The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media will hold its 11th International Conference in the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis July 8-11, 2008.

The IGEL Conference will be preceded by the IGEL Summer Institute, July 6-8. The Program of the Summer Institute is concerned with the cooperation of Humanities and Social Science students in order to develop adequate methods for the empirical investigation of literature and the media.

The IGEL Conference will be followed by the Society for Text and Discourse workshop (July 11-12) and the 18th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse (July 12-15), also held in the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis.

The conference which promises to be a great event features:
- Keynote speakers Doug Biber and Roz Picard
- 44 presentations on literary and media studies in emotion, personality, cognition, computational linguistics, and pedagogy!
- Presentation of "Directions in Empirical Literary Studies: In honor of Willie van Peer"
- President's address and President's banquet at the Brooks Museum

 

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS (CONFIRMED)

Douglas Biber is a Regents' Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. His research interests include English grammar, sociolinguistics, computational and statistical tools for linguistics, corpus linguistics, and register variation (synchronic, diachronic, cross-linguistic). Dr. Biber is internationally known for his computational techniques to analyze the linguistic characteristics of spoken and written genres and registers.

Rosalind Picard is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium. Dr. Picard is known internationally for pioneering research in affective computing and content-based image and video retrieval. Her award-winning book, Affective Computing lays the groundwork for giving machines the skills of emotional intelligence.

 

IMPORTANT DATES

IGEL Conference: July 8-11, 2008
IGEL Summer Institute, July 6-8, 2008