IAFOR > The Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE) > BCE2022 > Speakers

Speakers

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

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Plenary Speakers

  • Isabel Alonso-Breto
    Isabel Alonso-Breto
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Sue Ballyn
    Sue Ballyn
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Joseph Haldane
    Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Ishmeet Kaur
    Ishmeet Kaur
    Central University of Gujarat, India
  • Mattia Mantellato
    Mattia Mantellato
    University of Udine, Italy
  • Kathleen Firth
    Kathleen Firth
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, United States
  • John McLeod
    John McLeod
    University of Leeds, United Kingdom
  • Gloria Montero
    Gloria Montero
    Novelist, Playwright & Poet
  • Silvia Cuevas-Morales
    Silvia Cuevas-Morales
    Writer, Australia
  • Dolors Ortega
    Dolors Ortega
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Shirley Steinberg
    Shirley Steinberg
    University of Calgary, Canada
  • Adrien K. Wing
    Adrien K. Wing
    University of Iowa College of Law, United States

Previous Speakers

View details of programming for past BCE conferences via the links below.

BCE2021 BCE2020
Isabel Alonso-Breto
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Isabel Alonso-Breto obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2003, where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. A scholar in the area of Postcolonial Studies, she has worked on authors of Caribbean, Canadian, Indian and South-African origin, while her present research focusses on literature and life writing by Sri Lankan authors, mostly of the diaspora. A visiting scholar in recent years at the Universities of Toronto (Canada) and Marburg (Germany), Dr Alonso-Breto has been the guest editor of several issues of academic journals such as Coolabah and Indialogs, and is the general editor of the miscellaneous journal Blue Gum. Also interested in the social role of creative writing and translation, she has several pieces to her credit in this regard. Lately she has translated into Spanish the anthology Siembra solo Palabras, by Sri Lankan Tamil poet Cheran, published in 2019. Dr Alonso-Breto is a member of Ratnakara, a research group devoted to the study of the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean, and the Vice-Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona.

Interview Session (2021) | Brexit, Borders and the Gibraltarian Voice: a Conversation With M.G.Sanchez

Previous BAMC Presentations

Discussion Panel (2020): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25th 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Featured Interview (2022): “A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales”
Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil (France), Sciences Po Paris (France), and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (Japan), as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France), The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris (France), and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane’s research and teaching is on history, politics, international affairs and international education, as well as governance and decision making. Since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and is Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within Osaka University.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Dr Haldane is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), a Visiting Professor at the School of Business at Doshisha University (Japan), where he teaches Ethics and Governance on the MBA programme, and a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Education (USA), collaborating on the development of the Global PhD programme.

Dr Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations to universities and conferences around the world, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office in collaboration with IAFOR.

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu Region) and he is currently a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

Featured Interview (2022): Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2021): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Ishmeet Kaur
Central University of Gujarat, India

Biography

Dr Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry (educationist, author and poet) teaches at the Centre for English Studies at Central University of Gujarat, India. She was recognised as an Inspired Teacher for the President of India’s in-residence program at Rashtrapati Bhawan, New Delhi in June 2015. She has been largely interested in areas of literature of margins, studies of violence, trauma, and women studies. She has also been actively engaged in Comparative Studies and Translations from Punjabi into English. She is a member of the Global Guru Granth Sahib Translation project at Sikh Research Institute, United States. Her recent work has been on violence studies engaging with discourses on the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi. She is an editor of Black November: Writings on Anti-Sikh Massacres of 1984 and the Aftermath (2019); Patrick White: Critical Issues (2014); co-editor of Violence, Subversion and Recovery: Women Writers from the Sub-continent and Around (2019, with Rachel Bari) and the author of Texting the Scripture: Sri Guru Granth Sahib and the Visionary Poetics of Patrick White (2016). Her collection of poems is Forbidden Button and Other Poems (Signorina Publications, 2020)

Dr Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry also engages in conducting talks on women's concerns, well-being and mindfulness. She firmly believes that in a world that is full of pressures, there is an innate energy within people. She engages in discourses on various aspects of spirituality, learnings from Guru Granth Sahib, and real-life memoirs. She has delivered lectures in various institutions and different countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, America, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Spain.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Stories of Resilience and Strength”
Mattia Mantellato
University of Udine, Italy

Biography

Mattia Mantellato holds a cum laude PhD (Doctor Europaeus) in English language and literatures from the University of Udine, Italy, Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Society, and he is now a Post-Doctoral Fellow working on the project “English Caribbean Literatures of the Ocean: Eco-Feminist and Transdisciplinary Perspectives for a New Blue Aesthetic”. He researches and publishes on: Derek Walcott’s work, World Literatures, English Literature, Performance and Dance Studies and Multimodal Studies. He is also a professional ballet dancer, choreographer and artist. He graduated from La Scala Ballet Academy in Milan. For seven seasons, he was part of the ensemble of the National Ballet Theatre of Prague (Czech Republic). He has performed in more than 10 countries in Europe, in China (EXPO 2010), at the Biennale of Venice and at Mittelfest.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “The Arts, Literature and Dance: Multimodal and Embodied Approaches for a Resilient and Partnership World”
Kathleen Firth
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

The Kathleen Firth Lecture has been periodically organised by the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies (CEAT) at the University of Barcelona since 2011, when Dr Kathleen Firth retired from her teaching and academic work at the University. Dr Firth had taken over Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at UB from Professor Doireann MacDermott, who in turn was instrumental in introducing Postcolonial Studies in Spain. Dr Firth is renowned as an international scholar in the field and worked in many areas, with a strong focus on research but was also deeply committed to expanding the teaching curriculum. While her emphasis was on the Caribbean and India, she also explored and introduced literature from Canada and from the African continent.

