Acknowledgements

When I ran for the post of President of the Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM) in 2020, I ran on the theme of promoting diversity in this UNESCO-affiliated academic society and beyond. Naturally, when I bid for and was asked by the FILLM to host the 28th edition of its triennial congress at the University of Vienna, I chose diversity as the theme of the congress. A diverse set of papers was presented at the conference, mainly in an online mode at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is fourteen of these papers that have made it into this volume.

I would like to acknowledge the immense efforts and sacrifice by many people that led to this publication on linguistic, literary, and cultural diversity. I begin with the FILLM committee in charge of selecting bids for conferences, and thank them for selecting Vienna as the venue for the 2020 conference. I thank the Dean of the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the time, Prof. Melanie Malzahn, for enthusiastically supporting the conference in various ways, including funding aspects of it. The organization of the conference itself benefitted a lot from the active participation of my graduate students including Anissa Strommer, Zhang Yingliang, and Carlo Butera. Anissa was beginning to coordinate the paper submission process but suddenly had to leave for another job.

Dr. Carola Koblitz continued from where Anissa left and was instrumental in communicating with all the authors for their full papers to be reviewed and selected for this volume. We thank all the reviewers who helped us select quality papers for the volume. Mary Bodomo proofread the entire volume and we are very grateful to her. The Series Editor for FILLM Series in Languages and Literatures, Prof. Haun Saussy, provided valuable input throughout the process towards improving the submissions. Ms Isja Conen at John Benjamins has seamlessly coordinated the publication process and we are grateful for her efficiency.

Finally, special thanks go to each of the authors for their patience in us letting them revise their papers several times for the past two years. A Dagaare proverb says: “Late dinner is always better than going hungry for the evening”. Here comes late but well-cooked, delicious dinner of fourteen exciting chapters!