Husse 2027

Professor of English Language and Linguistics at University Paul Valery - Montpellier 3

University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry
Institut Universitaire de France

Bio

Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valery in France and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the current chair of the French national association for the study of English (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur) counting 2,500 members. Specialized in stylistics and pragmatics, she is the co-editor of The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns (John Benjamins, 2015) with Laure Gardelle and The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter (John Benjamins, 2018) with Manuel Jobert. She edited Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury) in 2020 and co-edited with Virginie Iché The Rhetoric of Literary Communication. From Classical English Novels to Contemporary Digital Fiction with Routledge (2022). In 2024, she co-edited The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy (John Benjamins) with Tuija Virtanen and Style and Sense(s) (Palgrave) with Linda Pillière. Her 2016 monograph on the American political TV series (Language and Manipulation in House of Cards: A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective, Palgrave) received an award from the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE). Her latest monograph entitled The Stylistics of‘You’. Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. She is Assistant Editor of Language and Literature. International Journal of Stylistics (Sage). She is currently writing a Cambridge Element on Critical Politeness Theory and finishing a monograph on racism from a pragma-enactive approach.

Abstract

In this talk, I propose to explore the workings of implicit racism as represented by Black American and British writers, essayists and playwrights. Drawing on the analytical tools of stylistics and pragmatics, I will examine the ways in which Black writers have staged interracial interactions since the 1940s, investigating the stereotypical attunements, presuppositions and pragmatic assumptions through which Black individuals have been compelled to negotiate racial positioning. The pragmatic and stylistic analysis will be based on a diverse corpus of memoirs and fictional narratives, including works by Richard Wright, Claudia Rankine, Jesmyn Ward, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Percival Everett and debbie tucker green, among others. Their works deploy forceful stylistic configurations in their address to the reader, which the talk will also explore. In particular I will bring to the fore how authors, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, variously reach out to, and sometimes confront, a (White) audience in their attempts to convey the experiential dimensions of racism.

Rolls Royce Commonwealth Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Alexandria, VA

Abstract:

For decades, the wireless link between transmitter and receiver has been seen as a mere  bit pipe whose goal is to faithfully reconstruct the exact transmitted signal at the receiver, without paying attention to the meaning or effect of the source message. This classical design may excel in delivering high communication rates and low bit-level errors, but its limitations become apparent when faced with the challenge of transmitting massive data streams for connected intelligence, Internet of Senses, or holographic applications, where the message intent and effectiveness must be considered, and extremely stringent requirements for reliability and latency must be met, often simultaneously. In this regard, the concept of semantic communication, in which the meaning of the source messages are incorporated in the design of a communication link, has recently emerged as a promising solution. However, despite a recent surge of efforts in this area, remarkably, the research landscape is still limited to basic constructs in which even the very definition of "semantics" remains ambiguous. In this talk, we opine that major breakthroughs in semantic communications can only be made by equipping the communication nodes with the capability to exploit information semantics at a fundamental level (from the data structure and relationships) which enables them to build a knowledge base, reason on their data, and engage in a form of communication using a machine language, similar to human conversation, with the capability to deduce meaning from the data in a manner akin to human reasoning. Towards this goal, we introduce a holistic vision for semantic communications that is firmly grounded in rigorous artificial intelligence (AI) and causal reasoning foundations, with the potential to revolutionize the way information is modeled, transmitted, and processed in communication systems. We show how, by embracing semantic communication through our proposed vision, we can usher in a new era of knowledge-driven, reasoning wireless networks that are more sustainable and resilient than today's data-driven, knowledge-agnostic networks. We then present our recent key results in this area, with foundations in AI and game theory, that showcase how the use of semantic communications can reduce the volume of data circulating in a network while improving reliability, two critical requirements for emerging wireless services, such as connected intelligence and the metaverse. We then discuss future opportunities in this exciting area, and explain how these semantic foundations can be a component towards building future artificial general intelligence (AGI)-native wireless systems, in which semantic communication serves as the perceptual layer of a broader architecture spanning perception, world modeling, and action-planning for physical AI agents. Such a vision points toward a shift in the role of wireless networks and their operators, moving from delivering connectivity to providing the reasoning and intelligence that physical AI systems require to operate reliably in the real world. We conclude by pointing to how physical AI agents may be equipped to generalize beyond their training data, reasoning effectively about unseen and out-of-distribution real-world scenarios rather than merely reconstructing patterns they were trained on.

