NANCY ARMSTRONG
Nancy Armstrong is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture & Media, and Gender Studies at Brown University. Her fields of interest include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American fiction, empire and sexuality, narrative theory, critical theory, and visual culture. She is the author of a landmark study of the relationship between gender, the novel, and subjectivity, Desire And Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford, 1987). Her Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Harvard, 1999) forever changed our understanding of the relationship between narrative realism and visual culture. She is also the co-author, with Leonard Tennenhouse, of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (California, 1992) and has written nearly one hundred articles, chapters, and reprints (published in six different languages) on the historical semiotics of literature, gender, and visual culture. Her most recent book, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900 (Columbia, 2005), explores the central role played by the British novel in constructing the modern self. She is Managing Editor of Novel: A Forum on Fiction and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of British Literary History (Oxford, 2005).

DROR WAHRMAN
Dror Wahrman is Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. He is an influential cultural historian of western Europe, focusing on its transition from pre-modern to modern times, particularly in Britain. His Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge, 1995) took apart and then put together again some key narratives that the modern west tells about itself—first, the rise of class society and especially the middle class; second, the emergence of the modern individual or modern self. He has extended his interest in the meanings of identity and self in his book The Making of the Modern Self  (Yale, 2004), which won both the Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies and the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820, co-edited with Colin Jones (California, 2002). He is currently co-writing a book with Professor Jonathan Sheehan of the University of Michigan about what differentiated the eighteenth century from the early modern period, a question they focus on the changing role attributed to god as the source of order and harmony. Wahrman also maintains strong interests in the history of Palestine (especially Jerusalem) since the eighteenth century and in photography of the Middle East, interests which have resulted in numerous publications written in both English and Hebrew.

CATHERINE HALL
Catherine Hall, one of the most distinguished historians of modern British history, is Professor of History at University College London. She is the co-author, with Lenore Davidoff, of the enormously influential Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Hutchinson, 1987) and the author of White, Male, and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Polity, 1992). Her recent work has focused on rethinking the relationship between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work has yielded four important anthologies, Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader (Manchester, 2000), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), which she co-edited with Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berg, 2000), which she co-edited with Ida Blom and Karen Hagemann, and At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006), which she co-edited with Sonya O. Rose. Her most recent monograph, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Oxford, 2002), which was awarded the Morris D. Forkosch Prize by the American Historical Association, studies the process of mutual constitution, both of colonizer and colonized, in England and Jamaica between the 1830s and the 1860s. Her recent work has been particularly concerned with the ways in which empire impacted metropolitan life, how the empire was experienced by those living in England, and how English identities, both masculine and feminine, were constituted in relation to the multiple "others" of the empire.

SUVIR KAUL
Suvir Kaul is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, after having taught at the SGTB Khalsa College in Delhi, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, and Jamia Milia Islamia, in addition to having served as Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. He is one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars of the relationship between British and South Asian culture.  His research interests include late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, contemporary South Asian writing in English, postcolonial studies, and literary and critical theory. He is the author of Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford, 2001) and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (Delhi: Oxford, 1992; Stanford, 1992). He has also edited The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; London: Hurst, 2001; Indiana, 2002), as well as co-editing an interdisciplinary scholarly anthology, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke, 2005; Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005) with Ania Loomba, Antoinette Burton, Matti Bunzl and Jed Esty.

INDRANI CHATTERJEE

Indrani Chatterjee is the author of Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India (Oxford, 1999) and the editor of Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (Rutgers, 2004). Her teaching and research interests include slavery in early modern and modern South Asia, the histories of women and sexuality, of law, and the cultural and intellectual histories at the intersection of the family in the subcontinent.

LYNN FESTA

Lynn Festa is the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins, 2006) and co-editor of the forthcoming The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Post-Colonial Theory (Oxford, 2008). She is currently working on two projects: The Personality of Things in Eighteenth-Century Britain and The Properties of Empire: Nation, Race, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France.

WILLIAM GALPERIN

William Galperin is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of English. He also serves as the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis. He is the author of Revision and Authority in Wordsworth (Pennsylvania, 1989), The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Johns Hopkins, 1993), and, most recently, The Historical Austen (Pennsylvania, 2002). He is currently working on a project on the history of missed opportunities in romantic-period discourse.

SETH KOVEN

Seth Koven is the author of Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004) and the co-editor, with Sonya Michel, of Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (Routledge, 1993). His teaching and reseach interests include the history of Europe, 1750 to the present, with a particular focus on Great Britain; modern European women's history; comparative urban history; and the history of sexuality.

JOHN KUCICH

John Kucich is a specialist in Victorian literature and culture. He is the author of The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Cornell, 1994), Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (California, 1987), Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Georgia, 1981), and, most recently, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton, 2006). A chapter from that work, "Sadomasochism and the Magical Group," was awarded the 2005 Donald Gray Prize by the North American Victorian Studies Association. He co-edited, with Dianne Sadoff, the collection Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, and a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts on the topic "Postmodern Narratives."