Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, USA, and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory. Prior to joining the Brown faculty in 2012, she taught at Johns Hopkins University, where she served as department chair from 2003–2009. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993). Prof Anderson has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (2002).

Harry E. Shaw is Professor of English at Cornell University, USA, where he has been teaching since 1978. Specializing in nineteenth-century English novels and narrative poetics, he explores the influence of the British novel on the rise of historical consciousness in Europe, and the ways in which novels help us conceptualize our place in history. He is the author of The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and his Successors (1983) and Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (1999), and co-author of Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Austen to Eliot 2008.