Biography:

 Walid Saad (S’07, M’10, SM’15, F’19) received his Ph.D degree from the University of Oslo, Norway in 2010. He is currently the Rolls Royce Commonwealth Professor in Digital Twin Technology, a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a founding faculty of the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech, where he leads the Network intelligEnce, Wireless, and Security (NEWS) laboratory. His research interests include wireless networks (5G/6G/beyond), machine learning, game theory, quantum communications/learning, security, UAVs, semantic communications, cyber-physical systems, and network science. Dr. Saad is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is also the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2013, the AFOSR summer faculty fellowship in 2014, and the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 2015. He was the (co-)author of twelve conference best paper awards at major conferences. He is the recipient of the 2015 and 2022 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society,  of the IEEE Communications Society Marconi Prize Award in 2023, of the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2023, and of the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2026. He was also a co-author of the papers that received the IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper award in 2019, 2021, and 2023. He received the 2025 Jacob A. Lutz III Eminent Scholar award from Virginia Tech. He has been annually listed in the Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher List since 2019. He was the inaugural Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in  Communications and Networking from 2022 - 2026.

Professor of Hispanic Studies at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Ohio

Biography

Dr. Damaris Puñales-Alpízar is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Case Western Reserve University, where she also has served as Chair of Modern Languages and Literatures, Director of International Studies, and Executive Sponsor of Alianza Latina. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and previously worked as a journalist in Cuba, Belize, and Mexico, founding Conexión, Belize’s first bilingual trans-border newspaper.

Her teaching and research focus on Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture. She is the author of the books Red Codes: Geopolitics of Translation during the Cold War. Cuba and the Eastern Bloc (2025); The Damn Circumstance. Scholarly Writings on Cuban Literature (2020) and Written in Cyrillic. The Soviet Ideal in the post-1990 Cuban Cultural Production (2012), and editor of Sieges to the Lettered Cayman: Literature and Power in the Cuban Revolution (2018) -with Emilio J. Gallardo Saborido and Jesús Gómez de Tejada-, and The Atlantic as Frontier: Cultural Mediations between Cuba and Spain (2014).

As a creative writer, she has published the poetry book No vine a hacerme la inocente (I won’t play innocent) and has her second poetry book in preparation. Her poems have been published online and in magazines in Cuba, Sweden and the United States.

Her scholarly articles have appeared in leading journals in the United States, Cuba, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Peru, France and Spain, such as The Latin Americanist, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Caribbean Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, La Habana Elegante, Kamchatka, Vallejo&Co, Revista de Letras, Artelogie, Cuadernos del Sur–Letras, Teatro, Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, etc.

Dr. Puñales-Alpízar has received multiple honors, including the Flora Stone Mather Woman of Achievement Award (2021) and an Expanding Horizons Initiative Grant. She has won two Fulbright Program Scholar Awards, in Russia (2018) and in Hungary (2026).

She founded and is the president of the nonprofit Trasatlántica. Poetry and Scholarship, an organization devoted to promoting Hispanic poetry creation in the United States while building bridges with poetry and culture in Latin America and Spain.

Currently, she is working on the edited volume, Translating Socialism.

Regarding my participation in the plenaria:

Abstract:

My presentation examines the role of literary translation in Soviet-era Cuba (1960–1990) as both a mechanism of cultural diplomacy and a means of producing affective affiliation within the socialist world. Rather than understanding translation as a neutral linguistic transfer, it argues that the circulation of literature from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe contributed to the construction of a transnational cultural imaginary in which Cuban readers were invited to recognize themselves as members of a shared socialist community. Drawing on publishing catalogs, bibliographical sources, and a sample of fifty-three weeks of the section “¿Qué se lee?” published in Bohemia between 1980 and 1981, my presentation also complicates the presumed dominance of Eastern European literature in Cuba: although socialist publishing institutions translated and distributed such works extensively, reader demand for them was considerably less predominant than their institutional visibility might suggest. To account for this apparent discrepancy, I shift attention from circulation alone to the affective and ideological work performed by translation. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of “linguistic hospitality,” it analyzes translators, editors, introductions, prologues, and book covers as mediating agents that framed foreign texts through narratives of solidarity, sacrifice, antifascism, revolutionary struggle, and socialist construction. These paratextual practices sought to transform cultural difference into familiarity and to produce what the article terms a “heroic cultural community of socialism.” Translation thus emerges as a central instrument of socialist modernity: one that shaped cultural memory and political belonging while positioning Cuba as a linguistic and cultural intermediary between Eastern Europe, the Spanish-speaking world, and the Global South.

