John McLeod, University of Leeds

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds. He works primarily in the field of postcolonial studies, with an interest in transcultural adoption writing and representations of diasporic and once-colonised locations. In his research he examines alternative forms of transpersonal relations and personhood, and explores the complexities and transformative possibilities inherent in adoption through the concept of “adoptive being”. Among his publications, Beginning Postcolonialism (2010) and the edited volume The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007), an in-depth exploration of Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanic postcolonial contexts. His current research investigates migration and mobility vis-à-vis 21st century globality, and focuses on transcultural adoptees, elite sporting figures, and economic migrants in world cities. 

Edgar W. Schneider, University of Regensburg

Edgar W. Schneider is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Regensburg. His work focuses on world Englishes, language contact and change, variationist sociolinguistics, and the impact of social class, age, gender, ethnicity, and geographical location on language use and linguistic variation. He has written extensively on varieties of American English (especially African American English and Southern English), pidgins and creoles, the history of English, and dialect geography. Among his several publications, Postcolonial English (2007), in which he theorises a dynamic model of the evolution of Postcolonial English, and the edited volumes The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes (2020, with Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt) and World Englishes at the Grassroots (2021, with Christiane Meierkord).

Janet Todd, University of Cambridge

Janet Todd is a renowned critic, editor, biographer and novelist. Her first books were on novels of the 18thcentury, especially Richardson and Rousseau, and on the poet John Clare. Her main work has been editing and introducing early women writers: she compiled the first encyclopaedia of British and American women authors of the Restoration and eighteenth century and started the first journal devoted to women’s writing in English. 

She edited the complete works of Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn and has written biographies of Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as of her daughters (Fanny and Mary Shelley) and her Irish pupil Margaret Lady Mount Cashell.

In recent years she has written three novels, A Man of Genius, Don’t You Know There’s A War On! and Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden: a novel with pictures. Both A Man of Genius and Austen and Shelley are partially set in Venice.

She has just finished a new 8-volume Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen aimed at a general readership. She has taught in Ghana, Puerto Rico, North America, India, England and Scotland. She is a former President of Lucy Cavendish College and a Fellow of Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

Luise von Flotow, University of Ottawa

Luise von Flotow is a renowned Canadian translator and translation theorist. She has been teaching translation studies at the University of Ottawa for nearly thirty years. Her primary research interest lies in the intersection between translation and feminism, gender dynamics and power relations. Her publications include the monograph Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’ (1997), and the edited volumes Translating Women (2011) and The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender (2020, with Hala Kamal). In addition to her academic work, she has made significant contributions as a translator from German and French. Her latest translation of Thomas Melle’s Die Welt im Rücken (2016) was published in 2023 as The World at My Back.