Wendy Ayres-Bennett is Emerita Professor of French Philology and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on the history of French, sociohistorical linguistics, and the history of linguistic thought, and, more recently, on language standardization and language policy and planning. She was Principal Investigator (2016-2021) on the AHRC-funded multi-disciplinary research project, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, which promoted the value of languages for key issues of our time and explored the benefits of language learning for individuals and societies. An AHRC-funded follow-on project Promoting Language Policy provided research-based evidence for moving languages higher up the political agenda.
Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has held visiting positions at Balliol College, Oxford and at Paris VIII. Her research has been funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the France Berkeley Fund, the Hellman Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.