Keynote Speakers

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	James Engell (Harvard) James Engell, Gurney Research Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, taught literature and environmental courses at Harvard 1978-2024, chairing the Department of English 2004-2010 and 2020-2021. His Harvard online course on rhetoric has enrolled 800,000 learners. Author or editor of twelve books and more than four dozen articles and chapters on Romantic and eighteenth-century studies, as well as on environmental issues, he has received several teaching, advising, and publishing awards.
	Ralf Haekel (Leipzig) Ralf Haekel is Professor and Chair of British Literature at the University of Leipzig. In 2003 he received his PhD from FU Berlin and in 2013 his Habiliation from the University of Göttingen. From 2008 to 2016 he was Juniorprofessor of English Literature and Culture at Göttingen. Previous to his current position he was Visiting Professor at the Universities of Mannheim, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hannover, and Gießen. His main research interests are Romantic Studies, Early Modern Drama and Theatre, as well as Irish Studies. A current focus of his research lies on the media theory of literature.
	Diego Saglia (Parma) Diego Saglia teacher English Literature at the University of Parma, where he has been working since 1998, and been the Director of the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries since January 2017. After doing his PhD at the University of Cardiff (UK) and, before joining Parma, he taught at the University of Cardiff and the University of Bath (UK). His research focuses on Romantic-period literature and culture, particularly on such themes as exoticism and orientalism, Gothic, national and gender identity, drama and theatre, as well as several central figures including Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans and Walter Scott. Another interest in his work is that of international and transcultural relations between Great Britain and other European traditions between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially Anglo-Hispanic relations and constructions of the image of Spain in British Romanticism.