Call for Submissions: The Richard M. Hogg Prize 2026
The International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) is pleased to invite submissions for the Richard M. Hogg Prize, awarded annually since 2008 in honour of Professor Richard M. Hogg.
The prize recognizes outstanding research in the field of English language and linguistics by early-career scholars, defined as PhD students or post-doctoral researchers who have completed their doctorate within the past two years at the time of submission. Candidates must also be members of ISLE.
The award is given to the best paper on any topic related to the study of English. The paper should not have been published before (except possibly in a departmental working paper or the like), nor should it have been submitted for publication elsewhere (and it should not be submitted for publication until after the prize outcome). The winner will receive £500, and the paper will be published on the ISLE website. In addition, the winner will be encouraged to submit the prize-winning paper—revised where appropriate in line with judges' or referees' comments—for competitive review for publication in a journal closely associated with the aims of the Society.
The deadline for submissions is 15 May 2026. The winner will be announced by 31 July 2026.
Further details—including formatting requirements, style guidelines, and examples of past winning papers—are available on the ISLE website.
The ISLE Summer School 2026 will take place at Uppsala University, Sweden, from 7th to 13th June 2026. The Summer School theme is 'English in transition: Socio-cultural encounters across time and space'. The academic programme includes courses, plenaries, roundtable disucssions, poster sessions, expert consultancy, and a day trip to see selected runic inscriptions in the area.
Our six courses and their instructors are as follows. You can opt for three courses in total (one of 1 or 2, one of 3 or 4, and one of 5 or 6):
1. Historical sociopragmatics of Irish English
Patricia Ronan (TU Dortmund)
2. Corpus linguistics and the evolution of style in English
Dan McIntyre (Uppsala University) and Brian Walker (Queen’s University Belfast)
3. Genre variation and the study of change: Challenges and rewards
Erik Smitterberg (Uppsala University)
4. Studying grammatical change with the Penn parsed corpora of historical English
George Walkden (University of Konstanz)
5. Studying language variation and change in handwritten texts
Peter J. Grund (Yale University)
6. Psycholinguistics and language change: Novel interdisciplinary insights
Marianne Hundt (University of Zurich)
We will also have four plenary lectures by Patricia Ronan, Erik Smitterberg, Marianne Hundt and Peter J. Grund, and roundtables led by Dan McIntyre and Nina Tahmasebi.
For full details of the programme, please see the Summer School website:
ISLE has made available a limited number of bursaries for graduate students/early career researchers who wish to attend in person. The bursary consists of a fixed sum to partly cover travel costs and accommodation, and the registration fee will be waived. For details of the eligibility criteria and how to apply, please go to the website above and navigate to the 'Deadlines and registration' section where you will find a link to the necessary information. The deadline for bursary applications is 30th November 2025.
The recording of the ISLE Forum on "Outreach with Impact: Linguistics in the Public Sphere" with Celeste Rodríguez Louro (moderated by Martin Schweinberger) is now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FKvCJqipc-4
The next ISLE Online Forum will take place on 12 November 2025, 6:00pm (CET): Julia Schlüter, Elen Le Foll & Katharina Deckert - "Innovations in Teaching Digital Data Literacies for Linguistics" (Zoom link tba).
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Some of the events at ISLE8 were livestreamed and are now available on the ISLE YouTube channel. This includes: Presidential address by Bernd Kortmann: English linguistics in the next quarter century: Prospects, problems, promises Plenary lecture by Alexandra D’Arcy: Unbroken sequences of language transmission and the child as a ‘linguistic historian’ Panel discussion: From ISLE1 to ISLE8 and beyond Plenary lecture by Daniela Landert: “what the seid Sere Harry entendith to do therin I knowe not”: Claims of no knowledge in the history of English ISLE prizes presentations Plenary lecture by Graeme Trousdale: The surprising English language |
The recording of the ISLE Forum on "How Much Room for Non-Mainstream Approaches in (English) Linguistics?" with Axel Bohmann, John Booth, and Elizabeth Hanks is now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1DE8ajd1Hkc
ISLE is excited to announce the winners of the ISLE Teaching Innovation and ISLE Outreach Prizes!
Congratulations to the first winner of the ISLE Teaching Innovation Prize: Julia Schlüter from the University of Bamberg. Learn more about her winning project "Empowering Non-Native English Language Professionals" here.
Elen Le Foll (University of Cologne) received an honorable mention for her project "Data Analysis for the Language Sciences: A Very Gentle Introduction to Statistics and Data Visualisation in R" (find the teaching material she developed here).
Congratulations to the first winner of the ISLE Outreach Prize: Celeste Rodríguez Louro from the University of Western Australia! You can find her winning outreach portfolio here.
More information on the ISLE Prizes:
The recording of the ISLE Forum on "Many Shades of Ink: The Study of Late Modern Biographical Discourse as a Journey of Investigation and Discovery" with Marina Dossena, Nuria Calvo Cortés and Massimo Sturiale is now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Xdcu1-sYa2Y
