Anjan Chatterjee (MD, FAAN), Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture, is the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. He wrote The Aesthetic Brain and co-edited Brain, Beauty, and Art, and Neuroethics in Practice, and The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience. He received the Geschwind Prize in Cognitive Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology, the Arnheim Prize for contributions to Psychology and the Arts by the American Psychological Association, and the Lawrence Foreman Award from Haverford College for work towards the betterment of society. He was the past President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and the Cognitive Neurology Society and currently serves of the boards of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Global Wellness Institute, and Philadelphia Fringe Arts.

Moniek Kuijpers is an assistant professor of empirical literary studies at the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel in Switzerland. She is currently leading a research group working on the project “Shared Reading in the Age of Digitalization” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Eccellenza grant. She published extensively on the topics of narrative absorption, digital social reading, reading habits and (shared) reading and mental well-being. Currently, she is the General Editor of IGEL's journal Scientific Study of Literature.

Marco Bernini is Associate Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies at Durham University. His research connects narrative theory and cognitive science. He published on modeling and cognition, writing and the extended mind, introspection and mental imagery, interdisciplinary methods, mind wandering, inner speech, moods and affects, analogy-making, emergence and complexity, hypnagogic and hypopompic transitions, dream states, imaginary companions, ‘experiential crossing’ of storyworlds and characters, empirical studies on reading and imagination. He is the author of Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models and Exploratory Narratives (OUP, 2021), and co-editor of the forthcoming Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition (OUP, 2026). He founded and directs the Narrative and Cognition Lab.

Martin Pickering is Professor of the Psychology of Language and Communication at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in language production, language comprehension, dialogue, bilingualism, and artificial intelligence. He has published extensively on topics such as eye movements during reading, the tendency to repeat words and grammar within and across speakers, and the way that people predict what other people are likely to say. He is the author of Understanding dialogue: language use and social interaction (CUP, with Simon Garrod), is the former editor of the Journal of Memory and Language, and is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is interested in using psycholinguistic methods to consider how people produce, comprehend, and appreciate literature in general and poetry in particular.