Paul Sopčák, Lecturer in the English Department and Academic Integrity Coordinator, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada

Paul's interests include early modernist literature, the empirical study of literature, phenomenology, and existential philosophy. He is assistant editor for the journal Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL) and Secretary of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL). His current research looks at the relationship between literary reading, empathy, and prejudice.

Davide Castiglione, Lecturer in English language and literature, Vilnius University, Lithuania

Davide teaches poetry, stylistics, and other linguistic disciplines. In his research on the stylistics of difficulty he has identified a checklist of linguistic indicators that tend to be foregrounded in difficult poems, thus favouring certain kinds of response over others. Belonging to all linguistic levels, but especially to semantics and pragmatics (discourse), these features are foregrounded both internally (e.g. they are highly salient in defining the texture of the given poem) and externally (e.g. they deviate from prototypical norms of language, both literary and non-literary).

Winfried Menninghaus, Director, Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main)

Previous appointments included professorships at Freie Universität Berlin, the universities of Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Rice, Jerusalem, and the EHESS Paris. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. His fields of research include rhetoric and poetics; philosophical and empirical aesthetics; and literature from 1750 until present.

Willie van Peer, Emeritus professor of Literature and Intercultural Hermeneutics, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany

Willie van Peer studied Germanic Philology in Flanders (Antwerpen, Leuven), received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lancaster University (G-B), and worked at the universities of Tilburg and Utrecht in the Netherlands and Munich University in Germany. He is a former President of IGEL and former Chair of PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association). He is also a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He is the author of several books and articles on poetics and the epistemological foundations of literary studies, and initiated the empirical study of foregrounding with his 1986 book. He is also the founding General Editor of the IGEL journal Scientific Study of Literature.

Frank Hakemulder, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Affiliated Full Professor at the Reading Center of Stavanger University, Norway

Frank has a background in literary theory and comparative literature. His research focuses on the effects of reading literary texts on outgroup attitudes and moral self-concept (e.g., The moral laboratory, 2000). He supervises two national research projects in the Netherlands: one pertaining to the experience of being absorbed in fictional worlds (Narrative Absorption, 2017), and the other on how such experiences affect social perception and self concepts (see www.finditinfiction.org). Currently he is investigating how literary reading gives readers a sense of meaningfulness in studies of text qualities (e.g., foregrounding), how readers are instructed to read, reading medium (screen versus paper), and how these interact to generate deeply absorbed, eudaemonic experiences.