Notes on the Authors and Contributors

The collaborative research programme Creative Multilingualism (2016 to 2020) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the context of its ambitious Open World Research Initiative. Its seven research strands involved a large number of researchers from many disciplines, whose profiles and publications are available here: https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/. This volume reflects our collaborative research and it has also benefited from the expertise of contributors beyond the research team.

Jonathan Black

Contributor

Jonathan joined Oxford University as Director of the Careers Service in 2008 after a career that included blue-chip management consultancy, international academic publishing and co-founding a medical publishing start-up. He conducts coaching sessions, workshops and innovative programmes that provide hands-on career experience, and runs research programmes on what is required to secure a graduate-level job. In 2017 he published How to Find the Career You’ve Always Wanted and he writes the fortnightly ‘Dear Jonathan’ careers column for the Financial Times.

Noah Birksted-Breen

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 4: Creative Economy

Noah is a theatre-maker and scholar, specializing in new writing in the UK and Russia. He founded Sputnik Theatre Company — the only British company dedicated solely to bringing new Russian plays to UK stages. For Sputnik, he has directed and translated new Russian plays for Soho Theatre, BBC Radio 3’s Drama of the Week, Southwark Playhouse and Theatre Royal Plymouth (http://sputniktheatre.co.uk). He completed his PhD at Queen Mary University of London in 2017 on ‘Alternative Voices in an Acquiescent Society: Translating Russian New Drama for UK stages (2000–2014)’.

Marianna Bolognesi

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 1: Metaphor

Marianna is Senior Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the University of Bologna, Italy. Following two years as European Union Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at the Metaphor Lab, University of Amsterdam, she joined Creative Multilingualism from 2017 to 2019, working on the interplay between metaphor, linguistic diversity and human creativity. Her current research focuses on the relationship between language and thought, and on the semantic representation of word meaning in the mind and its expression in pictorial and verbal modes of communication.

Philip Ross Bullock

Senior Researcher, Strand 4: Creative Economy

Philip is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College, Oxford. He has published widely on various aspects of Russian culture from the eighteenth century to the present and has a particular interest in the reception of Russian culture abroad. His most recent book is Pyotr Tchaikovsky (2016).

Chiara Cappellaro

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 3: Intelligibility

Chiara is a researcher in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. Her interests and expertise lie in morphology, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and Italian and comparative Romance linguistics. Contributing to Creative Multilingualism has allowed her to broaden her interests to areas such as receptive multilingualism and intelligibility across cognate varieties.

Kate Clanchy

Contributor

Kate is a teacher and writer. In 2018, she published England: Poems from a School, a collection of her migrant students’ poems, and was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature. Her most recent book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (2019), was described by Sir Philip Pullman as the ‘best book about writing and teaching and children I have ever read’. 

Julie Curtis

Senior Researcher, Strand 4: Creative Economy

Julie is Professor of Russian Literature and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her recent books are Mikhail Bulgakov (2017) and A Reader’s Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’ (2019); and she has edited a volume of scholarly essays and interviews with theatre-makers entitled New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (2020).

Rajinder Dudrah

Co-Investigator and Lead, Strand 4: Creative Economy

Rajinder is Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries at Birmingham City University. He has taught, researched and published widely across film, media and cultural studies, and is the founding Co-Editor of the scholarly journal South Asian Popular Culture. Rajinder is also Co-Investigator for the AHRC-funded ‘Diaspora Screen Media Network’, and two of his recent books include: The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema (co-edited with Ajay Gehlawat, 2019) and Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema (2012).

John Fanshawe

Partner, Strand 2: Naming

John is a Senior Strategy Adviser at BirdLife International. Before taking up that role in 2005, he was Head of Policy and Advocacy at BirdLife in 1998–2003, and Head of Development Programmes in 1993–1995. As a Senior Strategy Advisor, he is coordinating a programme on birds, culture and conservation, including a series of collaborations with authors, artists and musicians. See also http://egi.zoo.ox.ac.uk/members/dr-john-fanshawe/

Linda Fisher

Co-Investigator, Strand 7: Language Learning

Linda is Reader in Languages Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She teaches and researches in multilingualism, multilingual identity, language teacher education and creativity in language learning. A key research interest is how people’s beliefs about their capacity for language learning influence their motivation and progression, and the role of metaphor in this process.

