Professor Forsdick studied French as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford. After graduating, he completed a PhD at Lancaster on the author, traveller and naval doctor Victor Segalen. Following his first post as Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, he moved to the James Barrow Chair of French at the University of Liverpool in 2001, a post he held until his move to Cambridge in 2023. He was President of the Society for French Studies, 2012-14, Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, 2010-13, and served as chair of sub-panel D26 (Modern Languages and Linguistics) for REF2021. From 2012 until 2021, he was AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures'. A Member of the Academy of Europe and a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities , he is also currently Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. Charles is Adjunct Professor in Translation Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Honorary Professor in the Centre for the Study of International Slavery at the University of Liverpool. He edits or co-edits three series for Liverpool University Press: Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, World Writing in French: New Archipelagoes and the Glissant Translation Project. He also edits a series for Anthem Press called Anthem Studies in Travel.  

Carey read Spanish and Russian at Cambridge and spent her transformative year abroad (1990-1991) in what was then the USSR. She studied in Voronezh and then at Leningrad State University, while doing stints on a collective farm, honing her ration-card shopping skills and travelling from Estonia to North Ossetia to Tajikistan. She then spent the summer in Colombia, translating a book, being chewed by mosquitoes in the Amazon, and missing the coup back in Moscow. She graduated from Cambridge in 1992 and immediately moved back to Russia to work for the start-up Moscow Times, before three years as the Moscow correspondent for The Sunday Times, covering revolutions in Georgia, serial killers in Siberia and the first Chechen War (1994-96). She moved to London in 1997 and worked for the Sunday Times as deputy news editor, diplomatic correspondent, and property editor before moving to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2006. As a diplomat, she has served overseas at the UK mission to the United Nations in New York (2009-12) and in London, focussed on China, international organisations, and Russia. She is currently working on the coordination of HMG support to Ukraine. 

Jade is a BBC New Generation Thinker and AHRC-funded Cambridge researcher. She worked as The Times' Arts Commissioning Editor and writes for the Guardian, Observer, TLS and Telegraph. She holds a First in French and Russian from Cambridge and Poetry Masters (Distinction) from the University of East Anglia. Supervised by Robert Macfarlane, her PhD studies nature poets of colour. Through 'scriptocurrency', her original theoretical framework, Jade explores coinings as intellectual currency to counter colonial legacies and gain 'purchase' on historically exclusive genres. She teaches at the Universities of Sheffield, Bournemouth and Poetry School with workshops filmed by BBC One. Her poetry is published by Carcanet and Nine Arches while her Arts Council-funded non-fiction Silthood, another coining, traces connections between soil and self through mudlarking, metal detecting and medieval re-enacting. Prizes include the ‘30 To Watch: Journalism Award’, Northern Writers and Alpine fellowship. She has also put together an album of poem-songs, titled Algal Bloom. 

Philip graduated in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge University, after which he joined Morgan Grenfell AM as a graduate trainee, working for 6 years as a buy-side analyst and PM at Morgan Grenfell AM in London and Tokyo. He then moved to SG Warburg Securities in 1990 as Head of Research in Japan. After returning from Japan in 1992, he worked on the development of UBS’ European client business, before spending 9 years in Germany, France and Holland integrating the existing local client businesses with newly acquired client bases from UBS' local acquisitions. From 2000 he was European Head of UBS' Equity Client Relationship team and was latterly Head of Equities in Benelux, and on the Management Board of the IB's Dutch entity. 

He returned to London in 2006, and assumed responsibility for UBS’ client strategy in Europe, sitting on the Global Client Committee. In July 2015 UBS broadened the scope of the Senior Relationship Management function to cover capital markets activities. In early 2020 Philip became Head of the SRM team in EMEA, and has become increasingly involved in Client Strategy for global markets in the EU. He re-located to Paris in 2020 as part of UBS’ post Brexit re-organisation. Philip is currently responsible for covering a number of UBS’ most complex global institutional clients. He speaks regularly to investors around the world on industry trends, buy side models, and new product development

Dillon completed his BA in Spanish and Portuguese in 2016 and his MPhil in Film and Screen Studies in 2017, both at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is the writer, creator and executive producer of the original comedy series Everyone Else Burns, which he wrote with his frequent collaborator Oliver Taylor. The series stars Simon Bird, Kate O’Flynn, Lolly Adefope, Morgana Robinson and Amy James-Kelly as members of a religious order in modern-day Manchester. It aired on Channel 4 in January 2023 as the biggest All4 Comedy launch since Derry Girls in 2018. The second season of the series is currently in production.