IAFOR > The Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture (BAMC) > BAMC2021 > Speakers

Speakers

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

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  • Isabel Alonso-Breto
    Isabel Alonso-Breto
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Joseph Haldane
    Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Sara Martín
    Sara Martín
    Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
  • Gloria Montero
    Gloria Montero
    Novelist, Playwright & Poet
  • Baden Offord
    Baden Offord
    Curtin University, Australia
  • Bill Phillips
    Bill Phillips
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • M. G. Sanchez
    M. G. Sanchez
    Writer, UK
  • Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes
    Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes
    Curtin University, Australia

Previous Speakers

View details of programming for past BAMC conferences via the links below.

BAMC2020
Isabel Alonso-Breto
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Isabel Alonso-Breto obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2003, where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. A scholar in the area of Postcolonial Studies, she has worked on authors of Caribbean, Canadian, Indian and South-African origin, while her present research focusses on literature and life writing by Sri Lankan authors, mostly of the diaspora. A visiting scholar in recent years at the Universities of Toronto (Canada) and Marburg (Germany), Dr Alonso-Breto has been the guest editor of several issues of academic journals such as Coolabah and Indialogs, and is the general editor of the miscellaneous journal Blue Gum. Also interested in the social role of creative writing and translation, she has several pieces to her credit in this regard. Lately she has translated into Spanish the anthology Siembra solo Palabras, by Sri Lankan Tamil poet Cheran, published in 2019. Dr Alonso-Breto is a member of Ratnakara, a research group devoted to the study of the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean, and the Vice-Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona.

Interview Session (2021) | Brexit, Borders and the Gibraltarian Voice: a Conversation With M.G.Sanchez

Previous BAMC Presentations

Discussion Panel (2020): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil (France), Sciences Po Paris (France), and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (Japan), as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France), The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris (France), and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane’s research and teaching is on history, politics, international affairs and international education, as well as governance and decision making. Since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and is Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within Osaka University.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Dr Haldane is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), a Visiting Professor at the School of Business at Doshisha University (Japan), where he teaches Ethics and Governance on the MBA programme, and a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Education (USA), collaborating on the development of the Global PhD programme.

Dr Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations to universities and conferences around the world, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office in collaboration with IAFOR.

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu Region) and he is currently a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

Keynote Presentation (2021): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Sara Martín
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Dr Martín specialises in Gender Studies, particularly Masculinities Studies, which she applies to the study of popular fictions in English, with an emphasis on science fiction. Her most recent books are Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in British Fiction: From Hitler to Voldemort (2019) and Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film: Focus on Men (2020).

Gloria Montero
Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography

Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.

Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.

She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".

With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.

Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).

Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).

She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.

Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.

Photo by Pilar Aymerich.

Keynote Presentation (2021): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2020): KNOCK KNOCK... WHO'S THERE?
Discussion Panel (2020): “In Conversation with Gloria Montero”
Baden Offord
Curtin University, Australia

Biography

Baden Offord is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Curtin University, Australia. Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand of Māori and Pākehā heritage, he has lived most of his life in Australia, as well as several years in Spain, South India, and Japan. An internationally respected scholar in human rights, education, sexuality and culture, his latest book (co-edited with Fleay, Hartley, Woldeyes and Chan) is Activating Cultural and Social Change: The Pedagogies of Human Rights (London, Routledge: 2022).

Professor Offord has held academic appointments as the Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair of Human Rights in the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University (2015-2020); as Chair (Visiting Professor) of Australian Studies, Centre for Pacific and American Studies at The University of Tokyo (2010-2011); as Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona; and as Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Southern Cross University (1999-2014). He has also had visiting positions at Indiana University, the University of Auckland, and La Trobe University. In 2021 he was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia (AO) ‘for distinguished service in tertiary education in the field of human rights, social justice and cultural diversity.'

Professor Offord is a member of IAFOR’s Academic Governing Board. He is Chair of the Cultural & Area Studies section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Keynote Presentation (2021): Engaging with Culture: A Conversation on Decolonising the Future

Previous BCE Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2020): The Relevance of the Humanities and Arts in Uncertain Times
Bill Phillips
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Bill Phillips is a senior lecturer in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Barcelona, Catalonia. He has published widely on poetry in English, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, science fiction and crime fiction. Together with other members of the Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, based at the University of Barcelona, his most recent research has been on postcolonial crime fiction and he is currently working on the Sean Duffy novels of Adrian McKinty, and the crime novels of Jacob Ross.

M. G. Sanchez
Writer, UK

Biography

M. G. Sanchez is a Gibraltarian writer based in the UK. He studied at the University of Leeds, where he obtained BA, MA and PhD degrees in English Literature. He is the author of fourteen books, among them novels, journals, memoirs, historical studies and collections of short stories. His writing focuses on Gibraltarian identity politics and on the geopolitical challenges facing the Rock and its inhabitants. He is also interested in borders, Brexit, masculinity, national stereotypes and colonial/post-colonial discourses of “otherness”. More information about his writing can be found at https://www.mgsanchez.net and www.facebook.com/mgsanchezwriter/.

Interview Session (2021) | Brexit, Borders and the Gibraltarian Voice: a Conversation With M.G.Sanchez
Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes
Curtin University, Australia

Biography

Dr Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes is a Senior Lecturer, multidisciplinary researcher and writer based at Curtin University’s Centre for Human Rights Education, Australia. Drawing from the history, philosophy and experiences of marginalised people and communities, Yirga contributes critical insights for reimagining the future and addressing epistemic and racial injustices. He researches African experience and Ethiopian traditions and writes creatively on belonging and diasporic lives. He has won university and industry awards for his teaching, research, and creative writing. His publications include the sole-authored book Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence Against Traditions in Ethiopia. (New Jersey: The Red Sea Press, 2017) and the forthcoming book (with Offord, Fleay, Hartley and Chan) Activating Cultural and Social Change: The Pedagogies of Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2022).

Keynote Presentation (2021): Engaging with Culture: A Conversation on Decolonising the Future
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