Jonathan Culpeper is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University. His publications include Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence (2011) and Pragmatics and the English Language (2014; with Michael Haugh). Until recently, he was Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics.

Alison Mackey is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and Lancaster University. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. She is the co-editor of the Mildenberger prize-winning The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (2012; with Susan M. Gass).

Naoko Taguchi is Professor in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She has authored/co-authored several books, including Second Language Pragmatics (2017) and Developing Interactional Competence in a Japanese Study Abroad Context (2015). She is the co-editor of a new journal, Applied Pragmatics.