Professor Michał Krzyżanowski, Uppsala University, Sweden
Professor Michał Krzyżanowski holds the Chair in Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden where he is currently also Deputy Head of School/Department of Informatics and Media as well as Director of Research at the Uppsala University Research Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism (CEMFOR). He is one of the leading international scholars working on critical discourse studies of communication, media and social change with special focus on politics and practices of discrimination, exclusion and social inequality and on anti- and post-democratic communication. His work explores European politics, media and the public sphere by looking at anti-immigration rhetoric, normalisation of racism as well as on other challenges to democracy under the impact of far-right, extremism as well as neoliberalism
Michał is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Language and Politics which - under his leadership since 2014 - has become one of the key international, interdisciplinary and critical fora for analysing discourse and communication in the processes of contemporary social and political change. He is also a co-editor of the book series Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies and sits on a number of editorial boards including of Critical Discourse Studies or Social Semiotics journals or such innovative book series as e.g. DATA Browser.
Federico Romero is Emeritus Professor at the Department of History, European University Institute, Florence. A specialist on 20th Century international and transnational history, he researched various aspects of Cold War history and in 2015-20 directed the ERC Advanced Project “Looking West: the European Socialist regimes facing pan-European cooperation and the European Community (PANEUR1970S)”.
Among his recent publications, he co-edited with Angela Romano the volume European Socialist Regimes’ Fateful Engagement with the West: National Strategies in the long 1970s (London: Routledge, 2021); and with Ulrich Krotz and Kiran Klaus Patel, Europe’s Cold War Relations. The European Community Towards a Global Role (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). He is also one of the editors of “La Commission Européenne 1986-2000. Histoire et mémoires d’une institution.” (Luxembourg, 2019)
Vivien Schmidt: Professor Emerita, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University, where she taught from 1998 through 2023. Her appointments were in both the Pardee School of Global Studies and the Political Science Department. She was also Co-Chair of the EU Studies Group at Harvard’s Center for European Studies from 2008 to 2023. Prof. Schmidt is currently Honorary Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome and Visiting Fellow in the Schuman Center at the European University Institute in Florence. Previously, she was Professor of Political Science and Management and Founding Director of the European Studies Program at UMass Boston, as well as Director of the Center for Democracy and Development in the McCormack Institute for Public Affairs. Over the years, she held visiting and affiliate positions at a number of European universities.
In addition to LUISS University, these include the Free University of Berlin, the Free University of Brussels, Sciences Po in Paris, the European University Institute in Florence, Oxford University, and the Max Planck Institute, Cologne. Professor Schmidt has published extensively. Her latest book is Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (Oxford, 2020) which received the Best Book Award (2021) of the American Political Science Association’s Ideas, Knowledge, Politics section and Honorable Mention for the Best Book Award (2019-2020) of the European Union Studies Association. She is a frequent commentator in public media on matters pertaining to the EU in addition to having often presented her views in European institutional and think-tank venues.
Prof. Schmidt has a lifelong interest in art and photography, and in the 1990s began pursuing photography in earnest.
Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996, an Honorary Doctorate from University of Orebro in Sweden in 2010, and an Honorary Doctorate from Warwick University in 2020. She is past-President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria, and 2018, the Lebenswerk Preis for her lifetime achievements, from the Austrian Ministry for Women’s Affairs. She is member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Academia Europaea. In March 2020, she became Honorary Member of the Senate of the University of Vienna. In June 2021, she was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for her lifetime achievements, in November 2022 she received the Paul Watzlawick Ehrenring of the Medical Society + City of Vienna. She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and Language and Politics.
She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University. 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö). In the spring 2014, Ruth held the Davis Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In the spring 2016, Ruth was Distinguished Schuman Fellow at the Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence. 2017, she held the Willi Brandt Chair at the University of Malmö, Sweden. 2018/2019 and 2021, she was a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM).
Her research interests focus on discourse studies; gender studies; identity politics and the politics of the past; political communication and populism; prejudice and discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work.
Ruth has published 12 monographs, 29 co-authored monographs, over 60 edited volumes and special issues of journals, and ca 420 peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters. Her work has been translated into English, Italian, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, German, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Arabic, Russian, Czech, Bosnian, Greek, Slovenian, and Serbian.
Recent book publications include Identity Politics Past and Present. Political Discourses from Post-War Austria to the Covid Crisis. (Exeter University Press 2022; with M. Rheindorf). The Politics of Fear. The shameless normalization of far-right populist discourses (Sage 2021, 2nd revised and extended edition); Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Migration Control (Multilingual Matters 2020; with M. Rheindorf); Identitäten im Wandel. (Springer 2020; with R. de Cillia, M. Rheindorf, S. Lehner); Europe at the Crossroads (Nordicum 2019; with P. Bevelander); The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics (Routledge 2018, with B. Forchtner); Kinder der Ruckkehr (Springer 2018, with E. Berger); The Politics of Fear. What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015; translated into the German, Russian, Bosnian, Chinese, and Japanese); The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave, revised 2nd edition 2011; translated into the Chinese); Methods of CDS (Sage 2016, with M. Meyer; 3rd revised edition, translated into the Korean, Spanish, and Arabic); Migration, Identity and Belonging (LUP 2011, with G. Delanty, P. Jones); The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the German Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (Palgrave 2008; with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak); The Politics of Exclusion. Debating Migration in Austria (Transaction Press 2009; with M. Krzyżanowski); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Sage 2010; with B. Johnstone, P. Kerswill); and Analyzing Fascist Discourse. Fascism in Talk and Text (Routledge 2013; with J E Richardson). See http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/Ruth-wodak for more information.