Biographies
Joanna Kaźmierczak Joanna Kaźmierczak works as a research specialist at the Educational Research Institute in Warsaw in Poland. She has more than 23 years of experience in the field of general education, teacher training, national and international assessment projects with students and teachers, and in the area of key competences development in school practice. As well as being responsible for international assessment projects in Poland (PISA, PIRLS), she actively cooperates with the Polish Central Examination Board (an institution in charge of external assessment of students) on numerous projects.
Sabine UehleinSabine Uehlein is Chief Program Officer and Vice CEO at Stiftung Lesen, a foundation in the educational sector that strongly believes in the impact and importance of literacy and reading. The foundation`s mission is to ensure that every child in Germany develops reading skills and enjoys reading. Stiftung Lesen works under the patronage of German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Stiftung Lesen is the founding member of EURead, a European Network that promotes reading, along with 31 NGOs from 22 European countries.
Sabine´s work involves creating and implementing nationwide programs and campaigns to promote reading, funding and building sustainable partnerships, and reaching out to families with young children who have low reading competence and low motivation to read. Through her work, numerous partnerships have been established, with key players like Google, ALDI, and McDonald´s. She has also launched the German LESESTART program.
Sabine has a Master’s degree in German Literature and Communication Science. As well as being a member of several Advisory Boards and a Consultant for governmental and non-governmental organizations in the educational sector, Sabine Uehlein also lectures part-time at the University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart.
Anita Peti-StantićAnita Peti-Stantić is the chair of Slovenian Language and Literature and a professor of South Slavic languages and comparative linguistics at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Zagreb). She is an international researcher, editor and scholar.
From 2015 to 2019 Anita Peti Stantić was, within the COST action IS1401 European Literacy Network, the leader of a working group of researchers from 27 countries, divided in five subgroups, who were engaged in research of the developmental aspects of reading literacy and reading competence. In this capacity, she held several plenary and invited lectures at international conferences. During her stay at Tufts University, she collaborated with Maryanne Wolf and Stephanie Gottwald at the Center for Reading and Linguistic Research and specialized in the RAVE-O method.
Anita Peti-Santić is a published author and translator. Some of her published books are Through Reading to Understanding: From Reading Literacy to Reading Competence (Naklada Ljevak, 2019), Curiosity: Why Should Young People Read Popular Science Texts, and do it Now? (Naklada Ljevak, 2021) which she wrote together with her daughter, a high school senior. Together with Vedrana Gnjidić, she translated Maryanne Wolf's book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2019).
Maryanne Wolf Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, teacher, and advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University.
Maryanne Wolf is a published author. Some of her published books are Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (HarperCollins, 2007), Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain (Edited; York, 2001), Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (HarperCollins, 2018; Ljevak 2019).
Miha KovačMiha Kovač is an author of numerous academic books and papers on publishing and reading in English and Slovene. Besides a set of academic papers, his English publications include Never Mind the Web: here comes the book (Chandos, 2008), a book in which he vividly predicted that in the digital landscape, a printed book will become a subversive medium that would need to be invented if it had not existed yet. He co-authored two chapters in Oxford Handbook on Publishing on trade and educational publishing and co-edited a special issue of First Monday on differences between print and screen reading (translated in Spanish). In the last five years, he was a member of Eread, a network of European reading researchers where he served as dissemination officer.
Read to breathe (Mladinska knjiga 2020; Ljevak, 2021) is his first mass-market trade book. In it, he successfully translated scholarly research on reading into a funny and reader-friendly narrative in the best traditions of non-fiction writing. The book is being translated into five languages.
Adriaan van der WeelAdriaan van der Weel is an emeritus extraordinary professor of Book Studies at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. His research interests concentrate on the digitization of textual transmission and reading, publishing studies, and scholarly communication. He is editor of several book series on these subjects, and editor of Digital humanities quarterly. His latest books are Changing our textual minds: Towards a digital order of knowledge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011), and The Unbound book (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2014), a collection of essays edited jointly with Joost Kircz.
Van der Weel was vice-chair of the COST Action ‘E-READ’, about the future of reading in the digital age, and co-founder of the Institute for the Future of Reading. His latest book, co-authored with Ruud Hisgen, will be published in early Spring 2022 by Atlas Contact (in Dutch) and is entitled The reading human: How the book defines our existence.