The 2026 Department of English Symposium will be February 5-6; this year's title is "Language and Ecology in the Anthropocene: A Symposium on Ecolinguistics."  The event will bring together leading international researchers engaged in explorations of the role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species, and the more-than-human world.

The event features keynote addresses from Professor Arran Stibbe (University of Gloucestershire, UK), Professor Sune Vork Steffensen (Southern Denmark University, Denmark), and Professor He Wei (Beijing Foreign Studies University, China) along with talks from more than twenty international scholars applying approaches such as corpus-assisted discourse analysis, econarrative, ecostylistics, ecopoetics, metaphor analysis, positive discourse analysis, critical multimodal discourse analysis and more to investigate a range of discourses and texts that shape how we perceive, understand, and engage with the physical world and its many inhabitants. 

With talks from international scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds across ecolinguistics, applied linguistics, critical animal studies, environmental communication, environmental science, and the environmental humanities, you are certain to find talks that appeal to you (and perhaps your class too!).
 

For the opening keynote from Professor Arran Stibbe, members of the UA community are invited to the Camelia Room in Gorgas Library at 12:00 pm for coffee and light refreshments before the talk commences at 12:30. All talks will be hosted on Zoom Webinar, and all presenters, including the opening keynote, will join via Zoom. Links to talks will be shared with registered participants in the days prior to the event.

If you have any questions, please email repoole@ua.edu.