Prof. Joan C. Beal (University of Sheffield)
Joan C. Beal is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield. Her research areas are in two main areas: the history of English in the Late Modern period (1700-1945) and dialect and identity in the North of England. Her PhD, subsequently published in 1999 as English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s ‘Grand Repository of the English Language’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press) was concerned with a pronouncing dictionary written by the Newcastle-born radical, Thomas Spence in 1775. This led her to consider the relationship between linguistic thought and radical politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the nature of linguistic change in the Later Modern period. It also sparked an interest in the nature of prescriptivism and the continuities and contrasts between prescriptive texts of the 18th century and those of the present day. Having spent all her career in the North of England, she has a long-standing interest in the dialects of this region. She has contributed the chapters on the phonology and morphosyntax of northern English dialects to the multi-volume publication Varieties of English, and completed (with Lourdes Burbano and Carmen Llamas) a book on the dialects of the North-east of England, which was published in 2012 by Edinburgh University Press. She was a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) project. The end product of this project is a website incorporating a major corpus of Tyneside English speech with orthographic and phonetic transcriptions, tagging and sound-files: The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. This has led to an interest in constructing linguistic corpora, which she has recently materialized in the creation of the Eighteenth-century English Phonology Database. She is one of the co-editors of the Edinburgh University Press Dialects of English series and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. Prof. Beal’s extensive list of publications also include Language and Region (Routledge, 2006), An Introduction to Regional Englishes (Edinburgh UP, 2010), Language in Modern Times 1700-1945 (Arnold, 2004), as well as reference work on dialect enregisterment in historical contexts.
Prof. Marina Dossena (Università degli Studi di Bergamo)
Marina Dossena is Full Professor of English Language at the University degli Studi di Bergamo. Her main research interests focus on English historical dialectology, especially in relation to Scots and Scottish Standard English. She has also published contributions on historical pragmatics (argumentative discourse and 19th-century business English). Her current research centres on Late Modern English, with special attention given to ‘language history from below’. She is currently involved in the compilation of the Corpus of 19th-Century Scottish Correspondence, and is co-editor of Token: A Journal of English Linguistics. She serves in the editorial board of other relevant academic journals such as Studia Anglica Posnaniensa and ESP Across Cultures; between 2010 and 2012, she edited The European English Messenger. Prof. Dossena’s extensive list of publications include a large number of edited books such as the two-volume English Historical Linguistics 2006 (with Maurizio Gotti and Richard Dury; John Benjamins, 2008), Studies in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and Data (with Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade; Peter Lang, 2008), Studies in English and European Historical Dialectology (with Roger Lass; Peter Lang, 2009), Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe (with Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti; John Benjamins 2012); Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English (John Benjamins, 2015); Knowledge Dissemination in the Long Nineteenth Century: European and Transatlantic Perspectives (with Stefano Rosso; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), etc. She has also given plenary talks at relevant international conferences of her specialization, such as the First International Conference on Late Modern English (Edinburgh, 2001), ICEHL 15 (Munich, 2008), ESSE 2014 (Košice, 2014), etc.