Bakhtiar Sadjadi obtained his PhD in English from the University of Exeter and has a PhD in Philosophy from University of Pune. He is Associate Professor of English Language and Literatrue at University of Kurdistan. He currently works at the Department of English Literature and Linguistics in the University of Kurdistan in Sanandaj. He is the Head of the first and, for the present, the only Department of Kurdish Language and Literature in Iran. Focusing on literary and cultural theory and criticism, he has authored books and papers in Kurdish, English, and Persian. Sadjadi conducts researches in Literary Criticism, Cultural Theory, English Literature, and Kurdish Language and Literature. His main interest is the study of language, ideology, the unconscious, subjectivity, and identity. The question of subjectivity formation and identity construction and representation in literary and artistic works with reference to sociocultural changes is central to his researches.

Professor Jalal Sokhanvar took a BA (1967) in English Language and Literature at the University of Mashhad, followed by MA in English Literature at Senate House U. of London and a PhD on American Literature at the University of Lille. He then joined the English department at Shahid Beheshti University (SBU) in 1976. He has interests in Philosophy of Literature, American literature and Literary Criticism, teaching courses in Literary Criticism, Poetry and Philosophy of Literature. During his time at SBU, he has worked widely in student support and teaching practice, and was head of curriculum development committee at the Ministry of Higher Education. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Critical Language & Literary Studies, and has published books and articles on English Literature, Literary Criticism and Modern Drama.

Éric Athenot is professor of American literature at Université Paris-Est Créteil. He translated the first-ever French translation of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass. After a thesis defended in 1995 on the work of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Éric Athenot devotes most of his research to 19th century American poetry. His activities have focused for the past twenty years on Walt Whitman (1819-1892), to whom he has devoted a monograph, numerous articles and communications and whose work he translates for José Corti editions. For a few years now, he has also been interested in the work of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), which he willingly puts alongside that of Whitman. He has also published works on contemporary American fiction (Richard Powers, Mary Caponegro, Rikki Ducornet).

Jaffer Sheyholislami’s research, supervision and teaching evolve around two main areas of applied linguistics and discourse studies: critical discourse studies (CDS) and sociolinguistics. After years of radio broadcasting in Iran, he completed his first Canadian degree at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario, in Library and Information Science, in 1993. After completing his B. A. in general linguistics—concurrent with a Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language— he taught English to newcomers in Ottawa for several years. In the meantime, He devoted his MA research to a Systemic Functional Linguistics-informed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of North American news discourse around international events. He continued to employ CDS/CDA in his PhD research, focusing on identity formation practices of Kurdish new media (specifically satellite TV and the Internet). The results of this and other related research projects have been published in a monograph, Kurdish Identity, Discourse and New Media, Palgrave Macmillan (2011), in addition to peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes published in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. He has continued to conduct research, supervise, and teach in the area of Critical Discourse Studies, in the past several years he has immersed himself in sociolinguistics, especially in relation to Kurdish, an area in which he was interested long before he entered academia. He is especially interested in language policy and planning, language and identity, mother-tongue education, linguistic landscape, and language ideologies. His works in these areas have appeared in over a dozen refereed journals, peer-reviewed edited collections, and major encyclopaedia and handbooks. It is because of these diverse interests that he has been privileged to carry out graduate supervision in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Iraq. In 2012, he was nominated for the Capital Educator’s Award and in 2016; he was awarded the Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award at Carleton.

Hashem Ahmadzadeh is presently an Associate Professor in Middle East Studies, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. He got his Bachelor degree in English from Zahedan University in 1985. Afterwards he settled in Sweden, where he received his Bachelor degree in political sciences in Uppsala University. In 1996 he got his Master degree in the same department and in 2003 he finished his PhD successfully. His doctoral thesis, Nation and Novel: A Study of Kurdish and Persian Narratives Discourse, was translated into Turkish in 2004 by Azad Zana Gundogan It was also translated into Persian by Bakhtiar Sadjadi in 2007. His other works include a translation of Dr. Abbas Vali's Genealogies of the Kurds: Constructions of Nation and National Identity in Kurdish Historical Writing ,The Kurds and their Others: Fragmented Identity and Fragmented Politics into Kurdish as well as Paul Auster's The Red Notebook. Ahmadzadeh has contributed to referred international journals with his essays on modern Kurdish novel and literary criticism.

Nazand Begikhani is a leading researcher on gender-based violence and has conducted research on many aspects of violence and gender relations, including honour-based violence and honour killings in Iraqi Kurdistan Region and inside the UK Kurdish diaspora, rape and sexual violence in Iraq and Syria, domestic violence, and family policy and practice in Kurdistan. She is currently researching gender-based violence and displacement, theorising women and war, sexual violence and slavery in the Middle East, focusing on ISIS war strategies. Nazand has worked as an expert advisor and mentor with a range of national and international NGOs and government departments, including, the United Nation’s Assistance Mission to Iraqi (UNAMI), the UN Women, the UK Metropolitan Police, Swedish Ministry of Integration, Kurdistan Regional Government Commission on Violence against Women, Kurdish Women’s Action against Honour Killings, Kurdish Women’s Rights Watch and Amnesty International. She has been a visiting Professor at the University of Soran, Iraqi Kurdistan.  She is also an international adviser to Kurdistan Region’s PM on higher education and gender, as well as an expert witness and member of the Women’s Rights Monitoring Board in Iraqi Kurdistan Region. She was, for a long period, involved in the campaign against honour-based violence in Europe and has worked in close collaboration with Kurdish and Middle Eastern organisations. Among many conferences, she addressed the 1995 Beijing fourth World conference on women, the UN’s meeting with the World March of Women 2000, the Paris international conference on Kurdish women (2002), and Sweden’s international conference on honour killings (2004). 

Seyed Mohammad Marandi is professor of North American Studies and dean of the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran. Seyed Mohammad Marandi is a graduate of the University of Tehran and Birmingham University (UK), where his PhD thesis was entitled Lord Byron, his critics and Orientalism, described as a “response to Edward Said’s Orientalism”. Marandi has appeared as a political and social commentator on international news networks such as PBS, RT, ABC, CGTN, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Press TV.

Alireza Anushiravani is Full Professor of Comparative Literature and Literature and Film and Literary Criticism. He has received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is currently teaching at Shiraz University, and is an affiliated member of the Academy of Persian Language & Literature, Iran. He spent his sabbatical year in 2009-10 at the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is currently working on a book length project in Persian on "Theories and Methodology of Comparative Literature: From 19th century to Present".