About

 

Who We Are

‘Authors and the World’ is a collaboration between researchers in the departments of Languages & Cultures, English & Creative Writing, Linguistics, and Contemporary Arts (LICA) at Lancaster University. We actively encourage the input of creative writers, translators, and industry professionals. Our aim is to interrogate the literary, social, political, linguistic, and historical significance of the author as a cultural artefact and a producer of literary texts.

What We Do

Our work is carried out in academic symposia, practice-focused workshops, and ongoing online debate and artistic experimentation. By pooling different disciplinary approaches to related phenomena such as celebrity, gender, multilingualism, political protest, intellectual communities, and cultural mediation, we show how the study of authors can act as a conduit for exploring the very nature of culture and its associated industries around the world.

 

Our Topics



 
Literary Lives

Literary Lives

How do authors ‘embody’ literature, in their biographical person as well as in their literary texts? What does it mean to ‘be’ an author in different media and institutional contexts? […]

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World Authorship

World Authorship

How do authors ‘circulate’ throughout world literature? Can their image, as well as their text, be translated?   Click here to read our posts on World Authors.    What is […]

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Multimodal Creativity

Multimodal Creativity

How do we make use of a range of creative modes, including the non-linguistic – writing, drawing and other images, objects, music, gesture?  One of our first major discussions of this […]

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Our Emphases



 
Celebrity

Celebrity

To what extent is ‘literary celebrity’ a product of the contemporary Western world? What do authors have to do with architecture? Can anyone be a famous author in the age […]

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Translation

Translation

What happens when an author writes in different languages, how do translators relate to authors, and can authorship ever be a truly collective process? Click here to read a larger […]

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The Digital

The Digital

What role do the new media and interactive technologies have in shaping authors’ careers and their writing? How do authors themselves shape digital media? How do such media alter the […]

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