Keynote Speakers

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, where he is a member of the Institute for Applied Linguistics. He is author of Other Russias:  Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (Palgave MacMillan, 2009), selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association in 2011. He is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and the general editor of the Kent State Scholarly Monograph Series in Translation Studies.  He is the co-editor of Volume XII of the ATA Monograph Series, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Re-Thinking Translation Pedagogy (John Benjamins, 2003), and Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology (St. Jerome, 2013), as well as the editor of Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (John Benjamins, 2011).  His recent translations include No Good without Reward: Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaya (U Toronto) and The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (U Tallinn, 2013), the final work of Juri Lotman. He is currently completing a book-length manuscript entitled Reading between: Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. 

Martin Stegu is Full Professor of Romance Languages at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) (since 2000). From 1995 until 2000 he held a chair of Applied Linguistics at TU Chemnitz / Germany. He is a co-founder of the Austrian Association of Applied Linguistics (Verband für Angewandte Linguistik / verbal) and co-editor of the “Sprache im Kontext” book series (Peter Lang; together with Ruth Wodak). His main research interests are applied linguistics (e.g. the discourse about its disciplinary status and its different subdisciplines, as well as its relationship with related fields such as translation studies); language awareness; folk linguistics, postmodern linguistics; gender and queer linguistics.

Some recent publications:

 ”’(Critical) Applied Linguistics’ und ‘Folk linguistics’: allgemeine und ‚queere‘ Überlegungen.”  In: de Cillia, Rudolf et al. (Hg.): Diskurs / Politik / Identität. Festschrift für Ruth Wodak. Tübingen: Stauffenburg 2010, 409-418

 “Postmodern (applied) linguistics”. In: Semiotica 183 (2011) 1/4, 343-357.

 “Keine Heteros auf gayboy! Diskrepanzen zwischen gay discourse und Queer Theory.” In: Calderón, Marietta / Marko, Georg (eds): Let’s Talk About (Texts About). Sexualität und Sprache. Sex and Language. Frankfurt: Lang 2012,301-319

 Queer Linguistic Approaches to Discourse (Special issue Discourse & Society 24.5) Los Angeles: Sage 2013 (edited together with Heiko Motschenbacher)