The Tolkien Society’s Annual Dinner Guest Speaker will speaking on the evening of Saturday 13th April at our event in Cambridge.
We’re pleased to announce Andrew Higgins as our annual Guest of Honour.
Dr. Andrew Higgins is the Director of Development at Imperial War Museums. He is an award-winning Tolkien scholar having published extensively on the works and language invention of Tolkien and other related authors and creators of fantasy and speculative texts. In 2012, Andrew received his PhD from Cardiff Metropolitan University with his thesis exploring the earliest versions of Tolkien’s Middle-earth world-building with a specific focus on the first languages he invented for this world. In 2016, he co-edited and published with Professor Dimitra Fimi A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Language Invention published by HarperCollins. Subsequent publications included chapters in A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honour of Verlyn Flieger (Gabro Head Press 2018), Sub-Creating Arda: Tolkien and Literary World-Building edited by Professor Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger (Walking Tree Press 2018) and most recently two chapters exploring the language invention of the Star Trek and Star Wars worlds in new editions from Vernon Press edited by Dr. Amy H. Sturgis and Emily Strand.
Each year Andrew gives papers at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo Michigan and The International Medieval Conference in Leeds for which he has organised the Tolkien at Leeds sessions for the last four years. Andrew has taught an online course for Signum University on Language Invention through Tolkien which he will be repeating in the near future! He is on the editorial board of both Mallorn and The Journal of Tolkien Research and is visiting guest lecturer on fundraising at the Accademia La Scala in Milan.
His talk to the Society in honour of the publishing of the new extended version of Tolkien’s Letters will be Epistolary Glossopoeisis: Tolkien’s Letter Writing and Language Invention.
