Keynote Speakers

 

John Banville. Photograph by Douglas Banville, 2006

John Banville is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. His most recent works are The Sea (2005), The Infinities (2009) andAncient Light (2012). His non-fiction book Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City was published in 2003. Scripts of his three adaptations of dramas by Heinrich von Kleist, The Broken Jug, God’s Gift (after Amphitryon), and Love in the Wars (after Penthesilea), are published by Gallery Press in Ireland. The Newton Letter was filmed for Channel 4 Television as Reflections (dir. Kevin Billington), with a script by the author. John Banville has also adapted Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September to film (dir. Deborah Warner, 1997), and has worked with the film director Neil Jordan on a number of projects including The End of the Affair. He co-authored a script with Glenn Close based on the George Moore short story “Albert Nobbs” (2011-12). His screen adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, with Ciaran Hinds, Sinead Cusack and Charlotte Rampling was released in April 2014.

Keynote Title: A Staged Interview with John Banville.

 

Judith Buchanan

Judith Buchanan is Professor of Film and Literature and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York. Her books include Shakespeare on Film (Longman-Pearson, 2005), Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (CUP, 2009 & 2011),Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Wordsworth, 2001) and (ed.) The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). She writes widely on Shakespearean performance histories and on silent cinema in relation to the other arts. She has done the expert voice-overs for silent films for the British Film Institute and for the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, speaks regularly to arts cinemas as well as to academics, and is Director of ‘Silents Now,’ a project bringing silent cinema to new audiences in fresh ways.

 

Keynote Title:  Wresting an Alphabet: Adapting Shakespeare Collaboratively.

 

Thomas Leitch

Thomas Leitch teaches English and directs the Film Studies program at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, coedited with Leland Poague, and the forthcoming Wikipedia U: Paradoxes of Authority in Liberal Education and Online Research. He is currently working on The Lessons of Adaptation. A two-time alumnus of the Salzburg Seminar, Professor Leitch has taught as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He serves on the steering committee of the Delaware Teachers Institute and on the editorial boards of Literature/Film Quarterly, Adaptation, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Hitchcock Annual, and the Contemporary Film and Media Studies series published by Wayne State University Press.

Keynote Title: Collaborating with the Dead.