How could we better employ our mind, or place our labour, or spend our time, or pass our pilgrimage in this World, than in scholastical occupations?

Plenary Speakers

Maria de Jesus C. Relvas 
Universidade Aberta (Portugal)

Maria de Jesus C. Relvas, retired from teaching since July 2025, was Professor of English Studies at the Department of Humanities of Universidade Aberta (Distance Education University of Portugal), where she taught English Literature of the Renaissance, English Society and Culture, Masterworks of Western Literature, Themes of Classic Culture and Portuguese Classic Literature.

She is Associate Researcher at LE@D (Laboratory of Distance Education and e-Learning, Universidade Aberta) since 2007 and Associate Member of SEDERI since 1992.

Her areas of academic research and interest are Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Renaissance imagery and iconography, Victorianism, Distance Education and Digital Humanities.

She has participated in several research projects in Portugal and abroad, within the fields of Literature, Culture and Distance Education.

In 2025, the project she is currently leading at Universidade Aberta, Caminhos de Camões – Percurso de Luís Vaz de Camões em Realidade Virtual – was awarded a € 15.000,00 grant and the Seal of Approval by The Mission Structure for the Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Luís de Camões, created by the Portuguese Government.
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The following works can be counted among her publications: “Lear and Quijote, two wanderers on uneven paths”; “ ‘On such a full sea are we now afloat’: Travelling through Oceans, Writings and Images in Early Modern Times”; “Beholding a ‘Brave New World’. Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest”; “Beyond Time and Oblivion: Sir Robert Sidney’s autograph manuscript”; “Icons of Supremacy and the Birth of an Empire – Two Portraits of Elizabeth I”; “A Villain and a Monster – The Literary Portrait of Richard III by Thomas More and William Shakespeare”; “Evaluating Continuous Assessment Quality in Competence-Based Education Online: The case of the e-Folio” (co-author; EDEN 2009 Best Research Paper Award).

Jonathan Sell

Universidad de Alcalá (Spain)
Jonathan P. A. Sell is Full Professor of English Literature at the Universidad de Alcalá in Spain, where he teaches literary analysis, history, and literary translation. 

Sell’s chief field of research is early modern literature. He is author of Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (Ashgate, 2006), Conocer a Shakespeare (Laberinto, 2012) and a two-part essay on the Shakespearean sublime, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos (both Routledge, 2022), winner of the AEDEAN and ESSE book prizes. A collection of essays, The Universal Shakespeare Creed, co-edited with Marta Cerezo Moreno, is forthcoming (Routledge). Current lines of enquiry include the theological background to Enlightenment bardolatry and the role of misreading in literary criticism.

Sell has also published on contemporary British writers. He is author of Allusion, Identity and Community in Recent British Writing (Universidad de Alcalá, 2010), editor of Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor, with Daniela Rogobete and Alan Munton, of The Silent Life of Things (Cambridge Scholars, 2015). In addition, he has edited and translated Florence Farmborough’s La vida y la gente de la España nacional and Eleonora Tennant’s Viaje por España (both Espuela de Plata, 2017).

Cinta Zunino Garrido
Universidad de Jaén (Spain)

Cinta Zunino-Garrido is Senior Lecturer at the University of Jaén (Spain), where she mostly teaches English literature and culture of the English-speaking countries. Prof. Zunino-Garrido’s research has intensively focused on the study of the literature and culture of the early modern period, both in terms of her publication record and her participation in research projects with external funding. She has especially focused on Elizabethan drama, rhetoric and poetry, although she has also done research in contemporary English authors such as James Joyce or Angela Carter, and has also studied the relations between Spanish humanism and 17th-century England. Prof. Zunino-Garrido is the author of Mimesis and the Representation of Experience: Dramatic Theory and Practice in pre-Shakespearean Comedy 1560–1590 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), which was awarded the Best Publication in Literary Studies Prize by the Spanish Association for English and American Studies (AEDEAN) in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Best Publication in English Literature Award by the European Association of Studies in English (ESSE) in 2014. She has edited the first English translation of Benito Arias Montano’s The Practical Rule of Christian Piety (Bibliotheca Montaniana, 2017) and is currently preparing for the Modern Humanities Research Association (UK) a critical edition of Thomas Lodge’s Phillis: Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies and Amorous Delights (1593).