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Emma-Louise Silva (Universite de Namur)12/11/25, 1:00 PMInvited symposium talk
For literary authors who revisit their experiences of youth to write autobiographical books, imaginatively drawing on memories plays a prominent role in the creative process. On the basis of cognitive literary studies and the archival study of creative writing processes, I have examined notes, mindmaps, manuscripts, and typescripts to chart how authors reconstruct their memories. The authors...
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Markus Werkle-Bergner (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)12/11/25, 1:45 PMInvited symposium talk
The development of memory across childhood is a central theme in developmental cognitive neuroscience, linking maturational changes in neural architecture to the emergence of increasingly flexible cognitive abilities. A core challenge of adaptive memory formation lies in balancing two competing demands: extracting regularities across experiences to enable generalization and inference, while...
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Winny Ang (University of Antwerp)12/11/25, 2:30 PMInvited symposium talk
How can stories support our wellbeing and mental health? As Ali Smith writes: “Books mean all possibilities, they mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full.” Stories help us navigate our social and emotional worlds by transforming the continuum of lived events into a narrative—sometimes coherent, sometimes fragmented or even...
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Peter Petré (University of Antwerp)12/11/25, 3:45 PMInvited symposium talk
While attention to the linguistic study of lifespan change has been growing over the past two decades, we are still only just starting to understand how grammar fits in. For a long time, the dominant view has been that grammatical change primarily happens between generations. Lifespan change was considered to be limited to age grading, the shift between different styles or language habits...
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Steven Gilbers (University of Groningen)12/11/25, 4:30 PMInvited symposium talk
Regional variation in African-American English (AAE; hip-hop’s primary language variety in the US) is especially salient to its speakers involved with hip-hop culture, as hip-hop assigns great importance to regional identity, and regional accents are a key means of expressing regional identity. For rappers, using a regionally marked rap style (i.e., “flow”: the rhythmic and melodic...
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Patrick McGuinness (Oxford University)12/11/25, 5:15 PMInvited symposium talk
Having had the good fortune to be brought up in two languages - English and French - I spent a great deal of my childhood thinking it was not good fortune at all: arriving in England aged 9 with a French accent but an Irish name, and being asked where I was 'from', caused me huge anxiety and dépaysement, much of it quite raw. I spoke to my mother in French, my father in English, and so going...
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Emma-Louise Silva (Universite de Namur), Lieven Buysse (KU Leuven and ESSE), Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)12/12/25, 9:45 AMBAAHE conference sessions
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Prof. Vanessa Joosen (University of Antwerp)12/12/25, 10:00 AMPlenary conference talk
Angela Carter is one of Britain’s best known and most studied authors of the twentieth century. Whenever her work is associated with children’s literature, her collection The Bloody Chamber is mentioned – a set of daring rewritings of fairy tales aimed at adult readers. Few scholars mention that Carter also authored several children’s books herself. In this lecture, Vanessa Joosen approaches...
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Prof. Michael Erard (Radboud University)12/12/25, 11:15 AMPlenary conference talk
In Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (2025), I addressed the following asymmetry in the language sciences: while they are richly endowed with models of language’s beginnings, they have not paid sufficient attention to how language ends for individuals, which means that language across the lifespan has never truly been explored. In this talk, I inquire into the sources...
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Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)12/12/25, 12:45 PMBAAHE conference sessions
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Caroline Gentens (KU Leuven), Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)12/12/25, 1:15 PMBAAHE conference sessions
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Imola Nagy-Seres (KU Leuven)12/12/25, 1:30 PM
Katherine Mansfield’s fiction and personal writings abound in marine life forms: ‘decorative starfish’, ‘velvet sea anemones’, ‘pink tinted sea shells’ – these are just a few of the animals that inhabit her fictional waters. She describes her short story, ‘At the Bay’ (1922) as a kind of literary rock pool, ‘full of sand and seaweed, […] and the tide coming in’ – images based on her own...
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Sławomir Kozioł (University of Rzeszów, Poland)12/12/25, 1:30 PM
Michael Crummey’s Sweetland (2014) is frequently examined as a novel about resettlement, outport decline, and ecological loss, but it can also be read as a meditation on the human lifespan and its embedding within communal life. This paper proposes to interpret Sweetland through the lens of Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology, which emphasizes the intersubjective constitution of meaning,...
