Janolah Karimi Motahar (born 1964) is an Iranian scholar of Russian language and literature and a professor in the Department of Russian Language and Literature at the University of Tehran. He earned a B.A. from the University of Tehran and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Moscow State University. His textbooks and monographs are widely used in Iranian universities, and he has served as editor-in-chief of the Pazhuhesh-namah-ye Enteqadi-ye Motun va Barnameh-hā-ye ‘Olum-e Ensāni (Critical Research Journal of Humanities Texts and Curricula). From 2009 to 2011, he was the director of the University of Tehran Press. Karimi Motahar’s publications span pedagogy, literary theory, and Russian literary history, including Russian on the Road (2000; 15th ed. 2009), Practical Use of Motion Verbs in Russian (2002), The Qur’an in Alexander Pushkin’s Poetry (2005), Theory of Literature (2007), History of Russian Literature to the Nineteenth Century (2009), Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (2009), Russian Literature (2009), Pushkin and the East (2011), An Introduction to Literature (2012; rev. 2014), Nikolai Gumilyov and the East (2012), Saadi and Russian Poets (2017), and Hafez and Russian Poets (2018). His translations include Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, works by Lermontov and Shukshin, and selections from Ivan Bunin.

Ali Salami, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Tehran and the editor of Research in Contemporary World Literature. His research spans gender studies, discourse analysis, modern drama, Shakespeare, and postcolonial literature. Salami has earned acclaim for his English translations of classical Persian poets including Hafez, Rumi, Attar, Ferdowsi, and Khayyam, bridging Persian and Western literary traditions. His academic work has been published by leading international publishers such as Springer, Emerald, and Taylor & Francis. In 2018, he received the prestigious Bess and Philip Rosenblum Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Reader (2013, Illinois, USA), and coauthor of Political Discourse in Chinua Achebe's Tetralogy (2019, Chicago) and Translating Hafiz: Challenges and Strategies (2019, New York). His forthcoming book is “Fugitive Archives: Law, Memory, and Ecological Displacement in Transnational Literature” (de Gruyter/Brill).

Gerald J. Prince (born November 7, 1942, in Alexandria, Egypt) is an American literary theorist and academic. He is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, with affiliations in the Department of Linguistics, the Program in Comparative Literature, and the Annenberg School for Communication.

Prince earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1968. A leading figure in narrative poetics, he has helped shape the field of narratology, introducing and refining concepts such as the narratee, narrativity, the disnarrated, and narrative grammar. In addition to his theoretical contributions, he is a distinguished critic of contemporary French literature and a recognized authority on the twentieth-century French novel.

Prince’s work, published in both French and English, has been translated into numerous languages. He has served as a visiting professor at universities in France, Belgium, Italy, Australia, Canada, and the United States. He is General Editor of the “Stages” series at the University of Nebraska Press and serves on more than a dozen editorial and advisory boards. In 2013, he received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, which he presided over in 2007.

Christine Raguet is a French scholar of translation studies and Professor Emerita at Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3. She has directed the translation-studies research center TRACT and serves as editor/director of Palimpsestes, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to translation. Her academic work focuses on translation theory and practice, with particular engagement in Anglophone literature (notably Vladimir Nabokov and Henry James), and she has been recognized for both scholarship and literary translation, including the Prix Baudelaire (2012).

Raguet has published widely in French, English, and other languages, and has organized and overseen research activities and conferences within Sorbonne Nouvelle’s translation studies community. In addition to her editorial leadership of Palimpsestes, she has contributed articles and interviews on translation reception, transmigration, and creolization, and has been associated with the Institut du Monde Anglophone at Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Ali Behdad is the John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States.

Rino (Lazzaro) Caputo (b. 1947, Ischitella nel Gargano) is an Italian literary scholar, Docens Turris Virgatae and former Full Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” His work spans Dante and Petrarch through Manzoni, early Italian Romanticism, and Pirandello, alongside contributions to Italian and North American literary criticism. He has served in senior academic roles at Tor Vergata and has been active in national and international scholarly networks and journals.

