Plenary panels
Plenary Panel 1: Authorship
Thursday 5th November, 11:30-12:30 GMT – Register here
Authorship remains a central mechanism through which truth is produced, attributed, and contested across literary, philosophical, legal, scientific, and media domains. Yet authorship is neither stable nor self-evident. Rather than simply identifying the origin of meaning, it functions as a regime of attribution that distributes authority, responsibility, and credibility within institutional, cultural, and technological contexts.
This panel examines authorship as a social and epistemic infrastructure through which truth claims become intelligible and actionable. Truth is mediated not only by what is said but also by assumptions about who speaks, under what conditions, and with what authority. Whether attributed to individuals, collectives, institutions, anonymous sources, or technical systems, authorship shapes how claims are trusted, contested, and enforced.
Two dimensions are central to contemporary debates. First, authorship serves as a mechanism of accountability, attaching truth claims to positions of authority while assigning responsibility and liability. Second, it functions as a socio-cultural mechanism of recognition, influencing perceptions of credibility through genre conventions, institutional affiliations, and media environments.
These dynamics become especially visible when authorship is unstable, including under anonymity, collective production, contested provenance, or AI-generated content. Bringing together narratology, media theory, digital humanities and linguistics, the panel explores how authorship continues to organise truth under increasingly unsettled conditions.
Panellists
Andrew Bennett is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Author (2005) and books on literary ignorance (2009), suicide in twentieth-century literature (2017), and British Romanticism (mostly recently Reading Keats’s Letters, 2026). He is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (2023) and co-author with Nicholas Royle of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (6th edn., 2023).
Karina van Dalen-Oskam leads the Computational Literary Studies Research Group at Huygens Institute in the Netherlands. She is also endowed professor of Computational Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam since 2012 and Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) 2020-2025. Karina’s research focuses on computational literature studies. She combines quantitative and qualitative methods in her analyses of writing style and of readers’ opinions about novels and places them in a broader social context. She is also interested in translation science and in proper names. As a name scholar, her research focuses on literary onomastics, in which she examines usage and functions of proper names in novels from a comparative perspective. In June 2023, Amsterdam University Press published her book The Riddle of Literary Quality: A Computational Approach, in open access. This book contains an accessible synthesis of the results of the project The Riddle of Literary Quality, which ran from 2012 – 2019 and was funded by KNAW’s Computational Humanities Programme. Karina van Dalen-Oskam | LinkedIn
Edmund G. C. King is Senior Lecturer in English at The Open University. A book historian with a specialism in the history of reading, he wrote his PhD thesis on eighteenth-century scholarly understandings of Shakespearean collaboration, revision, and co-authorship. More recent research interests include literary sociology, issues relating to the regulation of speech and writing on contemporary online platforms (particularly the rise and fall of content moderation), and ways in which we might theorise contemporary managerialism, compliance, knowledge work, and the professional managerial class. He writes about these issues and more on Substack at @paroxysms.
Plenary Panel 2: Authenticity
Thursday 5th November, 16:45-17:45 GMT – Register here
Appeals to being ‘authentic’, ‘real’, or ‘true to yourself’ are pervasive in contemporary Western contexts. But what counts as authentic isn’t fixed; rather it’s shaped by social and cultural norms, technological affordances, and commercial pressures. In this panel we’ll reflect on authenticity as a concept and practice from two interconnected perspectives. On the one hand, we’ll consider the internal striving for authenticity, as evidenced within life writing genres, such as poetry, memoir, self-writing and self-translation, where authentic expression emerges as a necessary vehicle for recognition, reconciliation, and even survival. On the other, we’ll seek to dissect external perceptions and drivers of authenticity that structure performances of authenticity, particularly in digital media and AI contexts. Together with our four invited panellists, each of whom is distinguished in their respective field of research and/or practice, this panel will address the different ways in which authenticity emerges in language and communication, how it’s used for meaning-making and identity-work, and how it gets entangled with normative practices, moral judgments, and power.
Panellists
Dr Maxine Ali is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Reading. She completed her PhD in Language, Discourse and Communication at King’s College London (2025) with a thesis entitled ‘Authenticating Wellness: A discourse-analytic study of influencer-healers’ self-presentation practices on Instagram’ which was nominated for the King’s College Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize. Maxine’s research examines the interplay between language, health and technology, with a focus on gendered health communication, social media platforms and influencers, and post-truth digital economies. Her current work charts the significance of ‘authenticity’ as an organising discourse and performative resource within digital wellness cultures, considering how the premium placed on being ‘real’ and ‘genuine’ in social media environments fosters an online landscape where health misinformation thrives.
Siobhán Campbell is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing Practice at The Open University’s Department of English and Creative Writing and a multi-award-winning poet and critic. Author of six collections and co-editor of Eavan Boland: Inside History (2016), Siobhán Campbell’s work has received awards in the National Poetry Competition and the Troubadour International Competition and is the recipient of an Arts Council award and the Templar Poetry Prize. Current work on Maggie Maher, Irish maid to Emily Dickinson, emerges from a visiting Professorship at UNCC and Amherst. Siobhan works with NGOs and the NHS to co-design Creative Writing Interventions, researching the impact of arts practice in pressurized arenas. Latest research publications at Open Research Online including Participatory Poetries Against Othering—Creative Writing and Social Literary Practice with Displaced Women in Lebanon. Follow @poetrysiobhan.bsky.social
Matti Kangaskoski is poet and scholar. Kangaskoski’s research concerns the influence of digital media on literature, the effects of AI on literary writing, and, most broadly, digital technology as both poison and remedy. He is part of the Finnish Research Council Consortium project “Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field.”As literary author, Kangaskoski has published several works of poetry and novels as well as a digital motion picture book. His next book, forthcoming in 2027, is Internet on johtanut sotaan eikä tekoäly meitä pelasta (The Internet Has Lead to War and AI Will Not Save Us). Currently, he works as a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Jyväskylä
Trask Roberts is an assistant professor of French and translation at Kent State University. His most recent translation is Baptiste Thery-Guilbert’s novel At the End of the Sidewalks (2026) and at present he is translating Georges Mounin’s seminal work of translation theory Les Belles Infidèles. His scholarly research focuses on questions of translation within the context of modern French and English language literatures, with emphases on the practice of pseudotranslation and on authors who self-translate. His most recent essays on translation have appeared in Translation Studies, Dalhousie French Studies, Narrative, and the Journal of Modern Literature. He is currently completing a monograph on the relationship between autobiography and self-translation in the works of four twentieth-century writers.
Plenary Panel 3: Audiences
Friday 6 November, 13:30-14:30 GMT – Register here
