Closing Ceremony

Keynote Speakers

Translation Studies and the Revitalization of the Humanities

Prof. Shokry Megahed

Prof. Shokry Megahed is the former President of The National Center for Translation. He is a Professor of English Literature at Ain Shams University. Prof. Megahed is a very well published translator (more than 30 books). He is also a translation theorist and comparatist who wrote on the pedagogy, the process, and the assessment of translation. Major among his translations are Oxford Handbook of Secularism, Rethinking Secularism, Blood, Matter of the Araby, The Philosophy of Economics, The New Realities, The Origins of Modern Culture, The Landscape of History, The Rise of the West, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric.  His major contribution to translation theory is the concept/theory of reappropriative translation.(ترجمة الاسترداد)  Prof. Megahed taught at several facilities and universities, and supervised many theses and dissertations in language, literature, and translation.

Recent Advances in Languages Engineering: Challenges and Applications

Prof. Sameh Alansary

Dr. Sameh Alansary is a Professor of Computational Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University. His main areas of interest are computational linguistics and language engineering, corpus work, morphological analysis and generation, and building formal grammars. He established the Arabic Computational Linguistics Center in Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Prof. Alansary is the co-founder and Vice President of the Board of the Arabic Language Technology Center (ALTEC) in Cairo, an NGO that aims at providing Arabic language resources and building a road map for Arabic Language Technology in Egypt and in the Middle East. He is a member of many scientific organizations: (1) Egyptian Society of Language Engineering, Cairo, (2) Arabic Linguistics Society – USA, (3) Association of Computational Linguistics- USA-  Europe, (4) Universal Networking Language foundation, United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland.

Critical Sociolinguistics: Challenging Methods and Theories

Prof. Reem Bassiouney

Prof.  Reem Bassiouney obtained her MPhil and Ph.D. from Oxford University in linguistics. She is a Professor of Sociolinguistics and Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics at The American University in Cairo. Before that, she held the position of Associate Professor at Georgetown University in the US. Prof. Bassiouney has eight academic books and is currently the editor of the Routledge Series of Language and Identity. She is also the editor and creator of the Journal of Arabic Sociolinguistics, Edinburgh.

Prof. Reem Bassiouney is an award-winning Egyptian author. She was the winner of the National Prize for Excellence in Literature of the year 2022 from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. In addition, Prof. Bassiouney was awarded the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Award from Egypt’s Supreme Council for Culture for the best Egyptian novel of the year 2020, for her bestselling novel, Sons of the People, making her the first woman to win this prize. She was also granted the King Fahd Center for the Middle East and Islamic Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award for her book The Pistachio Seller in 2010. She also won the 2009 Sawiris Foundation Literary Prize for her novel Professor Hanaa. Four of her eight novels have already been translated into English, Spanish, and Greek.

Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language: Growing Supply for a Growing Demand

Dr. Saussan Khalil

Dr. Saussan Khalil is a Senior Teaching Associate of Arabic at the Faculty of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, UK, as well as the Founder & Managing Director of Kalamna, a social venture providing Arabic language classes to children in the UK and worldwide. Dr. Khalil is the author of Arabic Writing in the Digital Age: Towards a Theoretical Framework, and the creator of the Kalamna Phonics Toolkit. Dr. Khalil holds a Ph.D. in Arabic sociolinguistics and MA by Research in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, both from the University of Leeds, UK. She also holds a Certificate of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and a BA English Literature from Alexandria University, Egypt.

 “Words are the Only Victors:” The Enduring Power of Humanities

Prof. Heba M. Sharobeem

Prof. Heba M. Sharobeem is a senator and member of the Committee of Education, Scientific Research and Technology at the Egyptian Senate. She is also a Professor of Modern British and American Literature and the former Chair of the English Department at the Faculty of Education, Alexandria University, Egypt.  Her research interests fall broadly within the fields of feminist, post-colonial, and cross-cultural studies as well as comparative literature. Prof. Sharobeem has given presentations in all these fields in different conferences in Egypt and abroad, including America, Russia, England, Scotland, and India. She is also a teacher trainer with a keen interest in civic education. She has published research papers and articles in various journals and magazines in Egypt and abroad and contributed with a chapter and various pieces of writing and translations in two books, Women Writing Africa and Joke and Performance in Africa. She is a member of the Editorial Board team in two international journals.

The role of Applied Linguistics in a changing world: Some theoretical and practical implications for our field. 

Prof. Lorna Carson

Prof. Lorna Carson is Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences and Professor in Applied Linguistics. She holds a B.A. (Mod.), M.Phil. in Applied Linguistics and Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, and an M.A. from the College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium. In 2015 she was elected a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. She was the Founding Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, a multidisciplinary teaching and research centre which brings together the university’s expertise in Japanese, Korean and Chinese Studies, and presently directs the work of the university’s Centre for English Language Learning and Teaching.

Professor Carson’s research on language learning addresses issues located at the interface between individual and societal multilingualism, with a particular attention on the language classroom, with a focus on language learning, language education policy and assessment.

Her books include Language and Identity in Europe: The Multilingual City and its Citizens (2020, Peter Lang), The Multilingual City: Vitality, Conflict and Change, co-edited with Lid King (2016, Multilingual Matters); Language Learner Autonomy: Policy, Curriculum, Classroom, co-edited with Breffni O’Rourke (2010, Peter Lang), and Multilingualism in Europe: A Case Study (2003, 2005, Peter Lang). She is a former President of IRAAL, the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics (2014-2017).