Vassilis Sabatakakis is appointed as Associate Professor in Greek (Modern Greek) studies and serves as Director of Research and Research Education at the Centre for Language and Literature of Lund University in Sweden. His research interests and publications are in morphological, stylistic variations, literature, Greek travel literature and travel literature on the historical Greek regions, the Swedish travelers, and Philhellenism in Scandinavia. He has translated Greek poetry and prose in Swedish and his work has been anthologized in books and collective volumes. He manages the research project of master’s and PhD level candidates at Lund University and has taken part in Doctoral Advisory Committees at the Universities of Crete and Ioannina. He is the editor-in-chief of the annual peer review journal Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies.

In 2018 he was elected president of the European Society of Modern Greek Studies. Dr Sabatakakis and three participants as co-researches from different disciplines participated in a research project for the traveler and orientalist J. J. Björnståhl (1731-1779) that was funded by the Swedish Research Council. The outcome of this research is a volume entitled "Björnståhls resa: Europa och Konstantinopel 1767-1779" published in December 2021.

Dorota Michułka, Associate Professor (Institute of Polish Studies, University of Wroclaw). Head of the Department of Teaching Polish Language and Literature - Polish scholar and historian; member of the Didactic Team of the Polish Language Council of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Main Committee of the Olympiad of Polish Literature and Language for Elementary Schools (IBL PAN) and a member of IRSCL, MSA (Memory Studies Association) and the Children's History Society; author of over 180 publications in Poland and abroad (e.g. Routledge or Brill), including two monographs (the last one „Ad usum Delphini. On school literary education - past and prezent”, 2013); editor-in-chief of an international scientific journal Filoteknos. Children's Literature - Cultural Mediation - Anthropology of Childhood"; editor, foreword author and co-editor of 16 books published in Poland and abroad (e.g. On the Fringes of Literature and Digital Media Culture. Perspectives from Eastern and Western Europe Series, with B. Kalla and P. Poniatowska, (Brill 2018); she works on literary education, literature for children and young people, school reception of literature and culture, humanistic education in socio-cultural perspective; scholarship holder of, among others: Munich Jugendbibliothek, Germany (2017) and Illinois Wesleyan Univeristy, Bloomington (Faculty of Russian and German Languages, Department of Education (2018); in 2000- 2005 she worked as a Polish language teacher in Finland (Slaavilainen Filologian Laitos, Tampereen Yliopisto, Suomi), where she also taught Polish literature and culture.

 Photo by Leslie Lausch

XU XI 許素細 (b. 1954) is a former Indonesian national of Chinese descent from Hong Kong who became a U.S. national at the age of 33. An author of fifteen books — five novels, nine collections of fiction and essays and one memoir — she is considered one of Asia’s leading writers in English. She also edited five anthologies of Asian and Hong Kong writing. Forthcoming is a new collection, Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations (Signal 8, pub date: Nov 1, 2022); recent titles include The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021), This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (Nebraska 2019), Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (Signal 8, 2018) and the novel That Man in Our Lives (C&R, 2016). She currently holds the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is a founding partner of Authors at Large, Inc. Previously, she also co-directed the International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation in prose at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, and was Writer-in-Residence at City University of Hong Kong where she established the first low-residency MFA in Creative Writing in Asia. A diehard transnational, she long inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. Prior to 1998, she had an 18-year corporate career in marketing & management and held positions at several multinationals in the U.S. and Asia. She now splits her life between the state of New York and the rest of the world. Follow her @xuxiwriter on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Gioacchino Lavanco, Professor of Psychology, is the Director of the Department of Psychology, Pedagogy and Formation Sciences (DSPPEFF) at the University of Palermo. He leads research teams, related to different disciplines of Psychology. He has to his credit more than 50 books and 300 studies in different languages. He is President of the Centro Siciliano Sturzo.

Dr María Alcantud-Díaz has got a PhD in English Philology from the University of Valencia (Spain). She has many years of teaching experience at all stages of Education, being currently a Professor in the University of Valencia (Spain) at the Department of Didactics of Language and Literature of the Teacher Training Faculty where she is also the Vice Dean for Internationalization and Cooperation to Development. She is the Director of the Cadre for Cooperation and Sustainable Development (of the people axis) at the University of Valencia. Dr Alcantud-Díaz is the founder of the TALIS research group (proyectotalis.com/). Her research focuses on innovation in foreign languages learning by combining languages teaching, literary and intercultural education and Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship.