Renata Summo-O'Connell, founder and current director of the AILAE has lived in Australia for nearly twenty years. Her research interests are in nomadic philosophy, looking specifically at the figurations intersecting society, gender and art. She created and is responsible for the Imagined Australia International Research Forum, having designed it to develop new models of transnational research, which, beyond institutional boundaries, may effectively further international debates and engage in creative projects on artistic and cultural levels in a dimension of reciprocity. She has collaborated in numerous research projects and written for various publications amongst which, as editor, the recent publication Imagined Australia, Reflections around the reciprocal construction of identity between Australia and Europe, 2009, Peter Lang, ISBN 978-3-0343-0008-7 p b ; Artistic expression and Community arts in Australia: the fundamental right to negotiate (displaced) identity within policies of exclusion. A case study in D. Weiss (Ed), Social Exclusion: An Approach to the Australian Case, Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, 2003; Background Speakers: Diversity and Its Management in the Lote Classroom.Michael Clyne, Sue Fernandez, Imogen Y. Chen, and Renata Summo-O'Connell. Belconnen, ACT, Australia: Language Australia, 1997. She is currently editing a new volume, Borders, Theory, Art and Power and editing and writing for two new books Australia Deconstructed and a book on Gender and Australian Music. Renata has taught for several years in Australian tertiary institutions, from Monash to Melbourne Universities in various fields from Methodology of Language Teaching to Gender Studies.

Damian O'Connell (co-founder) has supported AILAE from its very start and contributed in a generous, substantial and viable way to its establishment, activities and survival.

Damian has worked in Australia, US, Middle East and Europe now for many years. He has extensive experience in television production and in the employment of specialised cameras for cinema and television, having worked in many international documentary and film productions as well as all facets of television broadcasting. These include: Management of the 15th Asian Games Opening and Closing Ceremonies; First Assistant Director in various Australian advertising campaigns; Production Manager for several documentaries; Technical Producer for many international broadcasts amongst which the World Cup Soccer Germany and the World Athletics Championship, Helsinki . More recently he has acted as Technical Producer for Global Television Studios, Australia, and various outside broadcasts. He is now Head of Operations and Special Projects Manager for Spidercam worldwide.

Roberta Trapè (co-founder) is amongst one of the first people who have supported the AILAE concept, its philosophy and program with passion and profound knowledge of its context. Roberta completed her studies at the University of Florence, Italy (Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne e Contemporanee). She has taught in Italy and in Melbourne, Australia at university level for a number of years (The University of Melbourne, School of Languages and Linguistics).  Her research interests are in the field of 20th century and Contemporary British, North American and Australian literary studies with a particular focus on narrative. Roberta is now based in Italy and completing a PhD on the Australians' Travel to Italy at the University of Florence

Franca Tamisari is  Professore Associato of Cultural Anthropology at the Dipartimento di Studi Storici at  Ca’  Foscari University Venice where she has been teaching and conducting  research since 2005. She also worked at the University of Sydney (1996-2001) and at The University of Queensland (2001-2004). She has conducted research in Northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia since 1990, Northern Queensland, and Italy. Her major research fields include anthropology of performance, with particular attention to dance and the political and aesthetic aspects of art and ritual in local and cross-cultural contexts, cosmology and epistemology, bicultural education, ethnographic encounter, and processes of recognition in colonial and neocolonial relationships in Australia. Recent publications include the co-editing of “La sfida dell'arte indigena australiana. Tradizione, innovazione e contemporaneità, Jaca Book, Milan 2007”.

Jon Stratton is an Australian academic currently serving as Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Stratton has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex and has worked in Australia since 1980, arriving at Curtin in 1990 after teaching at universities in Brisbane, Armidale and Darwin. At Curtin, Stratton's work critically examines aspects of everyday life and also popular music, centred around issues of identity and cultural specificity. He has published widely from articles on soap opera to serial killing to cyberspace and books on postmodernity, the body and the role of race in Australian culture. Stratton was Vice-President of the Australasian Cultural Studies Association between 2000 and 2004. He coedited the Transnational Cultural Studies series for University of Illinois Press between 1997 and 2000. In 1998 he held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the International Forum for United States’ Studies at the University of Iowa.Stratton is on the editorial boards of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture among other journals.

Lidia Curti is Honorary Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” and IAS Affiliate in the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, UK.
Lidia is part of the editorial boards of «Anglistica», «Feminist Review» and «New Formations» as well as being the author of various books amongst which: Female Stories, Female Bodies (1998) of La voce dell'altra (2006). Lidia has contributed or co-edited, amongst other publications, La questione postcoloniale (with I. Chambers, 1997) ( The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons); La nuova Sherazade (2004) and Schermi indiani, linguaggi planetari (2008). Lidia Curti has published widely on a variety of topics amongst which poetics and aesthetics in film, on the feminine in Shakespearean theatre, on Gramsci theory and postcolonial critique, on migration in Southern Italy. She has recently made it possible, together with Iain Chambers, for Anglistica to become an online journal http://www.anglistica.unior.it/. Lidia continues her work on Indian cinema and literature and the poetics and politics of “another cinema”. Her groundbreaking historic and continuing role in European theory over the past decades brings to the transnational debate the AILAE wants to advance a unique contribution of wisdom and experience.