Lourdes Ortega is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She held previous faculty positions in applied linguistics and second language acquisition at Georgia State University (2000-2002), Northern Arizona University (2002-2004), and the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (2004-2012). Her main area of research is in second language acquisition, particularly sociocognitive and educational dimensions in adult classroom settings. She has also long-standing interests in second language writing and foreign language education and has published widely about systematic research synthesis and epistemological and ethical dimensions of second language acquisition research. In the last few years she has become interested in applying insights from bilingualism and from usage-based linguistics to the investigation of second language development. She is originally from Spain, where she also received her first degree in Spanish Philology. She studied abroad in Germany, lived in Greece for 7 years as a teacher of Spanish, and relocated to the United States in 1993, where she did her studies and where she has rooted her academic career. She was co-recipient of the Pimsleur and the TESOL Research awards (2001) and has been a doctoral Mellon fellow (1999), a postdoctoral Spencer/National Academy of Education fellow (2003), and a senior research fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (2010). Her work has appeared in books and articles in journals such as the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She is the author of several books, including Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge, 2009, revised edition 2017). Lourdes is a frequent keynote speaker at international conferences, including the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in 2010, the AILA Conference in 2014, and the TESOL Convention in 2015. She is a visiting faculty member and teaches in the Doctoral program at Hellenic American University.
Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University and affiliated to the University of Vienna where she is currently the PI of a three-year funded project on the Discursive Construction of National Identities. She is past-president of the Societas Linguistica Europea. Among other national and international prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She has held visiting professorships at the University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, European University Institute (EUI, Florence) and Georgetown University (Washington, DC). She is a member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament at University Örebrö. Ruth Wodak is co-editor of the SAGE journal Discourse & Society, and of the journals Critical Discourse Studies and Journal of Language and Politics. She is a visiting faculty member and teaches in the Doctoral program at Hellenic American University.
Her research interests include critical discourse studies; transnational and national identity politics and politics of the past; racism, antisemitism and other forms of discrimination; and ethnographic methods of linguistic field work. Ruth has published extensively in these fields, most recently with the books The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015, German translation 2016); Methods of CDS (Eds Ruth Wodak & Michael Meyer, Sage 2015, 3rd edition). The Discourse of Politics in Action. Politics as Usual (Palgrave, 2011).
Vijay Bhatia has retired as a Professor of English from the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. He was also an Adjunct Professor (Department of Linguistics) at Macquarie University, Australia, and at the University of Malay, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is the founding President of the LSP and Professional Communication Association for the Asia-Pacific Rim. Some of his recent research projects include Analyzing Genre-bending in Corporate Disclosure Documents, and International Arbitration Practice: A Discourse Analytical Study, in which he led research teams from more than 20 countries. Two of his books, Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings and Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based View, are widely used in genre theory and practice. His third monograph on genre theory, entitled Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Communication will be published by Routledge in 2016. He is a visiting professor and teaches in the Doctoral program.
Vijay’s research interests include Critical Genre Theory, Genre Analysis of academic and professional discourses, including, legal, business, newspaper, advertising, genres; ESP and Professional Communication; simplification of legal and other public documents; cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary variations in professional genres.
Phil Scholfield spent his career at University of Wales Bangor and in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University Of Essex, UK, where he continues as Visiting Fellow. He had a long association with Longman (now part of Pearson Group) publishers advising on their dictionaries, has published primarily in the areas of vocabulary learning, learner strategies, the English writing system and research methods in applied linguistics, and is a veteran supervisor of over 50 Ph.Ds. Today he concentrates on writing and postgraduate consultancy on research methods. He is a visiting faculty member and teaches in the Doctoral program at Hellenic American University.
Rosina Márquez Reiter is Reader at the University of Surrey where she teaches intercultural communication. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield), an MA from St Mary's College, University of Surrey and a BA in Psychology from the Universidad de la República, Uruguay. Her current research interests include intercultural communication, institutional talk, mediated communication, and face management. She is author of Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay (John Benjamins, 2000), Spanish Pragmatics (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005 with M.E. Placencia) and Mediated Business Interactions. Intercultural Communication between speakers of Spanish (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). She has published scholarly papers on indirectness, face, politeness, pragmatic variation, speech acts, conversational structure and service encounters. She is a visiting faculty member and teaches in the Doctoral program at Hellenic American University.