Invited Speakers
Dr. Nobuyo Fukaya is an associate professor at Niigata Agro-Food University in Niigata, Japan. She was formerly a lecturer at Shibaura Institute of Technology (Tokyo, Japan). She earned her B.A. from Rikkyo University (Tokyo, Japan) and her M.A. and Ph.D from Tsuda University (Tokyo, Japan). The title of her doctoral dissertation is Optimality Theory and Language Change: The Activation of Potential Constraint Interactions. The revised version of her dissertation was published by Kaitakusya, Japan. In her dissertation, she explained English word order changes, such as the verb-second phenomenon and its loss within Optimality Theory by re-ranking the set of constraints and tackled the question of how this re-ranking took place. She is currently studying how language develops. Her publications address the areas of language acquisition of L1 English-speaking children and Japanese EFL learners. She has collected extensive data using the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database (MacWhinney 2000) and explained within Optimality Theory how and why children acquire their mother tongue. She has particularly focused on the acquisition of wh-questions, comparing children’s and parents’ utterances. Her recently published papers on first language acquisition are “Case Study 1” (2022), “Optimality Theory and the Development of Do-Support in Children’s Wh-Questions” (2023), and “A CHILDES-Based Study on the English Dative Alternation” (2023). In addition, she has addressed second language acquisition using the Japanese EFL learner (JEFLL) Corpus (Tono 2007), and has compared L1 English-speaking children and Japanese EFL learners. Her major article on Japanese EFL learners is “Comparison of Japanese EFL Learners and L1 English Children: The English Dative Alternation” (2023). She is also one of the translators of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language written by Rodney and Geoffrey (2002) (Eibunpou daijiten shiriizu vol. 0, 2017) and Language Change written by Bybee (2015) (Gengo-wa donoyouni henkasurunoka, 2019), and has contributed to deepening the understanding of linguistics for beginners.
Daniel Noemi Voionmaa is a cultural critic,
chronicler, and scholar of Latin American literature
and culture. He obtained his PhD from Yale
University. His research and teaching focuses on the
intersection of critical theory and literature, and
on visual arts, film, and politics. He is the author
of four books and many articles.
Leer la pobreza en América Latina: Literatura y
velocidad [Reading Poverty in Latin America:
Literature and Velocity] (Cuarto Propio, 2004;
second edition 2011) develops the notion of the
Aesthetic of Poverty, using the concept of velocity
as a starting point to analyze literature, film, and
visual arts in Ecuador and the Southern Cone during
at the turn of the 21st century.
Revoluciones que no fueron: ¿Arte o política? Más
allá de realismos y vanguardias en América Latina
[Revolutions that did not happen, Art or Politics?
Beyond Realism and Avant-Garde in Latin America]
(Cuarto Propio, 2013) studies the 1920s and 1930s in
Ecuador and Chile, analyzing political discourses,
political performances and economic crisis alongside
novels, short stories, manifestos, poetry, and
literary and political magazines and journals.
En tiempo fugitivo: Narrativas latinoamericanas
contemporáneas [In Fugitive Times: Contemporary
Latin American Narratives (Universidad Alberto
Hurtado UP, 2016), is an interpretation of Latin
America’s recent literature that provides a
panoramic and critical interpretation of the last 30
years.
Surveillance, the Cold War and Latin American
Literature (Cambridge UP, 2022) is a social,
political, cultural and aesthetic analysis of the
relations between secret police agencies and
intellectuals and writers.
His current research –for which he obtained a
FIFA-CIES fellowship– is on Latin American
literature, soccer, modernization, and national
identities.
He teaches courses on human rights and violence,
literature, poverty and soccer, politics and
contemporary Latin American Film and narrative.
Currently, he teaches Latin American Literature and
Culture at Northeastern University, in Boston.
Previously, he was on the faculty in the Department
of Romance Languages and Literatures at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned
tenure, and in the Department of Languages and
Literatures at Bard College, where he was a visiting
assistant professor. He has been a guest lecturer at
universities in Spain, UK, Germany, Colombia,
Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, and the US.
Yina
Cao is a Ph.D. supervisor and a visiting scholar at the
University of Cambridge, with a research focus on
cross-cultural communication and comparative cultural
studies.