Andrew Gosler

Co-Investigator and Lead, Strand 2: Naming

Andrew is based at the University of Oxford, where he holds a position between the Department of Zoology and School of Anthropology as Associate Professor in Applied Ethnobiology and Conservation. He was Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded project to develop the Ethno-ornithology World Atlas in 2013. An experienced teacher of field ornithology, his recent research focuses on the growing disconnection of people from nature and their declining knowledge of natural history. See also http://egi.zoo.ox.ac.uk/members/dr-andrew-gosler/

Suzanne Graham

Co-Investigator and Lead, Strand 7: Language Learning

Suzanne is Professor of Language and Education at the Institute of Education, University of Reading. She teaches and researches creativity in language learning, second language listening and reading comprehension, and motivation for and beliefs about language learning. Her recent research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has explored the role of teacher-related factors in how learners’ motivation for, and attainment in, language learning develops as they move from primary to secondary school. See http://www.reading.ac.uk/education/about/staff/s-j-graham.aspx

Jane Hiddleston

Co-Investigator, Strand 5: World Literatures

Jane is Professor of Literatures in French at the University of Oxford, and Official Fellow in French at Exeter College, Oxford. She has published widely on francophone literature and postcolonial theory, including most recently Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (2014), and Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition (2017). She is currently working with Wen-chin Ouyang on three edited volumes on world literature and multilingualism.

Julia Hofweber

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 7: Language Learning

Julia is a postdoctoral researcher at University College London, formerly at the University of Reading. Her research interests are wide, but she is primarily interested in the cognitive processes involved in language acquisition and bilingualism. In her PhD, she investigated the relationship between code-switching and mental flexibility in bilinguals. In her research for Creative Multilingualism, she explored educational practices that have the potential to enhance linguistic creativity in the second language.

Katrin Kohl

Principal Investigator, and Lead for Strand 1: Metaphor

Katrin is Professor of German at the University of Oxford. Her research interests in German literature focus on poetry and poetics, including the work of F. G. Klopstock, R. M. Rilke and the holocaust survivor H. G. Adler. Further fields of research are rhetoric and the theory and practice of metaphor, and she is currently writing a monograph on ‘The Creative Power of Metaphor’. Leading Creative Multilingualism has immeasurably broadened her linguistic and disciplinary perspectives.

Heike Krüsemann

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 7: Language Learning

Heike is a researcher in Language and Education. Her research interests include learner motivation, linguistic creativity and the relationship between language and identity. She writes on language(s) and culture, and in 2018 completed her PhD on ‘Language Learning Motivation and the Representation of German, Germans and Germany in UK Schools and the Press’.

Aditi Lahiri

Co-Investigator, Strand 3: Intelligibility

Aditi is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Vice-President (Humanities) of the British Academy. Her research focuses on understanding how languages change and how that is related to the way in which the human brain processes and stores words, despite the incredible variability in every-day language production, native as well as non-native. She uses a mixture of techniques ranging from the philological study of old manuscripts to experiments measuring people’s brainwaves (EEG recordings) to see how they respond to a variety of different speech sounds or words.

Laura Lonsdale

Associated Researcher, Strand 5: World Literatures

Laura is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Oxford. Her research explores literary multilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world, and her monograph Multilingualism and Modernity: Barbarisms in Spanish and American Literature was published in 2018. She is also Co-Editor of The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (2017), which promotes a comparative approach to the multilingual cultures of the Iberian Peninsula.

Martin Maiden

Co-Investigator and Lead, Strand 3: Intelligibility

Martin is a Romance linguist and Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He is Director of the Oxford Research Centre for Romance Linguistics, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of Academia Europaea. He has particular research interests in the historical development of Italian and Romanian (with other Romance languages of south-eastern Europe). His most recent book is The Romance Verb: Morphomic Structure and Diachrony (2018).