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Kristin Davidse (KU Leuven)12/12/25, 1:30 PM
Halliday’s (1975) study of the beginning of language in the human infant and the nature of that early language broke new ground in comparison with contemporary studies such as Brown (1973) and Bowerman (1973). Hitherto, the beginning of language had been equated with the acquisition of words recognizable as lexical items from the adult language around 12–18 months. The acquisition of syntax...
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Nils Van den Keybus12/12/25, 2:00 PM
In Western thinking, especially since evolutionary theory and classification, branching patterns are firmly established as a dominant way of understanding the world ontologically and epistemologically. Outward branching—the splitting apart of different branches—has been mobilized to justify hierarchy, privileging the human petiole of the evolutionary tree. The Overstory reverses this...
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6. Rewriting Life Through Memory: Ageing and the Experience of Time in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs DallowayProf. Saliha SEBGAG (University of Mohamed Khider. Biskra /Algeria)12/12/25, 2:00 PM
This study explores the intricate relationships among memory, ageing, and the perception of time in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)—a novel that encapsulates an entire life’s journey within the span of a single June day. Utilizing Woolf’s modernist stream-of-consciousness technique, the narrative reveals how Clarissa Dalloway’s present is continually shaped and enriched, yet...
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Melissa Schuring (Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB))12/12/25, 2:00 PM
Background and aim | Cognitive sociolinguistics investigates the mental processes underlying the acquisition of socially-meaningful variation patterns (see e.g. Kristiansen & Dirven 2008). So far, studies focusing on children’s development have found mixed results regarding age patterns. For instance, Kristiansen (2010) investigated N=150 Spanish-speaking children (6-13 y/o) and found...
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Aybike Canan (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)12/12/25, 2:30 PM
Languages differ typologically in how they encode motion (Talmy, 1985), especially in boundary-crossing (BC) contexts. Özçalışkan (2015) demonstrated striking differences between Turkish and English in expressing path and manner of motion. English, a satellite-framed language, typically uses a manner verb and a path satellite. Turkish, a verb-framed language, uses a path verb and expresses...
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Thibaut Goossens12/12/25, 2:30 PM
The interbellum period witnessed a revolution in life writing, famously dubbed the ‘new biography’ by Virginia Woolf (1927). This movement explicitly sought to break from what Woolf identified as the Victorians’ obsessive adherence to historical facts and their overly reverential treatment of illustrious individuals – an approach strongly marked by Thomas Carlyle’s theory of the ‘great man’ as...
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Àngels Llurda (University of Lleida)12/12/25, 2:30 PM
Age studies scholarship has increasingly interrogated the intersection of care for older adults and neoliberal market ideologies. This presentation explores how popular culture, specifically the cozy mystery genre, negotiates the language and optics of care for older adults in terms of costs and accessibility. Taken as a whole, the stories with ageing detectives offer invigorating alternatives...
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Sylvie De Cock (UCLouvain)12/12/25, 3:00 PM
Register variation is a crucial aspect of language production. Corpus-based explorations of language have raised awareness of register variation and have yielded valuable insights into linguistic patterns associated with different registers (Biber et al. 1999). While register has important implications for any type of language production, it is particularly relevant to explore in learner...
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Dr Rudolph Glitz (Universiteit van Amsterdam)12/12/25, 3:00 PM
Literature does not only reflect, represent, or reveal aspects of age and the life course as conceptualized by a given society, but also affects the latter’s dominant age system through illocutionary forces that either reinforce or destabilize it. In my paper, I trace, firstly, the operation of such forces in a small selection of canonical English poems occasioned by the Great War, namely two...
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Katarzyna Wywial (Ghent University)12/12/25, 3:00 PM
David Joel Shapiro (1947-2024) was an American poet, critic and scholar who authored several books of poetry published between 1967 and 2017. Between the dates, one can observe an interesting and perhaps counterintuitive evolution of the poetic language that departs from Symbolism going through the stage of complex Ashberyan assemblages to noble lucidity of relatively simple “farewell poems”...
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Beau Serrus (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)12/12/25, 4:00 PM
The turn of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of a widespread challenge to early developmental theories of childhood as an imperfect, transitional phase leading to adulthood. Progressive educationalists such as Rabindranath Tagore and John Dewey emphasised children’s situational and embodied experiences, rather than seeing them merely as vessels for future potential. This paper will...
