conferences galore!

So, I think I posted something earlier about submitting some proposals to the Accio 2005 Harry Potter conference, in Reading, UK. I was supposed to hear back from them by the week of January 31st, and as of today, I hadn't heard anything, so I thought they hadn't accepted either of my proposed papers. However, it turns out that I had forgotten which email address I gave them, and I only checked that one today. They accepted me for a presentation called "Exploring the Language of Harry Potter", which is intended to be an overview of stylistic devices in the Harry Potter books. I will link the abstract on my website, for anyone who's interested.

Also, there's a Politeness Conference being hosted at the University of Nottingham this March, and one of my professors is a keynote speaker (he's been doing lots of work in impoliteness, and has gotten lots of attention for it recently). At the end of our pragmatics course last term, he told us all about it, and said that if anyone was interested, to email him around February, and we would get together a group of Lancaster people to go together. I emailed him recently, and so we're getting the plans ready for it. It looks like I'm pretty much the only student interested in it, so I will basically be going out there with Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, Geoff Leech, and a couple of others. These are heavyweights in the stylistics and pragmatics arenas, so that's pretty cool. And I've been waiting for a good way to get to know Mick Short better ... he's a personal hero of sorts. Should be exciting!

"You want the moon? Just say the word, and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Say, that's a pretty good idea. I'll give you the moon, [name]."
"I'll take it." (20 points, just 'cause it's such a great movie!)