Under the auspices of CercleS
Jeannette Littlemore is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has a PhD in English Language Teaching from the Thames Valley University. Her research focuses on figurative language and explores the facilitative and debilitative role played by metaphor and metonymy in language education and in cross-linguistic communication. She is interested in the ways in which emotional experiences drive the use of creative figurative language.
Her monographs include: Unpacking Creativity: The Power of Figurative Communication in Advertising, (with Paula Pérez-Sobrino and Samantha Ford, Cambridge University Press, 2021), Metaphors in the Mind: Sources of Variation in Embodied Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Figurative Language, Genre and Register (with Alice Deignan and Elena Semino, Cambridge University Press, 2013); Doing Applied Linguistics (with Nicholas Groom, Routledge 2011); Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Second Language Learning and Teaching (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) and Figurative Thinking and Foreign Language Learning (with Graham Low, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).
Lola Pons Rodríguez is a Spanish philologist and professor in the Department of Spanish Language, Linguistics and Theory of Literature at the University of Seville, where she obtained her PhD. Her research focuses mainly on the history of the Spanish language, with attention to phenomena of historical syntax, text editing and discourse, topics on which she has published several books, various works in magazines and specialized chapters. In addition to diachronic variation, she has also been interested in other fields of variation, to which she has dedicated some publications, for example, on the Spanish of America, the Spanish spoken in Andalusia or urban sociolinguistics. On this aspect, she has opened a line of research in which she studies the language of signs located in public spaces, that is, the linguistic landscape, a question on which she has published a monographic book and some articles. Linguistic landscape and history of the language are different samples of the same interest in the documentary recovery of texts that remain unpublished or that are destined to be ephemeral.
She has written two informative books on the history of Spanish:
Francisco Moreno-Fernández is a dialectologist and sociolinguist at Heidelberg University. He has studied Linguistics, Sociology, and Political Science and holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics. He has been Professor of Spanish Language at the University of Alcalá (Spain) since 1996 and he has been Professor of Ibero-American Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Studies at Heidelberg University since September 2019.
He has directed the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University, where he masterminded the Observatory of Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures in the United States. During his university career, he has conducted his research as a visiting fellow at various universities, including the Universities of London, New York (Albany), Québec, and Tokyo. He has also been visiting professor at the University of Gothenburg, Universidade de São Paulo, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, among others. Between the years 2008 and 2013, Francisco Moreno-Fernández lead the Instituto Cervantes worldwide as Academic Director. He is a full member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, and is a corresponding member of the Cuban, Chilean, Mexican and Spanish Academies of the Spanish Language.
Francisco Moreno-Fernández’s research interests lie at the intersection between language and society. During his academic career, he has initiated and developed multiple international research projects with interdisciplinary perspectives. At Heidelberg University, he is currently directing the development of a transversal research program in Ibero-American Studies under the guiding theme of “Spaces and Dynamics”. Aside from this, his ongoing projects focus primarily on the analysis of socio- and geolinguistic phenomena of the Spanish language in Europe and the Americas.