She led the postcolonial team at the University of Barcelona with enthusiasm and tireless work. At CEAT we are honoured to be able to offer these now traditional plenary lectures in her name. Together with the Doireann MacDermott Lectures, they are one of the hallmarks of CEAT activities.

Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, United States

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of IAFOR. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

John McLeod
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Biography

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He is the author of Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester UP, 2nd ed. 2010), and Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has edited special issues of the journals Kunapipi, Moving Worlds, and Études Anglaises, and is the co-editor of The Revision of Englishness (Manchester UP, 2004) and The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014). His essays have appeared in journals such as Wasafiri, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and ARIEL. He is an Executive Board Member of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) and co-editor of the Ohio State University Press series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture. In April 2022 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Paris Sorbonne, France. His new book, Global Trespassers, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser”
Gloria Montero
Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography

Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.

Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.

She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".

With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.

Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).

Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).

She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.

Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.

Photo by Pilar Aymerich.

Featured Interview (2022): Gloria Montero Asks Joseph Haldane to Tell His Story

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2021): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Keynote Presentation (2020): KNOCK KNOCK... WHO'S THERE?
Discussion Panel (2020): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Silvia Cuevas-Morales
Writer, Australia

Biography

Silvia Cuevas-Morales is a bilingual Australian writer of Chilean descent whose work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. After the 1973 military Coup d’état in Chile, her family was forced to flee the country and settled in Australia, where she completed her secondary and university studies, while teaching Latin American literature and Spanish language at La Trobe and Monash Universities. In 1999, she moved to Spain, where she has worked in the publishing world as an editor and literary translator, as well as collaborating with different newspapers and magazines as a freelance journalist.

Some of her published work includes: Purple Temptations (1994); Respiro de arena (1996); Sur/South Poem(a)s (1998); Al filo de la memoria/At memory's edge (2001); Canto a Némesis (2003); De la "A" a la "Z": Diccionario universal de autoras que escriben en castellano (2003); Vínculos Teatrales (2003); Rodaré maldiciendo (2008); Poliamora (2010); Diccionario de centenarias ilustres: 100 mujeres que cambiaron la historia (2011); Desarrelament y altres poemes / Desarraigo y otros poemas (2012); Nanas lésbicas: para conciliar el sueño (2013) Pienso, luego estorbo... / Je pense, donc je gȇne... (2014); El tren del miedo y otros relatos (2015) and Apátrida: Diario de un destierro/ Stateless: Diary of an Exile (2017).

Featured Interview (2022): “A Conversation with Poet Silvia Cuevas-Morales”
Dolors Ortega
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Dolors Ortega Arévalo has been a lecturer of Literature in English at the University of Barcelona, Spain since the year 2010, teaching courses focused on Contemporary Fiction in English, Modernist and Postmodernist Literature in English, Medieval Literature, North American Contemporary Fiction, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Literatures, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She received her PhD from the University of Barcelona and she was awarded the European Doctorate Mention for her thesis "Deterritorialising Patriarchal Binary Oppositions: Deleuze, Woolf, Masculinities and Film Adaptation", after a year as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher under the supervision of Dr Humm at the University of East London, United Kingdom. Her research has focused mainly on Modernist writers, Gender Studies, Contemporary British Fiction, Film Adaptations, Postcolonial Literatures and the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. She has most recently been working on transnationalisms and hybridity and has published the prologue and only authorised annotated Spanish translation of F.S. Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (2014) as well as the prologue of F.S. Fitzgerald’s Cuentos Rebeldes (2018). She is a member of the consolidated research group Ratnakara with its current project “Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018-095648-B-I00). She has been a member of the academic committee of the MA “Construcció i Representació d’Estudis Anglesos” of “Facultat Filologia i Comunicació de la Universitat de Barcelona”, and is currently a member of the executive committee of “Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals (CEAT)” and the Head of Studies of CFA Rius i Taulet School for Adults in Barcelona.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Adult Education and the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Lifelong Learning”
Shirley Steinberg
University of Calgary, Canada

Biography

An innovative teacher educator and critical pedagogy scholar committed to diversity, inclusion, interdisciplinarity, and shared vision, Steinberg’s scholarship has contributed to the notions of Critical Multiculturalism and Diversity, Critical Bricolage, Critical Youth Studies, and Kinderculture. Her commitment to equity and social justice is internationally disseminated. She currently holds the Werklund Research Chair of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary. Steinberg is the author or editor of over 50 books and is the Whitworth Award Winner for Career Education Research Excellence 2019-2022. She is the director/writer of films relating to education and critical ways of knowing and is the winner of 17 festival awards for a collaborative film: Elders' Room, made with Kainai First Nation.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Do We Look Back to Move Forward?”
Adrien K. Wing
University of Iowa College of Law, United States

Biography

Dean Adrien K. Wing is the Bessie Dutton Murray Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, United States, where she has taught for 34 years. She is the Associate Dean for International and Comparative Law Programs, and the Director of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. Author of over 150 publications, she teaches Critical Race Theory, Sex Discrimination Law, and Law in the Muslim World. She is editor of Critical Race Feminism (NYU Press, 2003) and Global Critical Race Feminism (NYU Press, 2000). Recipient of many honours, she currently serves on the American Journal of International Law Board of Editors. Wing holds her Bachelor’s degree from Princeton with high honours, MA degree from UCLA in African Studies, and her Doctorate of Jurisprudence from Stanford Law School.

Keynote Presentation (2022): “Attacks on Critical Race Theory”
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