IAFOR > The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities (ACAH) > ACAH2024 > Speakers

Speakers

The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities is a multidisciplinary conference held concurrently with The Asian Conference on the Social Sciences(ACSS) and The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies (ACCS). Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. Registration for either conference will allow participants to attend sessions in both.

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

Umberto Ansaldo

Curtin University, Australia
Grant Black

Chuo University, Japan
Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry

Central University of Gujarat, India
Johan Edelheim

Hokkaido University, Japan
Donald E. Hall

Binghamton University, United States
Joseph Haldane

The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
Ayako Harada

Nagoya University Graduate School of Law, Japan
Thor Kerr

Curtin University, Australia
Timothy Langley

Langley Esquire, Japan
Noriko Odagiri

Tokyo International University, Japan

Become a Speaker

Excellent plenary speakers are central to our conferences, ensuring that timely, innovative and engaging content is presented to our audiences around the world. If you would like to be considered for a speaking slot at one of our conferences, please apply below.

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Previous Speakers

View details of speakers at past ACAH conferences via the links below.

ACAH2023	ACAH2022	ACAH2021
ACAH2020	ACAH2019	ACAH2018
ACAH2017	ACAH2016	ACAH2015
ACAH2014	ACAH2013	ACAH2012
ACAH2011	ACAH2010

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Umberto Ansaldo

Curtin University, Australia

Biography

Professor Umberto Ansaldo is Head of School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University, reporting to the Provost. He was previously the Head of the School of　Literature, Art and Media at the University of Sydney, and the Head of the School of　Humanities at the University of Hong Kong.

Professor Ansaldo’s disciplinary roots are in linguistics – most specifically in the study of language contact, linguistic typology, and language documentation. He is the author of four books to date (with CUP, OUP, Routledge, and Stockholm University Press), has edited or co-edited a further 11 volumes and journal special collections, and has authored multiple journal articles and book chapters. His most recent output is the co-editorship of The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Routledge, 2021).

At the University of Hong Kong (HKU), Professor Ansaldo led the Humanities Area of Inquiry on the Common Core Curriculum Committee in HKU’s major revision of its curriculum (2010-2013), a time when, along with the University of Melbourne, HKU was leading in reimagining undergraduate curricula. As Chair of Linguistics, he was instrumental in establishing the Department in the top ten programs in Linguistics (QS rankings), and number one in Hong Kong. He also sat on HKU’s Senate and HKU’s Campus Development & Planning Committee. In the latter role, he was involved in the completion of the new Humanities Tower at the Centennial Campus, and the physical relocation of the Faculty from the Main Building.

At the University of Sydney, Professor Ansaldo sat on the University Executive Research Committee and led his School through a transformative period in terms of curriculum innovation and research engagement. He was in charge of overseeing the incorporation of the Sydney College of the Arts into the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. This included integrating existing and developing new curricula, forging research synergies, and leading the renovation of a purpose-built facility, with associated financial, technical, and HR responsibilities. He also piloted the first three micro-credit units in the Faculty.

Professor Ansaldo has throughout his career secured competitive research grants and leveraged industry funding for the advancement of the humanities and social sciences. One of his proudest achievements was his role in securing financial support to develop and host an exhibition on language and the brain, the “Talking Brains” exhibition that launched successfully at the CosmoCaixa in 2017. This type of engagement and championing of the Humanities is what Umberto is most passionate about.

Umberto lived and worked in Sweden, The Netherlands, Singapore, and Hong Kong, before moving to Australia. He speaks seven languages including Mandarin – he is well-acquainted with Asia and has conducted fieldwork in Muslim communities of the Indian Ocean, and has strong international networks in Southeast Asia, Japan, and Europe. One of the factors that attracted him to Curtin is the University’s Global Vision, which he believes is the future path of higher education and research.

