Kristy Beers Fägersten
Kristy is an Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Södertörns högskola, Sweden. She received her PhD in linguistics at the University of Florida, where she wrote her dissertation on swearing in American English. Her current research interests include the non-native use of English swear words and the discourse of Swedish contemporary newspaper comics.
Eliezer Ben-Rafael
Eliezer is Professor Emeritus in Sociology of the Tel-Aviv University. He is past president of the International Institute of Sociology, and past incumbent of the Weinberg Chair of Political Sociology, and he serves on the advisory board of Israel Studies in Language and Society. He has authored and edited numerous books about language, identity, ethnicity, the Israeli society, and globalization. His recent works include: Is Israel One? Religion, Nationalism and Ethnicity Confounded (2006), Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (dis)Order (2009) and World Religions and Multiculturalism: A Dialectic Relation (2010). Visit Eliezer's website.
Miriam Ben-Rafael
Miriam has taught French for many years and is an independent researcher in sociolinguistics. She obtained her PhD in French linguistics and has investigated and published in areas that include Hebrew-French language contact, sociolinguistic variation under the influence of globalization, and the linguistic landscape of ethnic communities. Among her recent publications are ‘The linguistic landscape of transnationalism: The divided heart of Europe’ (2010), ‘English in French comics’ (2008), ‘Language attrition and ideology: Two groups of immigrants in Israel’ (2007).
Frank Bramlett
Frank earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Georgia and is now an associate professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has published research on discourse styles in interviews at a social service agency; conversation analysis and the short fiction of Raymond Carver; and the interaction of gender and anti-gay prejudice and its impact on social stigma. Most recently, his work on verbal camp in The Rawhide Kid appeared in the on-line comics journal ImageTexT. Frank is also a founding contributor (with Roy Cook and Qiana Whitted) of Pencil Panel Page: Questions about Comics.
Carla Breidenbach
Carla is a Chicana originally from California, who is now an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Her areas of study include Chicano sociolinguistics, identity, ethnicity, and sexuality, racial humor, immigration, and pop culture linguistics. When not working, Carla can be found on the beach with her dogs.
Neil Cohn
Neil is a scholar of the cognition underlying the visual language of comics. He is the author of Early Writings on Visual Language and Meditations and the illustrator of We the People (with Thom Hartmann) and A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning (by Ray Jackendoff). His work may be found online at http://www.emaki.net/.
Jill Hallett
Jill is a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Illinois and a high school teacher in Chicago. Her research interests include
sociolinguistics, specifically American and world Englishes, linguistic identity in literature, inner city pedagogical discourse, and second language acquisition. Her dissertation research analyzes teacher accommodation to student language.
sociolinguistics, specifically American and world Englishes, linguistic identity in literature, inner city pedagogical discourse, and second language acquisition. Her dissertation research analyzes teacher accommodation to student language.
Richard W. Hallett
Richard is the coordinator of the Linguistics Program at Northeastern Illinois University. During the 2009-2010 academic year, he was a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar based in New Delhi researching the sociolinguistic aspects of the Incredible India tourism campaign. His research interests include the language of tourism, discourse analysis, world Englishes, and second language vocabulary acquisition. He is the co-author of Official Tourism Websites: A Discourse Analysis Perspective, which was published by Channel View in 2010.
Gert Meesters
Gert holds a PhD in Dutch Linguistics from the University of Leuven and teaches linguistics at the University of Liege, Belgium. His scientific work can be consulted at the ORBi research repository. In addition to his academic work, he has written for many years for the general press as a comics critic, currently for the Flemish news weekly Knack. Be sure to look at Gert's web archive, too.
Elisabeth Potsch
Elisabeth graduated from Lawrence University in 2008 with a B.A. in Linguistics. She currently works as a library specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also attends the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. When not combing the bookstacks for comics, she enjoys working on her constructed language.
Thecla Schiphorst
Thecla is a Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her background in performance and computing forms the basis for her research, which focuses on embodied interaction, sense-making, and the aesthetics of interaction.
Veronika Tzankova
Veronika is a PhD student at the Communication & Culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her background education in civil law was obtained in Turkey, where she spent seven years of her life exploring the Oriental culture and its influence on moral values and language. Her current interests include Islam and visual culture, Islam and virtual reality, and discrepancies in representation between physical reality and electronic environments in the context of Muslim societies.
Shane Walshe
Shane is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In 2009, he received his PhD in English linguistics from the University of Bamberg, Germany, for his thesis Irish English as Represented in Film (Peter Lang, 2009). His primary research interests are perceptual dialectology, the depiction of varieties of English in popular culture, and the notion of linguistic stereotyping.
Richard Watson Todd
Richard has worked for nearly 20 years at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi where he is Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Research and Services in the School of Liberal Arts. He is the author of Much Ado about English and Classroom Teaching Strategies, and he has published numerous articles in the areas of text linguistics, computer-based analyses of language, and curriculum innovation. He also runs the Big Applied Linguistics Database.
Robert F. Williams
Robert is Associate Professor of Education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He teaches courses in education, cognitive linguistics, distributed cognition, and gesture studies. His research explores conceptual and bodily aspects of meaning construction in everyday cognition and instruction.