She has successfully led and completed four national and
provincial social science research projects and has
contributed to five major national bidding projects. Dr.
Cao has published five English-language papers in A&HCI
journals and over twenty papers in CSSCI journals. In
recognition of her scholarly contributions, she was
awarded the First Prize for Outstanding Papers by the
Chinese Journalism History Association in 2022 and the
Humanities and Social Sciences Excellence Award by
Sichuan University in the same year.
Dr. Cao has authored and edited three monographs. She
holds several significant academic positions, including
Secretary-General of the Digital Humanities Section of
the International Comparative Literature Association,
Executive Director of the Cultural Communication
Semiotics Research Committee of the Chinese Association
for Literary and Art Theory, Council Member of the
Canadian Studies Section of the Chinese Association for
World Ethnology, and the Deputy Director of the Canadian
Studies Center at the College of Foreign Languages and
Cultures, Sichuan University.
Qin Xu
is currently a researcher at the Graduate School of
Humanities and Sociology, at the University of Tokyo. He
has carved a notable path in the field of Korean
language studies. He possesses a diverse educational
background, holding a Bachelor of Engineering in
Software Engineering and a Bachelor of Letters in
Spanish from Jilin University, China. Furthering his
academic pursuits, Xu completed his Master of Letters
and Doctor of Letters at the Graduate School of
Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo,
Japan.
Xu's professional journey is equally impressive. He
began as a Teaching Assistant at the University of
Tokyo, the Lab of Study of Korean Culture, and has since
become a part-time lecturer at some institutions such as
Keio University, Kanda University of International
Studies, Meiji Gakuin University, Teikyo University, and
Tokyo Woman's Christian University. His dedication to
teaching the Korean language is evident through his
multifaceted roles.
In his research, Xu has employed experimental phonetic
methods to elucidate the acoustic characteristics of
Yanbian Korean, spoken in Yanbian Korean Autonomous
Prefecture, Jilin Province, China. Yanbian Korean is
crucial for dialect studies as it is based on the
Hamgyong dialect of North Korea, now difficult to
investigate. Despite substantial research on Yanbian
Korean, comprehensive phonetic descriptions across its
phonemic system were lacking. Xu addressed this gap
during his master's and doctoral studies, examining its
monophthongs, diphthongs, and consonants. He is now
dedicating himself to the auditory phonetics study in
the Korean dialect which will include perceptual
experiments.
Due to Yanbian Korean becoming an endangered language,
Xu's ongoing research aims to resolve these challenges,
compile the collected phonetic data, and construct a
comprehensive speech corpus for Yanbian Korean, ensuring
its preservation and wider accessibility for research.
Dr
Mariam Mohamad is a Senior Lecturer at Universiti Sains
Malaysia, Penang Malaysia. Her research interest is in
the field of mobile learning and mobile assistive
technology. Dr Mariam was acknowledged as one of the
pioneers from Malaysia in mobile learning research, in
the book entitled Mobile Learning in Higher Education in
the Asia-Pacific Region published by Springer. Her work
also referred by UNESCO in the publication entitled;
Turning on Mobile Learning: Illustrative Initiatives and
Policy Implications.
Dr. Mariam has extensive experience in disseminating her
work internationally. She actively involves presenting
her work in international conferences with ISI Web of
Science and SCOPUS indexed status. She was invited by
UNESCO to present her work in Mobile Learning Week 2014
at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. She was also invited by
ICEMT 2018 to give her speech in Okinawa, Japan and
IMLF2018 in Singapore. In 2019, she was invited by
ICEDU2019 in Kuala Lumpur as a plenary speaker and forum
panelist. She also attended ICEMT 2019 in Nagoya, Japan
as a plenary speaker. In 2020 she was invited as a
keynote speaker for IMRC 2020 in Philippines. In 2021,
she contributed as the keynote speaker in TEL 2021,
plenary speaker in ICSE 2021 and also as invited speaker
for ICEEL 2021. Recent contribution was as invited
speaker in ICIET 2022.
For her success in the field, in 2021, she was awarded
with international grants which include Sumitomo
Foundation and Japan Foundation to support her research
in mobile assistive technology. For the community, she
also devoted her time as the Advisor for Special Need
Students Association, University Sains Malaysia. She is
also a committee member for Research & Development Unit,
Malaysian Association for The Blind.
