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 and Literary Criticism at University of Kurdistan. He currently works at the Department of English Literature and Linguistics in the University of Kurdistan in Sanandaj. He was the Head of the first and, for the present, the only Department of Kurdish Language and Literature in Iran from 2015 to 2020. 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 constructed and represented in literary and artistic works and cultural practices. The question of subjectivity formation and identity construction and representation in literray works with reference to sociocultural changes is central to his research.

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

Professor 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.

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).

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.

Zakarya Bezdoode received his PhD in English Language and Literature from Shahid Beheshti University, Iran. He teaches English Literature at the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Kurdistan. He is interested in cultural studies and conducts research on subjectivity and identity in contemporary English and Kurdish fiction. He is writiting fiction too, and his first collection of short stories in Kurdish, Dialogue, was published in 2018.