Wen-chin Ouyang

Co-Investigator and Lead, Strand 5: World Literatures

Wen-chin is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is looking at the Silk Roads as a model for new comparative literature and world literature that will enable South–South comparisons, such as Arabic and Chinese, and make visible the global circulation of ideas, poetics, literary genres and world views along multiple contact hubs.

Karen Park

Co-Investigator, Strand 2: Naming

Karen is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include language change, documentation and maintenance, generative syntax, Austronesian languages, ethno-ornithology, and biocultural diversity and conservation. She was the Principal Organizer of the 2019 Intersections of Language and Nature Symposium (www.iln2019.com) at the University of Pittsburgh, which encouraged collaboration between language documentation and conservation.

Sowon S. Park

Co-Investigator, Strand 6: Prismatic Translation

Sowon is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty of Cognitive Science Emphasis at UC Santa Barbara. She is Principal Investigator of a Crossroads-funded project that brings together research on unconscious memory in Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence and Literary Studies (http://um.english.ucsb.edu/). She edited the special issue of the Journal of World Literature, 1(2), on ‘Chinese Scriptworld and World Literature’ (2016) and is Co-Editor of the Global Asias Series published by Oxford University Press.

Nora E. Parr

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 5: World Literatures

Nora is a Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was formerly based at SOAS, and has been a research fellow with the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project Rights for Time/Time for Rights. Her work on contemporary Arabic and Palestinian Literature centres on re-defining critical terms through cross-context analysis, and has focused in particular on the terms ‘nation’ and ‘trauma’. She was Visiting Researcher at the Council for British Research in the Levant (Jordan and Palestine), and serves as Middle East Subject Editor at the Literary Encyclopedia.

Eleni Philippou

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 6: Prismatic Translation

Eleni is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her book Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction (2020) explores the implications of Adorno’s critical theory for literary studies. Her key research interests are postcolonial and world literature, contemporary literature and critical theory. In recent years, her research has moved strongly towards comparative literature, and translation theory and practice. She is also an active poet, with a number of her poems published in both British and international anthologies and journals.

Matthew Reynolds

Co-Investigator and Lead, Strand 6: Prismatic Translation

Matthew is Professor of English and Comparative Criticism at the University of Oxford, where he chairs the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre (OCCT). Among his books are Prismatic Translation (2019), Translation: A Very Short Introduction (2016), Likenesses: Translation, Illustration, Interpretation (2013) and the novels The World Was All Before Them (2013) and Designs for a Happy Home (2009). 

Daniel Tyler-McTighe

Director, Multilingual Performance Project

Daniel is a Research Fellow in Performing Arts at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Adjunct Professor at Millikin University. He is a theatre-maker who has staged productions at international theatre festivals in Shanghai, Almagro and Madrid and throughout England. He has created theatre with, by and for young people and community groups at the national theatres of Korea and Spain, Warsaw Palace of Culture and several UK theatres. His practice-as-research PhD from Loughborough University was titled ‘Contemporary Shakespeares: Adapting, Theatre-Making and Ghosting’.

Ana Werkmann Horvat

Postdoctoral Researcher, trand 1: Metaphor

Ana is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics in Zagreb, Croatia. Following completion of her doctoral thesis on ‘Layers of Modality’ at the University of Oxford, her research as part of the Creative Multilingualism team was concerned with language processing and figurative language. Her recent research focuses on how figurative language is understood by monolingual and multilingual native speakers and language learners.

Felice S. Wyndham

Postdoctoral Researcher, Strand 2: Naming

Felice’s research interest is ecological knowledge conservation in the service of Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ resource and land rights. Her recent writings are on narratives of deep historical ecologies in the Americas. As Principal Investigator of a 2017–2019 British Academy-funded project, she developed participatory ethno-ecology work with Ayoreo, Yshir and other communities in Paraguay and Mexico. For more on her work see www.narratinglandscapes.net