Dr Zoltán Kövecses                                   

Dr Zoltán Kövecses is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.

His main research interests include the theory of metaphor and metonymy, the conceptualization of emotions, the relationship between cognition and culture, and the issue of cultural variation in metaphor.  

He has taught widely at several American and European universities, including the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Rutgers University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Hamburg University, Odense University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Granada, Heidelberg University, and the University of Paris Diderot.

He is an associate editor of Cognitive Linguistics and one of the four editors of Metaphor and Symbol. He also serves on the advisory board of several scholarly journals, including, the Review of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Semantics.

His most important books include Where Metaphors Come From (Oxford UP, 2015); Language, Mind, and Culture. A Practical Introduction (Oxford UP, 2006); Metaphor in Culture. Universality and Variation (Cambridge UP, 2005); Metaphor. A Practical Introduction (Oxford UP, 2002/2010); Metaphor and Emotion (Cambridge UP, 2000); American English. An Introduction (Broadview Press, 2000); Emotion Concepts, Springer-Verlag, 1990); and The Language of Love (Bucknell UP, 1988).

He received the prestigious Charles Simonyi Award in 2008 and, in the same year, he was a distinguished fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, United Kingdom.

Dr. Ștefan Oltean is Professor of Anglo-American Linguistics, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. His research has focused on the structure of the sentence, on free indirect discourse, on proper names, fictional names, and multilingualism, for the analysis of which he has used generative, semantic and pragmatic frameworks. Profesor Oltean was chairperson of the English Department of Babes-Bolyai University (2012-2015), dean of the Faculty of Letters (2000-2004) and vice-rector of Babes-Bolyai University (2004-2006).

He was Visiting Professor at Kent State University Kent, Ohio (1984-1986), and Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1990-1992). He is currently president of the Commission for Humanities and Theology, the Romanian Quality Insurance Agency for Higher Education (ARACIS). He was member of the board of the European Language Council (ELC/CEL) (2006-2014).

He was editor of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia (2000-2004), and is member of the advisory board of Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Bucharest, and British and American Studies, University of Timișoara. He published books and articles in stylistics, discourse analysis, narrative poetics and semantics. They include Topics in the Semantics of Names and Discourse, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărții de Știință, 2015; Introducere în semantica referenţială [“An Introduction to Referential Semantics”], Cluj-Napoca, Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2006; Lumile posibile în structurile limbajului [“Possible Worlds for Linguistics”], Cluj-Napoca, Echinox, 2003 (books); and “A Survey of the Pragmatic and Referential Functions of Free Indirect Discourse”, Poetics Today, Vol. 14: 4, Duke University Press, 1993, 691-714; “Free Indirect Discourse: Some Referential Aspects”, Journal of Literary Semantics. An international review XXIV/1, Julius Groos Verlag, 1995, 21-41; “On the bivocal nature of free indirect discourse”, Journal of Literary Semantics. An international review, 32, Mouton de Gruyter, 2003, 167-176; “On the semantics of fictional names”, Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, LVIII, 4, 371–382, Romanian Academy Press, 2013 (articles).

Professor Giacomo Ferrari

Professor Giacomo Ferrari is a graduate in Historical Linguistics (Sanskrit) from the University of Pisa, Italy, he carried out research in the field of Computational Linguistics starting with 1968 up to 1984, affiliated with the University of Pisa first and later as senior researcher at the National Council of Research.

In 1984 became Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Pisa and in 1993 moved to the University of East Piedmont. In 2000 he became full professor of General and Computational Linguistics. From 2004 and 2010 he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He has also held annual courses in the Faculty of Computer Science of the university of Milan (1985-1986) and General Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts of Parma (1990-1992), and higher education courses in the Universities of the State of Sao Paulo (Brazil), Krakow and Warsaw (Poland), and Iasi and Alba Iulia (Romania).

His main fields of research are Computational Morphology and Syntax, Man-machine interaction and Dialogue studies, man-vehicle interaction, intelligent tutoring systems, computational corpora and dictionary building, and the funding sources have been the EU, the National Council of Researches and the Ministry of Education. He participated into an exploratory national project for the building of an expert-system on the archaeological heritage of Rome.

He was the programme chair of the first conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1983) and was a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Computational Linguistics (MIT Press).

In 1986 edited a special issue of the IEEE-Proceedings (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering) on Natural Language Processing.

He is one of the founders of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence and organised in 2006 The XL Conference of the Italian Linguistics Society.

Professor Azamat Akbarov

Professor Azamat Akbarov is Vice Rector for International Relations, International Burch University, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a Professor in Applied Linguistics of the English Department at International Burch University in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

He has cross-linguistic expertise, having worked in French, Turkish, Russian, Korean, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Uzbek as well as English, and understands the practical issues involved in teaching and learning different languages and transferring research ideas from one language to another.

He is the Chairman of the International Conference of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (FLTAL), President of the Association for Applied Linguistics in Bosnia and Herzegovina (AALBiH), Editor-in-Chief of J-FLTAL journal and Co-chair of the AILA 2020 World Congress. 

Professor Maria-Ana Tupan

Professor Maria-Ana Tupan is currently appointed to the Doctoral School of Alba Iulia University, Romania. From 1991 to 2014 Tupan taught courses in the history of British literature and in applied literary theory at Bucharest University. Senior Fulbright Grantee in 1994-5. Member of The Romanian Writers Union, and of Die Gesellschaft für Fantastik Forschung. Author of 15 books, book chapters and articles published in Romania, Europe, and India. Papers read at conferences in Athens, University Park (Penn State University), Madrid, Manchester, Salzburg, Vienna, Dresden, Graz, Rome, Cologne. Awards from the Romanian Writers’ Union and literary reviews. Publications in the fields of literary history and theory, comparative literature, genre theory, discourse analysis, and cultural studies.

Relevant titles include: Relativism/ Relativity: The History of a Modern Concept. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, June 2013, Genre and Postmodernism (Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2008); Modernismul si psihologia. Încercare de epistemologie literara. Modernism and Psychology. An Inquiry into the Epistemology of Literary Modernism (Bucuresti: Editura Academiei Române, 2009)