About 300 professors of English from some of the world's leading universities will meet in Malta for a five-day conference at the Old University Building, Valletta, from July 19 to 23, 2010. The academics are members of the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE) and the meeting is being convened by Peter Vassallo, who was elected president of the association in 2007.

The conference will comprise 18 sessions on different periods of English language and literature, ranging from medieval to contemporary literature, and from the history of the English language to discourse linguistics and the teaching of English at university level.

Two sessions will be held on writers and the Mediterranean respectively. Plenary speakers include Prof. John Carey from Merton College, Oxford and Prof. Dame Gillian Beer from Cambridge University.

Among the universities to be represented at the conference are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Toronto, Vancouver, New South Wales, Melbourne, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrew's, King's College, London, Warwick, Trinity College, Dublin, Cardiff, Moscow, St Petersburg, Heidelberg, Berlin, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Vienna, Paris, (Sorbonne) Nantes, Montpellier, Geneva, Zurich, Uppsala, Lund, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Bologna, Pisa, Verona, Salamanca, Barcelona, Leiden, Coimbra, Tokyo, Thessaloniki and Ankara.