Speakers

𝓓𝓻. 𝓐𝓱𝓶𝓪𝓻 𝓜𝓪𝓱𝓫𝓸𝓸𝓫 is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His award-winning research focuses on World Englishes, language identity, and educational linguistics, critically examining the politics of language in society. He is a leading proponent of “Subaltern Linguistics,” a decolonial approach advocating for equitable and contextually responsive language policies and pedagogies. Founder of the Free Linguistics Conference and a former editor of TESOL Quarterly, he has extensive experience in teacher education and has led major international projects. His work, committed to “linguistics without borders,” challenges linguistic imperialism and promotes the value of local languages and knowledge systems in education.

Dr. Ali Usman Saleem is a Ph.D in English from University of Bedfordshire, UK and a SUSI scholar from University of Montana, USA. His research interests include Anglophone Pakistani Fiction, 9/11 and War on Terror discourse, Transcultural Studies and Digital Humanities. He has published book chapters with Routledge and Peter Lang on Transculturality, Paracolonialism and a nexus of terrorism and modern technology in the northern areas of Pakistan along with a number of research papers in peer reviewed journals. Currently he is working as a Professor of English at Government College University Faisalabad.

Dr. Benet Vincent is an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at Coventry University’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities, where he has taught since 2013. He leads undergraduate and postgraduate modules in English language teaching, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and computer-assisted language learning, and supervises PhD research using corpus methodologies. Prior to academia, he taught English as a Foreign Language internationally. His research focuses on applications of corpus linguistics, including academic writing support and discourse of Covid-19, and he coordinates the Corpus Linguistics at Coventry group. Benet is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Fatima Syeda is serving as Professor and Chairperson at the department of English, Forman Christian College University where she is serving since 2005. She holds a PhD in English Language & Literature from University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan with research on Men as Victims of Violence in Partition Fiction. Her academic interests include Masculinity Studies, South Asian Literature in English, Digital Literary Studies, & Minority Literature(s). She has organized major International Conferences, International Symposiums, and is an active researcher and speaker with numerous publications and keynote addresses to her credit.

Dr. Humaira Irfan is an Associate Professor of English at University of Education, Lahore. She earned her MS in Applied Linguistics and PhD in Sociolinguistics from the University of Glasgow, UK under an HEC foreign scholarship and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Malaya, Malaysia. With over 80 research publications and a poetry collection titled “A Soul’s Meditation”, she has received multiple international awards and fellowships, including from the universities of Exeter (UK) and Arcada University of Applied Sciences (Finland). A keynote speaker and trainer for PHEC and PJA, Dr. Irfan has extensive collaborations with universities across Asia, Europe, and the USA.

Jayakaran Mukundan, PhD, is Professor at UNITAR International University where he teaches and supervises students at post-graduate level. His main research interests are in ELT Materials, Teaching of Writing and Teacher Professional Development. Professor Mukundan received the Anugerah Akedemik Negara (National Award for Academic Excellence) in 2013 and has won Gold medals for his Textbook Evaluation software at the British Invention Show (London, 2009) and at IENA (Nuremberg, Germany, 2010). He was Visiting Research Fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK for several years where he supervised a PhD candidate to completion.

Kate Roy completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2008, conducting a Deleuzian comparative study of the works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leïla Sebbar. She has held postdoctoral research roles and received grants from the Universities of London, Tübingen, and Innsbruck, as well as from the DAAD, the Berlin State Library, and the Leverhulme Trust, including a Visiting Fellowship at Liverpool. She later lectured in German at the University of Leeds and remained an Honorary Research Fellow until 2018. Her recent work continues to explore diasporic and postcolonial writing, translation, and comparative literary and cultural studies.

Dr. Muhammad Shaban Rafi is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work addresses societal challenges through the lens of language. He has published widely with SAGE, Elsevier, Wiley, Routledge, Springer, and Emerald. He writes regular an op-ed for The Daily Times. He is currently serving as a Lead Guest Editor for Emerald and Springer journals, including Artificial Intelligence in Education and Frontiers of Digital Education. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2023–24) at the Center for Information Technology and Society, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.