Outi Lauhakangas is an independent researcher, D.Soc.Sc in Helsinki University, Finland. She is one of the editorial consultants of the international journal Proverbium and a co-organizer of international colloquiums on proverbs. She has been the chief editor of a cultural magazine in Finland and published several nonfiction books about genres of folklore.
Marina Yu. Kotova teaches in the Department of Slavonic Philology of Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. She is a co-organizer of international philological conferences. She is an author of “Russian-Slavonic Dictionary of Proverbs with English parallels” (2000) and several monographs on contrastive paremiology, cultural studies, stylistics and translation studies.