Michael Erard
Michael Erard is a linguist and writer who has lived in Latin America, Asia, North America, and Europe. He received his PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, taught linguistics, literature, and writing at UT and Southwestern University for a while, and worked as a researcher at the FrameWorks Institute from 2008 to 2013. He was the first ever writer in residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in 2017-2018, and has worked at Maastricht University since 2019, currently as funding advisor, while also having a research affiliation with the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen. In 2022, he was awarded a prestigious Public Scholar Fellowship from the US National Endowment for the Humanities.
He has written widely on language and culture in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, Aeon, The New York Times, New Scientist and The European Review of Books. His books on language include Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (first published in 2007), Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners (2012) and, most recently, Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (2025).
Vanessa Joosen
Vanessa Joosen is Full Professor of English Literature and Children's Literature at the University of Antwerp. There she led the ERC-funded project “Constructing Age for Young Readers” (2019-2024) and organizes the annual Children’s Literature Summer School. Vanessa Joosen is the author of, amongst others, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales (2011), Adulthood in Children’s Literature (2018) and co-author of Age in David Almond’s Oeuvre (2023). She is currently the vice-president of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature.
