Keynote speakers

Werner Wolf received his Habilitation (highest academic qualification) in Munich in June 1991. He is a founding member of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and is currently Professor and Chair of English and General Literature at the University of Graz, Austria, as well as Vice Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies at Graz (CIMIG). His main areas of research are literary theory (aesthetic illusion/immersion, narratology, and metafiction/metareference in particular), functions of literature, 18th- to 21st-century English fiction, as well as intermediality studies (more specifically relationships between literature and music and the visual arts). His publications include, besides numerous essays, reviews and contributions to literary encyclopedias, the monographs Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst (Aesthetic Illusion and the Breaking of Illusion in Fiction, 1993), The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Inter-mediality (1999), and Selected Essays on Intermediality (ed. Walter Bernhart, 2018). He is also (co-)editor of volumes 1, 3, 5, 11, 14, 15 and 19 of the book series "Word and Music Studies" (1999-forthcoming) as well as of volumes 1, 2, 4-6 and 11 of the series "Studies in Intermediality" (2006-2018). For more details, including his publications on the topic ‘music and narrativity’, see his homepage, hosted by the University of Graz. 

Tristian Evans graduated from Bangor University, Wales with a first-class BMus (Hons) degree in Music, and continued his studies there by embarking on the MA course and subsequently a Doctoral programme with the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, graduating in 2010 with a thesis that explored the use of minimalist and post-minimal music for film and television.

He has gained considerable experience teaching undergraduate and postgraduate modules, on a wide range of subject areas including music analysis, early music history, 19th- and 20th-century music history, composition and ethnomusicology. Research interests include minimalist and postminimal music, analysis, film music analysis, performance of early 20th century French piano music, and Welsh music.  Numerous papers have been delivered at international conferences and study days around the United Kingdom, and also in Belgium, Finland, Malta, Poland and the USA. He published a monograph on Philip Glass’s film music entitled Shared Meanings in the Film Music of Philip Glass: Music, Postminimalism and Multimedia (Routledge, 2015). Most recently, he has published numerous entries on Welsh music in the Companion to Welsh Music (Y Lolfa, 2018) and an entry on Philip Glass for The Grove Music Guide to American Film Music (Oxford University Press, 2019).

As a freelance pianist, he serves as an examiner for Trinity College London, and also works as a piano teacher. He is often invited to adjudicate in instrumental and vocal competitions in Wales. As a pianist, he became a Fellow of the Royal Schools of Music in 2016, following a recital in London specialising in the works of Maurice Ravel. He recently composed and livestreamed a multimedia work for piano as part of a creative environmental project in collaboration with Bangor University, M-Sparc Science Park, and the Welsh Federal College.

Peter Dayan is Professor of Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh. From 2014 to 2019, he was also Obel Visiting Professor at the University of Aalborg in Denmark. Over the past two decades, he has probably been to more conferences with “word” and “music” in the title than anyone else, and has been involved with many publishing projects in the field, including the Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and the Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (forthcoming 2021). His academic home territory is in French, but his outlook is resolutely comparative. He has supervised and examined many PhD theses linking music with literature from all over the world, including China, Italy, and America. 

The three books he has published since 2006 chart a journey. They begin with an examination of how literature and music use each other to define themselves as art, and end up, in The Music of Dada: A Lesson in Intermediality for Our Times (Routledge, 2020), with a theory of a universal circulation between media. He is currently working on For the Love of Art (a volume of essays), to be published by Legenda. He is retiring from his teaching post in the summer of 2021, but will be continuing with his research and supervision for another couple of years, contentedly watching the field flourish.