Naoki Sakai of Cornell University, Brigitta Busch of the University of Vienna and Brian James Baer of Kent State University have accepted to be keynote speakers at the Seventh EST Congress in Germersheim.
Naoki Sakai is professor in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Cornell University. His research fields are in comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, the histories of semiotic and literary multitude. He inaugurated the project TRACES: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation, which is simultaneously published in four languages - Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese (Spanish was added this year and it is expected that the German edition of TRACES will be published in 2013) and served as its founding senior editor (from 1996 to 2004). His most relevant publications include: Translation and Subjectivity (1997), Hope and Constitution (2008), Deconstructing Nationality (co-edited with Brett de Bary and Toshio Iyotan, 2005), TRACES 1: The Spectre of the West (co-edited with Yukiko Hanawa), TRACES 4: Translation, Biopolitics and Colonial Difference (co-edited with Jon Solomon).
Brigitta Busch lectures on Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. In 2012 she was awarded the Berta Karlik Chair for Women Scientists. Her first career was in agriculture; her second has been dedicated to issues of multilingualism, first in Carinthia and Southeastern Europe, where she worked for the Council of Europe, and later in South Africa. International recognition has been gained by her language-biographical approach and a creative visual method for the representation and analysis of linguistic repertoires. She is currently doing research on the relationships between migration, multilingualism and traumatic experience. Her academic monographs include Der virtuelle Dorfplatz. Minderheitenmedien, Globalisierung und kulturelle Identität (The Virtual Village Square. Minorities, Globalization and Cultural Identity, 1999); Sprachen im Disput. Medien und Öffentlichkeit in multilingualen Gesellschaften (Languages in Dispute. Media and Public Space in Multilingual Societies, 2004); Von Menschen, Orten und Sprachen. Multilingual leben in Österreich (Of People, Place and Languages. Living Multilingually in Austria), with Thomas Busch (2012); and her inaugural lecture as Berta Karlik Chair Das sprachliche Repertoire oder Niemand ist einsprachig (The Linguistic Repertoire, or No One is Monolingual (2012). She co-edited, with Neville Alexander, Literacy and linguistic diversity in a global perspective. An intercultural exchange with African countries (2007). Her first novel Winterweizen was published in 2011.
Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies the Institute of Applied Linguistics, Kent State University, where he serves as Coordinator of Graduate Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1996. His research interests include Russian translation history, translation and censorship, discourse analysis in translation studies, and the pedagogy of translation. He is the co-editor of Beyond the Ivory Tower: Rethinking Translation Pedagogy (John Benjamins, 2003) and the author of the monograph Other Russias (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Dr. Baer is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies (John Benjamins) and the general editor of the KSU Monograph Series in Translation Studies. His most recent works include the book-length translation No Good without Reward: Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaia (U of Toronto, 2011) and the edited volume Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (John Benjamins, 2011). He has recently completed an anthology, Russian Writers on Translation, which is forthcoming from St. Jerome. Dr. Baer currently sits on the board of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA).