EKU Professor at the ESSE Conference in Ireland

Last modified: 2019. October 10.

Dr. habil. Éva Antal, the College Professor at the Department of English Studies attended the worldwide conference of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) between 22nd and 26th August at the National University of Ireland in Galway.

At the conference, where more than 800 speakers from about 30 countries participated, she did not only present a paper but also was a co-convenor of a seminar in literary theory. The seminar was titled "The Sublime Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of the Sublime in British Literature since the 18th Century", which she organised together with Dr. Kamila Vránkova from the University of South Bohemia. At the ESSE conferences, at least two scholars from two different EU countries can initiate a seminar proposal and, their proposal having been accepted, the co-convenors are to collect and evaluate the received individual abstracts, later outline the timetable of the seminar and chair the sessions. In "the sublime" group (SEM 32) 8 speakers from 5 countries had circulated their papers and each speaker had a presentation meanwhile acted as an opponent to a previously selected paper, asking questions and giving comments. Our colleague lectured on the Burkean sublime ("Transgressing the Boundaries of Reason: Burke's Poetic (Miltonic) Reading of the Sublime") and she could easily respond to all the papers since she wrote her habilitation treatise on the sublime in 2011. At the 2016 ESSE conference, besides the EKU participant, there were three scholars from Eötvös Loránd University, one from the University of Debrecen, and three from the University of Szeged.
The conference provided great opportunities to get involved in scholarly dialogues and to launch international projects. The speakers of the above mentioned seminar agreed upon publishing their papers either in a volume or in the 2016 and 2017 issues of the journal Eger Journal of English Studies. The EgerJES is an annually published departmental journal that is indexed by EBSCO and edited by Éva Antal and Csaba Czeglédi with the assistance of an international Editorial Board. The seminar speakers from Belgium, France and Russia would gladly join the work of the EB in the future, meanwhile Éva Antal was asked to take part in her seminar co-convenor's habilitation procedure as one of the opponents to the treatise in the Czech Republic. Our colleague has also invited all the speakers to the forthcoming HUSSE (Hungarian Society for the Study of English) conference that will be held in Eger in January 2017 and is being organised by the Departments of English and American Studies of our University.


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