Dr. Mircea Dumitru is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest (since 2004). Vice-president of the Romanian Academy since 2022. Executive Director of Romanian-US Fulbright Commission (since 2020). Rector of the University of Bucharest (2011- 2019). President of the European Society of Analytic Philosophy (2011 – 2014). President of the International Institute of Philosophy (2017 – 2021). Fellow of Academia Europea (since 2019), Corresponding Fellow of the Romanian Academy (2014-2021). Fellow of the Romanian Academy (since
2021). Minister of Education and Scientific Research (July 2016 – January 2017). Visiting Professor at Beijing Normal University (2017 – 2022). President of Balkan Universities Association (2019 – 2022).
He holds a PhD in Philosophy at Tulane University, New Orleans, USA (1998) with a topic in modal logic and philosophy of mathematics, and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Bucharest (1998) with a topic in philosophy of language. Invited Professor at several Universities from Europe, USA and China.
Main area of research: philosophical logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. His main publications include Modality and Incompleteness (UMI, Ann Arbor, 1998), which received the Mircea Florian Prize of the Romanian Academy); Logic and Philosophical Explorations (Humanitas, Bucharest, 2004, in Romanian); Words, Theories, and Things. Quine in Focus (ed.) (Pelican, 2009); article on the Philosophy of Kit Fine, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, the Third Edition, Robert Audi (ed.)
(Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Dr. Malcolm Guite is a poet and priest, and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. His books include Sounding the Seasons; Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury 2012) and Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder 2017). In 2023 he was awarded the Archbishop Lanfranc Medal by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has a YouTube series called A Spell in the Library.
Paper Title
‘A Poet in Narnia?’ how a Twenty-first century English poet, re-imagined himself as a poet in Narnia’
Dr. James Como (Ph.D. Columbia U.) is Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and Public Communication (the City University of New York). His literary and cultural criticism includes essays on rhetoric, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Peruvian society, Sigrid Undset, Thornton Wilder, and, most recently, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A founding member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society (1969), he has appeared in four television documentaries on Lewis and written five books on him, including C. S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C. S. Lewis and His Favorite Book (Winged Lion Press, 2022). In retirement he continues to lecture, to publish short stories, and to enjoy traveling with Alexandra, his wife of fifty-seven years. Together they have two children and two grandchildren and live in Manhattan.
Dr. Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College. He has written extensively on medieval linguistic and literary topics; recent books include Bagels, Bumf, and Buses: A Day in the Life of the English Language (OUP, 2019), The English Language: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2018), How English Became English (OUP, 2016), and Does Spelling Matter? (OUP, 2013). He has lectured widely on C.S. Lewis and was curator of the exhibition C.S. Lewis Words and Worlds (Magdalen College, 2024) and is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian, 2024).
Paper Title
C. S. Lewis and the reinvention of Medieval Literature
Dr. Alison Milbank is Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Nottingham, having taught previously at the Universities of Virginia and Cambridge. She is particularly interested in literature that questions the limits of the material world, particularly the Gothic from Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Literature (Macmillan, 1992) to God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Realism in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her monograph, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester University Press, 1998 & 2007) examines George MacDonald’s employment of the Commedia in imagining a positive purgatorial afterlife, while MacDonald is also shown to be an influence on Tolkien in her Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (T & T Clark, 2007). She has a strong interest in ecclesiology, with For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions(SCM, 2010), co-written with Andrew Davison and more recently, The Once and Future Parish(SCM, 2023) and is currently working on a genealogy of Anglican eco-theology and divine immanence from the Scientific Revolution onwards.
Paper Title
Varieties of Gothic and Platonism in C. S. Lewis and Susanna Clarke
Dr. Jim Beitler is Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and Professor of English at Wheaton College, where he holds the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought. His scholarship focuses on the rhetoric of Christian witness and writing as a spiritual activity, looking to C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Desmond Tutu, and other exemplary communicators as guides for faithful practice. Beitler is the author of three books—Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words (with Richard Hughes Gibson, 2020), Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church (2019), and Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States (2013)—and he teaches undergraduate courses on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien and Environmental Stewardship, and Christianity and Fantasy. He also serves as one of the hosts of the Wade Center Podcast.
Paper Title
“Responsive Each to Other’s Note”: Reading Lewis Reading Milton
