Speakers

Julia Lajta-Novak is Associate Professor for Anglophone Literature and Mediality at the University of Vienna, Austria. She is an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing and has published extensively on biographical fiction and on poetry performance. Her (co-)edited books and journal issues include Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), a special issue of Life Writing on the theme of “Life Writing and Celebrity” (Taylor & Francis, 2019), and Experiments in Life-Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is the author of Gemeinsam Lesen (Lit 2007 – a book on reading groups) and Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (Brill | Rodopi 2011). Since 2021, she has been directing a 5-year research project titled “Poetry Off the Page: Literary History and the Spoken Word, 1965-2020” (supported by the European Research Council and the Austrian Science Fund), which focuses on spoken word poetry in UK and Ireland.  

Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016), editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011), and co-editor (with Leah Price) of Further Reading (2020), a collection of essays for the series Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. He was also a co-curator of the exhibition ‘How We Read: A Sensory History of Books for Blind People’ at the inaugural Being Human Festival. His latest book is titled Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022).

Jarmila Mildorf is Professor for English philology at the University of Paderborn. She completed her PhD in sociolinguistics at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and her ‘Habilitation’ in English literature at the University of Paderborn. Her research interests include audionarratology, radio drama, socionarratology, autobiography, oral history, dialogue studies, literature and medicine, the medical humanities, stylistics and gender studies.

She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence: Constructions and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners (2007, University of Nebraska Press) and Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (2023, De Gruyter). She has co-edited numerous collections of essays and special journal issues, most recently Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama (2021, Ohio State University Press), Narrative and Mental Health: Reimagining Theory and Practice (2023, Oxford University Press) and Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (2024, Brill). Two special issues on autobiography/autofiction and life storytelling in digital contexts are forthcoming in the journals Partial Answers and Narrative Inquiry.

Mildorf is co-founder and editorial board member of the book series Narratives and Mental Health (Brill) and serves on the boards of the journals EON (University of Sibiu) and Re:visit (University of Innsbruck).

For further information, see: https://www.uni-paderborn.de/person/356