – and Australian Indigenous peoples. Documenting language variation and rescuing the debate from seemingly peripheral locations – the ‘empty’ Great Sandy Desert, or the abject urban margin – it insisted on the complex, ultimately open-ended and multilateral ownership of the English language by all who inhabit its intersubjective space, rendering the inherited authority of who ‘owns’ meaning problematical and ethically suspect. Her second monograph, Global English, Transnational Flows: Australia and New Zealand in Translation, addressed the central, yet unresolved, theoretical debate concerning the translation of post-colonial English language varieties. Her recent research centers on Climate Change and Climate-induced Migration Discourse, Populist Discourse, and Social-media Activism with many case-studies from the Australian context. Her most recent monograph, The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: the Case of Climate Change and Migration, provides an analysis of the evaluation of climate change and climate-induced migration risks in institutional and newspaper discourse. Katherine is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.
