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Jennifer Birkett holds the established Chair of French Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her publications include books and articles on 19th-century Decadence, and on 20th-century women’s writing in French and English. She is co-author of the Macmillan Guide to French Literature and co-editor of the Longman Critical Reader on Samuel Beckett, and was responsible for the latest complete revision and updating of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on French Literature (Middle Ages to present). She has just completed a literary biography of Margaret Storm Jameson, and is about to publish a co-edited collection of essays on this writer (Margaret Storm Jameson: Writing in Dialogue).

Martyn Cornick is Professor of French Cultural History and Head of the Department of French Studies in the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on French intellectual history, especially on Jean Paulhan and the status of the Nouvelle Revue française. His most recent studies have focused on the NRF and the Orient, and on Jean Paulhan as a “modernist” editor. He is completing the edition of the correspondence between Paulhan and Armand Petitjean.

Simon Goulding has recently completed his PhD on Patrick Hamilton and George Orwell. His previous publications include work on James Hanley and on Patrick Hamilton's novel, The Midnight Bell. He is currently working on a study of British writing in the Second World War, and an account of depictions of the Auxiliary Fire Service in the period 1939-1945, in the works of Henry Green, William Sansom, Stephen Spender and Humphrey Jennings.

Angela Kershaw lectures in French at Aston University, where she teaches modern French and European culture, French language and translation studies. Her main research interest is in inter-war French literature and politics, on which she is about to publish two new books: Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France, and Women in Europe between the Wars: Politics, Culture and Society (co-ed. with Angela Kimyongur). She is currently working on the novels of Irène Némirovsky.

Angela Kimyongur is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Hull. The main focus of her research is the writing of Louis Aragon and she has recently completed a monograph entitled Memory and Politics: Representations of War in the Work of Louis Aragon. She is currently working on issues of gender representation in the work of Aragon and other French Communist writers.

John Lucas, Emeritus Professor of English at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent, is the author and editor of many books of criticism, including England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry and Dickens: The Major Novels, and of six collections of poetry. Recent books include The Radical Twenties: Writing, Politics and Culture (1999), Ivor Gurney (2001), Starting to Explain: Essays on Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2003), and A World Perhaps: New and Selected Poems (2002). Since 1994 he has been the publisher of The Shoestring Press, Nottingham.

Alan Munton (Dr.) is Archivist at the University of Plymouth. He wrote his doctorate at Cambridge on Wyndham Lewis, and has since published extensively on Lewis and modernism. He edits the Wyndham Lewis Annual. He has taught English at Reading University, the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, and at the University of Plymouth. He is a Fellow of the English Association.

Joseph Pridmore has recently been awarded a PhD at the Nottingham Trent University. His focus was on re-evaluating working-class writing of the 1930s, paying particular attention to its subversions of class, genders and sexualities. He has published work on James Hanley and George Garrett in The Penniless Press,and on Louis MacNeice in The European English Messenger.

Gisèle Sapiro is research director at the CNRS (Centre de sociologie européenne-Paris) and teaches at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. She has published a book on the French literary field during WWII, La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (1999), and articles on literature and politics, public intellectuals, translation, etc. She has co-edited Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (2004) and Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (2004), two issues of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales on international literary exchanges and the circulation of ideas (144 and 145, 2002), and an issue of  Sociétés et représentations on socialist realism in France (15, 2002). Most recently, she edited a special issue of Le Mouvement Social on the organization of professions (214, 2006), and published an article on “Responsibility and freedom: foundations of Sartre’s concept of intellectual engagement,” in the Journal of Romance Studies (2006).

Stan Smith holds the Research Chair in Literary Studies at Nottingham Trent University and is a member of the Executive of the English Association. He has published two books on W. H. Auden (1985, 1997) and was contributory editor of The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (2005). Other books include Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry (1982), Edward Thomas (1986), W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (1990), The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (1994), Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (2005). Most recently he was contributory editor of the English Association's centenary volume, Globalisation and its Discontents (2006). He is currently completing a study of Contemporary Poetry and Displacement.