Sandrine Sorlin
Professor of English language and linguistics at University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3 (France)
Specialized in stylistics and pragmatics, Sandrine Sorlin has published books on linguistic defamiliarisation in English literature (La Défamiliarisation linguistique dans le roman anglais contemporain, PULM, 2010) and on language and authority in a historical perspective (Langage et autorité: de l’ordre linguistique à la force dialogique, PUR, 2012).
She is also the author of a handbook of stylistics (La Stylistique anglaise. Théories et Pratiques, PUR, 2014), the co-editor of The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns with Laure Gardelle (John Benjamins, 2015) and The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter with Manuel Jobert (John Benjamins, 2018). She published a monograph on an American political TV series (Language and Manipulation in House of Cards: A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) for which she received an award from the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE book award 2018). She has recently edited a book on Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury, “Advances in Stylistics Series”, 2020).
She is co-chair of the Société de Stylistique Anglaise (http://stylistique-anglaise.org/home/), co-editor in chief of Etudes de Stylistique Anglaise and Assistant Editor of Language and Literature. She is an honorary fellow member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Raymond A. Mar
Professor of Psychology at York University (Toronto, Canada)
Raymond A. Mar completed his undergraduate and graduate training at the University of Toronto, ultimately receiving his PhD in psychology with a focus on individual differences. Currently, he is a professor of psychology at York University, where his lab conducts research on how imagined experiences affect real-world cognition and behavior.
This research tends to focus on experiences with fictional stories, across various forms of media (e.g., novels, television shows, graphic novels, video games). His lab employs a diverse range of methods, including those associated with personality psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, and this work has appeared in the Annual Review of Psychology, Human Brain Mapping, and Discourse Processes, among other journals.
Dr. Mar was awarded the Tom Trabasso Young Investigator Award by the Society for Text and Discourse, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. With respect to teaching, he has a passion for communicating the diversity of ways that one can conduct research, teaching research methods at the undergraduate and graduate level. In 2020, his first textbook will appear on this topic, the 3rd Canadian Edition of Methods in Behavioural Research (McGraw-Hill). In addition, he has created a set of online tutorials to help introduce people to the statistical programming language, R (remindery.info.yorku.ca). He also maintains a website on the psychology of fiction (onfiction.ca).