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Speaker Profiles
 Frances Binns
is the first Therapeutic and Specialised Play Consultant in the UK who
has worked with the Central Manchester Children’s Hospitals NHS Trust
for 25 years where she clinically leads a team of 40 play specialists.
This post involves referrals for children who have anxieties and fears
requiring intervention and complex illnesses chronic and acute,
including a training role to multi-disciplinary professionals in all
aspects of the value of therapeutic play in health care. She also
worked as a facilitator of 35 play practitioners for the North West
Play Benchmarking group at the University of Central Lancashire UK.
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 Deirdre Burke
is a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton.
She started as a secondary school RE teacher and spent over a decade in
teacher training. She completed her PhD thesis The Holocaust in
education: teacher and learner perspectives in 1998, and has researched
educational and religious topics related to the Holocaust. She is
currently engaged in a research project on Religions in Wolverhampton.
Deirdre has always made extensive use of humour in exploring religious
issues, making particular use of humour within a religious tradition to
help students engage with that tradition. This session on Story and
Humour within the Jewish Tradition will explore how humour provides
insights into Jewish worldviews, and how humour functions in the Jewish
historical experience.
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 Ed Dunkelblau
is a clinical psychologist, speaker and consultant. He works with
schools throughout the U.S. dealing with topics of Humor, Social
Emotional Literacy and School Safety. He also consults with major
corporations on the topics of Humour, Emotional Intelligence and
Productivity. He is contributing author to Handbook of Humour and
Psychotherapy: Advances in the Clinical Use of Humour (Book only) and
to Humour and Wellness in Clinical Intervention . His work has been
featured on CNN, in the New York Times and USA Today. Ed is past
president of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor and for the last ten years has produced the annual AATH conference across the USA.
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 Christian F. Hempelmann received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Purdue University
in 2003, specializing in humor studies and computational linguistics.
His dissertation, entitled "Paronomasic Puns: Target Recoverability
towards Automatic Generation," was supervised by Victor Raskin. Christian has been working in linguistic humor studies since 1996, received an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Hannover,
Germany, in 1998 with a thesis on "Linguistic Approaches to Humor: The
General Theory of Verbal Humor in Performance" supervised by Rainer
Schulze, and another M.A. in English from Youngstown State University
in 2000 with a thesis on "Incongruity and Resolution of Humorous
Narratives-Linguistic Humor Theory and the Medieval Bawdry of Rabelais,
Boccaccio, and Chaucer" supervised by Salvatore Attardo.
Apart from humor studies, his research interests include ontological
semantics, historical linguistics, and phonology. Christian won the
2003 ISHS emerging scholar award and recently joined the Coh-Metrix project of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis.
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 Birgit Hertzberg Kaare is professor of Folklore at Oslo University,
Norway. She has been working with humour from a culture perspective for
many years and has been on extensive fieldworks in northern Norway
collecting humour for the National Folklore Archive. She has also been
working with qualitative questionnaires about the use of humour in
daily life. This autumn she will give a course for students taking the
BA named “Humour and culture”. One other main field of research is the
impact of new technology on culture. At present she is working on a
interdisciplinary project named Digital Childhood.
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 Paul McDonald
is a Senior Lecturer in English, American Studies and Creative Writing
at the University of Wolverhampton. He teaches courses on various
aspects of humour including American humour and comedy writing. His
most recent critical publications are Fiction from the furnace: a hundred years of Black Country writing (2002) and The student guide to Philip Roth (2003). He has also published two comic novels, Surviving Sting (2001) and Kiss me softly, Amy Turtle (2004) and is currently editing a collection of short fiction showcasing new comic talent from the Midlands UK.
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 Graeme Ritchie studied pure mathematics at the University of Dundee and theoretical linguistics at the University of Essex before obtaining his PhD (in computational linguistics) from the University of Edinburgh
in 1977. From 1983 to July 2004 he was a member of academic staff at
the University of Edinburgh, and from 1st August 2004 he is a senior
research fellow in the Department of Computing at the University of Aberdeen.
He has worked in artificial intelligence and natural language
processing since 1973, publishing three books and over fifty papers.
His research into humour began in 1993 with the supervision of a
pioneering doctoral thesis on computational humour. Since then, he has
been developing a rigorous framework for analysing verbally expressed
humour, the subject of a book published by Routledge in 2003. During
academic year 2001-2002, he held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship on "Linguistic Modelling of Humour", and is currently principal investigator in a three-year project using computational humour to help children develop their linguistic skills.
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 Willibald Ruch, 2002 president of the International Society of Humour Studies (ISHS),
recently moved from Queens University Belfast, UK to the Department of
Psychology at Zurich University, Switzerland. He received his PhD from
the University of Graz, Austria in 1980 and later worked at the
University of Düsseldorf, in Germany. Between 1992 and 1998 he held a
Heisenberg-fellowship awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-DFG
(German Research Foundation) which he devoted to the study of the sense
of humour. The psychology of humour, laughter and cheerfulness has been
a focal point throughout his career and he has authored about 50
journal articles and book chapters on the subject and constructed
several humour tests. Recently he has been studying humour from a
perspective of positive psychology. He is a member of the editorial board of HUMOR--International Journal of Humor Research, co-editor of the humor research monograph series, and initiator of the humor pod in the positive psychology network. He edited and contributed several chapters to "The Sense of Humour: Explorations of a personality characteristic". A recent publication is the chapter on humour for the VIA Classification of Strengths Manual.
Throughout his work his aim has been to weave humour with adjacent
fields of inquiry while his interest in humour and laughter focus
primarily on the definition and measurement of the sense of humour,
deriving and validating a taxonomy of jokes and cartoons, the role of
emotion, mood temperament in humour, the study of the facial expression
in smiling and laughter, and more recently, the relationship between
humour, laughter and health. He is webmaster of the ISHS-website and of
the Humor Research website.
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 Jason Rutter,
is a sociologist at the Centre for Research on Innovation and
Competition at the University of Manchester UK. He has published on the
interaction between stand-up comedians and audience members since
completing his PhD in 1997 “Standup as Interaction: Performance and
Audience in Comedy Venues”. His current research and publication
interests centre around social aspects of the use of Information and
Communication Technologies especially issues of consumption, trust, and
interaction within domestic spaces.
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 Patty Wooten
RN BSN PHN is a nurse, a humorist and a professional clown. She
combines over thirty years of nursing experience together with her
understanding of the therapeutic benefits of humour to guide health
professionals, patients and families to create effective humour
programs that benefit body, mind and spirit. Patty has authored 3 books
about therapeutic humour and published over 50 articles in professional
journals. Her research on Humour and Nurse Burnout was presented at the
1990 ISHS meeting in Sheffield, England. Patty is past president of the
Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor and for the last ten years has produced the annual AATH conference across the USA.
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Faculty member: winner of the emerging scholar award 2002
 Giselinde Kuipers
received an M.A. in anthropology from Utrecht University and a PhD in
sociology from the University of Amsterdam. Her M.A. thesis was on
ethnic humour and her PhD was on social differences in the sense of
humour. She spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia to study the American sense of humour. She is currently
working as a research fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam,
researching American television comedy in Europe. She has published in
English and Dutch on humour, popular culture, television, and the
Internet.
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