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Louise Benson James (Ghent University)12/12/25, 4:00 PM
This paper looks at two bestselling novels – Marie Corelli’s The Young Diana (1918) and Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen (1923) – both of which feature women who regain their youth through the power of science. One British and one American, these novels, which we could call science fiction romance, thematise scientific anti-aging technologies, responding to the rejuvenation craze of the 1910s...
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Asseline Sel (Universite de Namur)12/12/25, 4:00 PM
Because of their potential to confer “prestige, gravitas, and humanist principles to emerging platforms” (Sullivan 2022, 163; see also Bührle 2018, 8), Shakespeare and his plays are prime targets for new media keen on legitimizing themselves, especially in the face of criticism. It is hardly surprising, then, that online performances of Shakespeare’s plays appeared from the early days of video...
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Ester Gubert (University of Trento), Dr Thomas Van de Putte (King’s College London)12/12/25, 4:30 PM
In memory studies in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, there is a lack of research on memories of ageing. This is counterintuitive, because these memories rely on bigger cultural meanings of ability and age, on meaning-making within groups (e.g. the family), they are highly affective, often inform future imagination, and are key to policy debates. These are all cultural and...
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Sonali Kulkarni (Tilburg University)12/12/25, 4:30 PM
This paper departs from the premise that any understanding of literature across the lifespan must account for the ubiquitous practice of readers returning to the books they have already read. While empirical studies on rereading remain scarce, anecdotal and observational evidence suggest that people voluntarily revisit books read in the past (Beckett, 2009; Falconer, 2009; Waller, 2019). In...
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Oleski Miranda Navarro (Emory & Henry University)12/12/25, 4:30 PM
In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Latin America, positivist and scientific racist discourse prescribed rigid social hierarchies based on gender, race, and ethnicity, effectively excluding women, children, and indigenous populations from formal projects of nation-building. This essay argues that the Cuban intellectual José Martí and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral mounted a...
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Prof. Ewa Rychter (Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences, Poland)12/12/25, 5:00 PM
This paper will focus on The Testament of Mary (2012)—a novella by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, whose protagonist-narrator is the ageing mother of Jesus, depicted as spending her last days in exile in Ephesus, remembering her past and reflecting on the events both preceding and following her son’s crucifixion. In her old age, Tóibín’s Mary finds the courage to establish her own mature...
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Robert Pickett (University of Westminster)12/12/25, 5:00 PM
Alex Pickett
PhD Researcher
University of Westminster
r.pickett@westminster.ac.ukAmnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI), generally, is diagnosed when a person’s memory range is below that of what is expected of people their own age. This involves a steep decline in memory function, usually in a person who is later in life, that does not otherwise affect basic cognitive skills. Yet,...
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Dan Henry Gonzales (Ateneo de Manila University)12/12/25, 5:00 PM
This presentation examines how the Philippine government memoranda issued during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency (2016–2022) conceptualize basic education through metaphor. Drawing on Saussurean semiotics, the study treats policy language as a system of signs that reveals deeper cultural meanings. The focus is on directives from the Ministry of Education and related agencies, with attention to...
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Muhammad Abdullah (Government College University Lahore)12/12/25, 5:30 PM
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) offers a fertile site for interrogating the intersections of aging, gender, and marginality in transcultural contexts. Literary gerontology has often been dominated by Western paradigms, where narratives of decline and the male aging experience receive disproportionate attention. In contrast, Roy’s narrative broadens the scope of...
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Ewa Konieczna (University of Rzeszów)12/12/25, 5:30 PM
This presentation investigates the conceptualisation of medical staff in conspiracy theories surrounding childhood vaccination and organ cancer treatment in mature/old age, situating the analysis within the theme of language across the lifespan. Conspiracy narratives (in the sense of Introne et al. 2020) in English-speaking contexts—particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom—have...
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Dr Songul Dogan Ger (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)12/12/25, 5:30 PM
Over the past decades, globalisation and increased mobility have led to extensive interaction among diverse languages and cultures. As the development of social and cultural contacts in intercultural or multicultural contexts has accelerated, there has been growing recognition of the need to integrate culture teaching and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) into foreign language...
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