Professor in Literature, University of Szeged, Hungary

Abstract

How do we reconceptualise human subjectivity when we imagine the self through intimate encounters with other non-human animals? The lecture starts out from this philosophical dilemma, investigated by Derrida, Berger, Coetzee, and Haraway, among others, and traces a historical and transmedial genealogy of women’s human-animal life-writing through a heterogeneous corpus—including fictional autobiography, biopic, collective confessional manifesto, thanatological memoir, and humanimal body-art performance. These works not only problematise the limits of human language in verbalising selves and lives, but also engage with zoosemiotic insights into animals’ communicational potentials to outline a poethics of interspecies solidarity. Beginning with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877), an early moralising attempt to advocate animal rights, I move to Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), where canine focalisation reconfigures biography as an experimental tribute to literary foremother Elizabeth Barrett Browning through animal stream of consciousness. This line of inquiry extends to metamodernist continuations in Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz (2018) and Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), which lend voices to the marmoset of Bloomsbury and to the souls of animals, associated with iconic authors, who died amid the human conflicts of the past century. Besides necropolitical commentaries on shared vulnerability, the animal becomes an agent in the formation of autobiographical subjectivity in Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2015), where mourning for her father becomes entangled with her training of a goshawk. Taking „becoming-animal” beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor, interspecies identification is associated with minoritarian experience, the reclaiming of agency, and an ethical responsiveness. In the biopic Temple Grandin (2010), autism facilitates identification with animal perception and contributes to the reform of industrial livestock handling; in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020), responsiveness to kin-beyond-species aligns with a queer decolonising agenda that mobilises ecological frameworks to address social injustice; while contemporary women performance artists working with animals (Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramović, Eleanor Morgan), expose the carnal material stakes and institutional confines of interspecies encounters. Bringing into dialogue feminism, posthumanism, human-animal studies, and biosemiotics, while testing the viability of concepts such as Donna Haraway’s sympoietic becoming-with, Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeal entanglement, or Kelly Oliver’s ethics of responsiveness, I argue that these animal biographies relocate subjectivity from the anthropocentric notion of the autonomous individual to interspecies assemblages. They reimagine subjectivation as a distributed, relational, metamorphic process in which animals function not merely as represented others but as witnesses, interlocutors, agents, and co-constitutive participants in the making of more-than-human lifeworlds.

Biography

Anna Kérchy, PhD DrHabil Dsc is a Full Professor of English literature at the University of Szeged in Hungary, where she is the head of the Doctoral Program in Literatures and Cultures in English, leader of the Gender Studies Research Group, and founding director of Children’s and Young Adult Literatures and Culture Research Centre. Her research areas focus on Victorian and postmodern fantastic imagination, body/gender studies, corporeal narratology, human-animal studies, posthumanism, transmedia storytelling, nonsense, women’s writing/ art, and children’s/YA literature. She authored the monographs Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter (Edwin Mellen, 2008), Alice in Transmedia Wonderland (McFarland, 2016) that won the HUSSE book award, Essays in Feminist Aesthetics and Narratology (JatePress, 2019) The Poetics and Politics of Victorian Nonsense (in Hungarian, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Press, 2024), and co-edited fifteen essay collections. She serves as vice president of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English, is editor-in-chief of TNT Ef, Interdisciplinary E-Journal of Gender Studies, and co-editor of ANIMALIA E-book series. She sits on the advisory board of Colorado University Press’s Wonder Tales: Critical and Creative Approaches series, Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature and Malmö UP’s Children’s Literature, Culture and Media Series. Her current work focuses on hydropoetics, humanimal biofiction, Victorian heterotopias, and the ethics of children’s literature.