Caputo has taught widely, including at Italy’s National School of Cinema (1999–2002), and has co-directed or directed journals such as Dante. International Journal of Dante Studies and Pirandelliana. In 2019 he served among the thirty judges of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize, representing Rome Tor Vergata.

Jacques Fontanille (born 1948) is a French semiotician and a leading figure of the Paris School of Semiotics. A student and close collaborator of Algirdas Julien Greimas, he helped extend Greimasian research through work on the semiotics of passions (with Greimas) and tensive semiotics (with Claude Zilberberg). Fontanille has authored or co-authored numerous books and articles across theoretical, literary, and visual semiotics, including Sémiotique du discours (English trans. The Semiotics of Discourse) and Soma et séma. He is a Senior Member (Chair of Semiotics) of the Institut Universitaire de France and long taught at the Université de Limoges, where he also served as president.

Fontanille organized and later led the Inter-Semiotic Seminar at the EHESS in Paris following Greimas’s death, and his books have been widely translated. His research spans rhetoric, discourse analysis, semiotics of practices, and forms of life, and he has lectured internationally. He is also associated with the International Association for Semiotic Studies and the International Association for Visual Semiotics.

Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari (b. 1974, Tehran) is an Iranian linguist and associate professor of linguistics and Persian at the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Fine Arts, where he has also headed the Department of Performing Arts. His research spans Persian linguistics, Iranian dialectology, teaching Persian as a foreign language, and the discourse analysis of drama and fiction. He earned his PhD in General Linguistics from Allameh Tabataba’i University and holds BA/MA degrees from the same institution. His institutional roles include affiliate membership in the University of Tehran’s Department of Linguistics and research membership at the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia.

Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari is the author or co-author of several books, including Tense in Persian (2002), the multi-volume Persian-teaching series Fārsi Biyāmūzim / Let’s Learn Persian! (2001), Persian for Dummies (2017), and co-editor of Essays on Typology of Iranian Languages (2019). His Google Scholar profile lists work across general linguistics, comparative literature, discourse analysis of drama, and clinical linguistics, with more than a thousand citations.

Dr. Shahriyar Mansouri is Associate Professor of Modern Irish and English Literature at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran. He was appointed as the IASIL Chair of the Bibliography Committee  in December 2024. His PhD at the University of Glasgow dealt with the modern Irish novel (Modern Irish Bildungsroman), and his MA thesis was a critical reading of Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable) in light of Solipsism. He specializes in the modern Irish novel, with special interests in James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Disability studies, Deaf Studies, Memory studies, history and theory of the novel, and reading modern literature in light of contemporary continental philosophy.

Marzieh Yahyapour is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tehran and a founding figure in Russian studies in Iran. She was awarded the Pushkin Medal, a state decoration of the Russian Federation conferred by order of the President for notable contributions to the humanities, literature, education, the arts, and culture. She is the first Iranian scholar to receive this honor. The medal was presented at the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Tehran by the Russian Ambassador on behalf of the President. Yahyapour has held multiple founding and editorial roles in her field. She is a founding member of the Iranian Association of Russian Language and Literature (2012/1391), founder and editor-in-chief of the Research Journal of Russian Language and Literature (the first peer-reviewed Russian-language journal published in Iran), a founding member of the Iranology Association, and a founding member of the Center of Corpus Linguistics. Her institutional initiatives include launching degree programs in Russian language, literature, and teaching at several Iranian universities (Tarbiat Modares, University of Tehran, University of Gilan, Al-Zahra University). She is the author or translator of more than 20 books, has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles internationally and nearly 50 domestically, delivered more than 70 conference papers, serves as editor-in-chief of the Foreign Languages Research Journal (University of Tehran), and sits on the editorial boards of journals including Philologos (ФИЛОLOGOS), Vestnik (Perm State University), Studies in Eurasian Humanities, Comparative Literature (University of Kerman), Research on Contemporary World Literature (University of Tehran), Women in Culture and Art (University of Tehran), and Foreign Languages Research.