Grant Black

Chuo University, Japan

Biography

Professor Grant Black is a professor in the Faculty of Commerce at Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, where he has taught Global Skills and Global Issues since 2013. Grant is engaged in diverse roles as a global manager, systems builder, executive leader and university professor. His research and teaching areas include global management skills, intercultural intelligence (CQ) and organisational management. He also has taught Japanese Management Theory at J. F. Oberlin University (Japan), and a continuing education course in the Foundations of Japanese Zen Buddhism at Temple University Japan. Previously, he was Chair of the English Section at the Center for Education of Global Communication at the University of Tsukuba where he served in a six-year post in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds a BA Highest Honors in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara; an MA in Japanese Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a Doctor of Social Science (DSocSci) from the Department of Management in the School of Business at the University of Leicester. Dr Black is a Chartered Manager (CMgr), the highest status that can be achieved in the management profession in the UK. In 2018, he was elected a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute (FCMI) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). Grant is President of Black Inc. Consulting (Japan), a Tokyo-based firm specialising in international and intercultural project management, communication projects, and executive leadership and training. He is the director of the Nippon Academic Management Institute (NAMI) and the author of Education Reform Policy at a Japanese Super Global University: Policy Translation, Migration and Mutation (Routledge, 2022). He serves as a Vice-President for the International Academic Forum (IAFOR).

Panel Presentation (2024) | Ethics and Care in Sole Custody Policy

Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry

Central University of Gujarat, India

Biography

Dr Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry is an educationist, author, and poet who teaches in the Centre for English Studies at Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India. She was recognised as an Inspired Teacher for the President of India’s In-residence Program at Rashtrapati Bhawan, New Delhi in June 2015. Throughout her career, she has largely been interested in the areas of marginal literature, studies of violence, trauma, and women's studies. She has also been actively engaged in Comparative Studies and translations from Punjabi into English and was a member of the Global Guru Granth Sahib Translation project at Sikh Research Institute, United States from 2018 to 2023. Her most recent work has been focused on violence studies, specifically engaging with discourses on the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi.

She is an editor of Black November: Writings on Anti-Sikh Massacres of 1984 and the Aftermath (2019); Patrick White: Critical Issues (2014); co-editor of Violence, Subversion and Recovery: Women Writers from the Sub-continent and Around (2019, with Rachel Bari); co-editor of Seeking Nanak : Commemorating the 551st Birth Anniversary of Guru Nanak Devji (2021, with Paramjeet Singh and Charanjeet Kaur), and the author of Life Sketch and Teachings of Guru Teghbahadar Sahib (2023, with Jaswant Singh) and Texting the Scripture: Sri Guru Granth Sahib and the Visionary Poetics of Patrick White (2016). She has also released a collection of poems, Forbidden Button and Other Poems (Signorina Publications, 2020).

Dr Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry also conducts talks on women's concerns, well-being, and mindfulness. Her work engages strongly with her firm belief that in a world full of pressures, there is an innate energy within human beings that can be positively channelised into making this world a better place. Through this principle, she engages in discourses on various aspects of spirituality, learnings from Guru Granth Sahib, and real-life memoirs.

She has delivered lectures around the globe, in various institutions and different countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, America, Pakistan, United Kingdom, and Spain. Most recently, she was invited as a guest faculty at University of Barcelona, Spain, where she delivered the 2023 Doireann MacDermott Lecture in April 2023.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | Possibilities of Change: Surviving the Times of Conflict

Johan Edelheim

Hokkaido University, Japan

Biography

Johan R. Edelheim (PhD) is a Professor of Tourism and Media at the Research Faculty of Media and Communication and the Graduate School of International Media, Communication and Tourism Studies at Hokkaido University, Japan.

After more than a decade working in hospitality and tourism industries around the globe, Professor Edelheim transitioned to teaching in secondary and tertiary education in these fields. He later managed the largest tourism educational institute in northern Europe for five years. Japan, where he relocated in 2019, is the eighth country in which Professor Edelheim has lived and worked.

Professor Edelheim has diplomas and degrees in education, philosophy, cultural studies, hospitality, and business. Behind his research lies a deeply rooted aim for humanism and equality. Most of his studies focus on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), especially in connection with tourism and hospitality Higher Education; Critical Tourism Studies (CTS) in regards to climate change, equality, identity, ethnicity and care; and foundational philosophies in tourism, with a special interest in ontology and axiology.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | Navigating Polarising Discourses: Cultivating Values-Based Literacies in a Multimodal Society

Donald E. Hall

Binghamton University, United States

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), United States. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, United States, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, United States. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of IAFOR.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | The Work of the University in Perilous Times

Joseph Haldane

The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s global business and academic operations.

Dr Haldane’s research and teaching is on history, politics, international affairs and international education, as well as governance and decision making, and he is a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance. Since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and, since 2017, Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within the University.

In 2020 Dr Haldane was appointed Honorary Professor of UCL (University College London), through the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction. He holds Visiting Professorships in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade, and at the Doshisha Business School in Kyoto, where he teaches Ethics and Governance on the MBA, and is a member of the Value Research Center. He is also a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa.

