Alireza Korangy received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA. His field of research is classical Persian and Arabic philology with a special emphasis on poetics, rhetoric, and linguistics. He has also done extensive research on the contemporary linguistics of Iran and its corresponding folkloric traditions (Sorani Kurdish, Kurmanji Kurdish, Gilaki, Lori, Baluchi, etc.). He is faculty at the American University of Beirut and has previously taught at the University of Virginia, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Harvard University. Farzad Sharifian held the Chair in Cultural Linguistics within the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia. He was a pioneer of Cultural Linguistics and was widely published in leading international journals and edited volumes. He was the author of Cultural Conceptualisations and Language (2011, John Benjamins) and Cultural Linguistics (2017, John Benjamins). He was the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Language and Culture (John Benjamins), and the Editor-in-Chief of Cultural Linguistics book series (Springer Nature) and Routledge Advances in Teaching English as an International Language book series (Routledge). He received several awards for his research, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, Germany.