About 180 distinguished professors of English from prestigious universities from 32 countries will be meeting in Malta in the third week of July for the Triennial Conference of the International Association of Professors of English (IAUPE), which is being organised in collaboration with the University. The conference is being convened by Peter Vassallo, Professor of English at the University and president of the association.

The five-day conference, from July 19 to 23 at the Old University Building in Valletta, will be addressed by distinguished scholars in this field of study. The plenary speakers are Prof. Dame Gillian Beer (Cambridge) and Prof. John Carey (Oxford).

The conference programme, which includes 18 different sections, is rich and varied, and ranges from Anglo-Saxon literature to the contemporary writers.

Papers will be read on the literature of the Middle Ages; Shakespeare and the Renaissance; 17th- and 18th-century literature; the Romantics; the Victorians; the Moderns; Modern and contemporary American literature; Contemporary British writers; and writers and the Mediterranean. There will also be four sections on English language studies and linguistics, including semantics and discourse linguistics.

The universities to be represented at the conference are Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Warwick, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Illinois, Innsbruck, Heidelberg, Munich, Cologne, Vienna, Uppsala, Toronto, British Columbia, Melbourne, Sydney, Moscow, St Petersburg, Helsinki, Lund, Gothenburg, Lausanne, Zurich, Geneva, Madrid, Zaragoza, Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Florence, Milan, Bologna, Venice, Montpellier, Paris, Lyon, Beijing and Tokyo.