Speakers
Language and Identity Symposium
Speakers listed in alphabetical order
Jaak Aaviksoo is the Estonian Minister for Education and Research. As former Rector of the University of Tartu (1998-2006), he oversaw the process of joining the prestigious Coimbra Group of Universities in 2003. His academic career was in optical physics and he has been elected Professor of optics and spectroscopy at the University of Tartu. He has been a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences since 2004.
Saturday, October 22, 12:50-14:20 Language policy and use in European universities
Jürgen Barkhoff is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. His current research spans topics as diverse as anthropolgy and literature around 1800, the cultural history of networks, networks of knowledge and influence in Europe, and contemporary literature of German-speaking Switzerland. He was also Chair of the Coimbra Group Task Force for Culture, Arts and Humanities from 2005-2011.
Saturday, October 22, 12:50-14:20 Language policy and use in European universities
Bettina Bock is a staff member of DWEE (Saxonian Academy of Sciences at Leipzig, Germany; her workplace is the Department of Indo-European Studies at Jena University). Her research interests include loanwords in the German language, especially with Latin or Greek backgrounds, the Indo-European vocabulary and historical phraseology.
Friday, October 21, 11:15-12:00 (co-authored with Rosemarie Lühr) "How European is the German vocabulary?" Abstract
Emili Boix-Fuster is Professor of Sociolinguistics, Department of Catalan Philology, at the University of Barcelona, Spain. His interests include sociolinguistics, language planning and applied linguistics. He is editor of the academic journal Treballs de Sociolinguistica Catalana and a steering committee member of the University of Barcelona's University Centre of Sociolinguistics and Communication (CUSC). He has just edited (with Miquel Strubell) Democratic policies and Language Revitalisation: the Case of Catalan (2011).
Friday, October 21, 10:15-11:00 "Language and identity in modern Catalonia: Integration, hybridization and segregation" Abstract
Martin Ehala is a Senior Researcher and Professor of Mother Tongue Education and Applied Linguistics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His research interests include language change, language contact, language and identity shift, ethnolinguistic vitality, interethnic processes, and intercultural communication.
Saturday, October 22, 10:50-11:35 "Russian-speakers in the Baltic states: Language use and identity" Abstract
Neasa Hegarty has been President of the former European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (EBLUL), a pioneering non-governmental organisation that was set up to promote linguistic diversity and languages. She is currently working as an independent culture / minority language specialist. Board member of Siamsa Tiíre - Ireland's National Folk Theatre and Arts Centre and IMRAM- Irish Languge Literature Festival.
Thursday, October 20, 13-13:45 "The European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages: A pioneer in the cause of linguistic diversity in the EU" Abstract 
Alexandra Jaffe is Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at California State University Long Beach. She conducts ethnographic research on Corsica, studying issues of identity, power and resistance related to minority language shift and language revitalization, and published Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica (1999). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004-2005. She is the editor of Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (2009) and currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
Saturday, October 22, 9:45-10:30 "Plurilingualism as practice and ideology on Corsica: Tourist and school contexts" Abstract
John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Head of Linguistics & English Language at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His research interests include language and identity, language and politics and the history of linguistics. He has published numerous books, including Language and Politics (2006) and Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious (2004), and co-edits the journal Language & Communication.
Friday, October 21 9:30-10:15 "Signs of belonging: Indexing and interpreting identity in language" Abstract
Tomasz Kamusella is affiliated with the University of St. An- drews, Scotland. He has previously worked at the Cracow Uni- versity of Economics and in Trinity College Dublin. His re- search focuses on Central European history, language politics, nationalism, ethnicity and European integration. He has pub- lished two monographs, The Politics of Language and Nationa- lism in Modern Central Europe (2009) & Silesia and Central European Nationalisms: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848-1918 (2007).
Thursday, October 20 13:45-14:30 "Scripts and politics in modern Central Europe" Abstract
Birute Klaas-Lang is Professor of Estonian as a Foreign Language at the University of Tartu. She has also held the position of Vice-Rector of Academic Affairs at the University of Tartu (2006-2010) and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. She has been the Head of the Estonian Language Council since 2005 and led the team writing the University of Tartu's Language Policy in 2009.
Saturday, October 22, 12:50-14:20 Language policy and use in European universities
Johanna Laakso is Professor of Finno-Ugric Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Alongside comparative-historical Finno-Ugric language studies (with a special focus on Finnic languages and questions of morphology and word fomation), her research interests include the problematics of minority and endangered languages, contact linguistics and gender linguistics.
Saturday, October 22, 9:00-9:45"Who needs Karelian, Kven or Austrian Hungarian - and why? On revising the study of European minority languages" Abstract
Rosemarie Lühr is Professor and Head of the Department of Indo-European Studies at the University of Jena, a member of the Saxonian Academy of Sciences at Leipzig, and also President of the Society of Indo-European Studies. Her primary fields of interest include Germanic philology, comparative linguistics, and relations between semantics and syntax.
Friday, October 21, 11:15-12:00 (co-authored with Bettina Bock) "How European is the German vocabulary?" Abstract
Konstanze McLeod is affiliated with the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research interests include minority language revitalisation and ethnocultural identity maintenance, as well as multiculturalism and identity politics more generally. She is the author of Minority Languages and Cultural Diversity in Europe: Gaelic and Sorbian Perspectives (Multilingual Matters, 2007).
Friday, October 21, 13:20-14:05 "Gaelic and Sorbian as multiple boundary markers: Implications of minority language activism in Scotland and Lusatia" Abstract 
Anneli Sarhimaa is Professor of the Northern European and Baltic languages and cultures at the University of Mainz, Germany. Her expertise lies in the fields of empirical and con- tact linguistics (with a focus on the languages of north- western Russia), areal linguistics and sociolinguistics (with a focus on the Circum-Baltic area), European, Nordic and Baltic language policies, discourse linguistics and critical discourse analysis (especially minority identities, their dis- cursive construction and linguistic manifestation), and literary linguistics.
Friday, October 21, 14:05-14:50 "What is said is one thing, what it tells about identity is another: On interplay of identities and grammatical choices" Abstract
Patrick Sériot is currently the Head of the Slavic Department at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests include the history of ideas, comparative and historical episte- mology of linguistics in Central and Eastern Europe. He has published Les langues ne sont pas des choses. Discours sur la langue et souffrance identitaire en Europe centrale et orientale (Languages are not things: Dis- course on language and identity suffering in Central and Eastern Europe, 2010)
Thursday, October 20, 15:35-16:20 "Language and nation: The pseudo-opposition between the Jacobine and Romantic models" Abstract
Anna Verschik is Professor of General Linguistics at Tallinn University, Estonia. Anna Verschik's research is mostly concerned with bilingualism, code switching, convergence and language contacts. She is the author of Emerging Bilingual Speech: From Monolingualism to Code-copying (2008).
Saturday, October 22, 11:35-12:20 "Estonian impact in Russian-language blogs: Contact-induced language change at work" Abstract
John Walsh is Lecturer in the Department of Irish at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research focuses on language planning and policy for Irish and other languages, language policy in Scotland and Canada, the Ghaeltacht, minority language media, and language and socio-economic development. He recently published Contests and Contexts: The Irish Language and Ireland's Socio-Economic Development (2011).
Thursday, October 20, 14:50-15:35 "Pushing an open door? Language policy at an Irish university" Abstract