Professor Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations to universities and conferences globally, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s and Cabinet Office, and oversaw the 2021 Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned study on Infectious Diseases on Cruise Ships.

Dr Haldane has a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, Sciences Po Paris, and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, and the schools of Journalism at both Sciences Po Paris, and Moscow State University.

From 2012-2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu), and since 2015 has been a Trustee of HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2015. He lives in Japan and holds a black belt in Judo.

Ayako Harada

Nagoya University Graduate School of Law, Japan

Biography

Dr Ayako Harada is Professor of Sociology of Law at Nagoya University Graduate School of Law, Japan. She earned her doctoral degree (LL.D) from Kyoto University in 2007. Throughout her academic career, she has been engaged in research on children and family law issues involving child abuse and neglect, child custody, and adoption. She has published ample research on this topic, including “Family Reorganization in the Japanese Family Conciliation System: Resolving Divorce Disputes Involving Minor Children,” 33(1) International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, 75-103, 2019. In 2023, her book entitled Protecting the Children's Right to Be Heard: Children's Right in Family Justice System was released, for which she received the Onaka Ikuo Family Law Research Award in 2024.

Panel Presentation (2024) | Ethics and Care in Sole Custody Policy

Thor Kerr

Curtin University, Australia

Biography

Thor Kerr is Dean Global, ASEAN at Curtin University and the International Director of its School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. Dr Kerr’s research draws on approaches from media and cultural studies with a focus on representations of infrastructure and communities on the eastern rim of the Indian Ocean. His teaching experience has focussed on postgraduate education,including the development, implementation, and coordination of master’s programs and research student supervision.

Dr Kerr has published a number of books, including To the Beach: Community Conservation and its Role in ‘Sustainable Development’ (2015) and Setting up the Nyoongar Tent Embassy: A Report on Perth Media (2013). He served as Lead Editor for Urban Studies: Border and Mobility (2019) and Indian Ocean Futures: Communities, Sustainability and Security (2016). Dr Kerr was also Guest Editor for issue 37(5) of the Q1 journal Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (2023) and for Coolabah journal’s Reimagining Australia editions (2018). His articles and essays have been published in a variety of research journals, including Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Media Practice and Education, Media International Australia, Somatechnics, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Journal of Historical Geography, Thesis Eleven, From the European South and contributed to broader media outlets, including The Conversation and The Jakarta Post.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | Satellite Constellations and National Communities

Timothy Langley

Langley Esquire, Japan

Biography

With 40+ years of experience in public affairs in Japan, Timothy Langley is the founder and driving force behind Langley Esquire, K.K. He leads the firm’s government and corporate outreach, advances stakeholder engagement, and crafts public affairs strategies for company clients.

Timothy Langley holds law degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Denver in the United States, as well as from Tohoku University, Japan. He combines a comprehensive understanding of international law with a unique perspective gained from decades working in and alongside the Japanese government. Langley was the first foreign national to work in the National Diet, serving as a policy aide to former Foreign Minister Nakayama Taro. He has developed and maintained contacts with senior politicians in all major parties since.

Langley has served as a political attaché for United States presidents and diplomats when they visit Japan, coordinating meetings with senior figures in the Japanese government. He has also served as General Counsel and Director of Public Affairs for Apple Computer and General Motors Asia-Pacific, supporting their operations in Japan. Companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100 firms have relied on his expertise to navigate Japan’s political and legal environment.

Panel Presentation (2024) | Ethics and Care in Sole Custody Policy

Noriko Odagiri

Tokyo International University, Japan

Biography

Noriko Odagiri is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Tokyo International University where she teaches clinical psychology within the university’s counselling course. She holds a PhD in Psychology and is a certified clinical psychologist, a certificated public psychologist, and has been as an ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) mediator for the Hague Child Abduction Convention in Japan since 2014.

She has served as a Visiting Professor at Willamette University, United States from 2011 to 2013. She participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) arranged by the United States Department of State, visiting Washington DC, Florida, and Oregon for research on the legal practice of international child abduction in December 2016.

Currently, she provides therapy to divorced or separated parents who have difficulty with childcare and parent-child relationships, and counsels children experiencing parental disputes. Additionally, she provides co-parenting programs after divorce, creating an app for participants in this program, and runs a visitation centre with a lawyer in Tokyo.

Panel Presentation (2024) | Ethics and Care in Sole Custody Policy