Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is the author of numerous books including Precarious Life (Verso, 2004), Frames of War (Verso, 2009), and Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press, 2015).

Kieran Setiya was born in Hull and now teaches philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and is the host of a podcast, Five Questions, in which he asks contemporary philosophers five questions about themselves.

His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include The Secret History of Wonder Woman, a national bestseller, and Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Suzy Hansen is contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and has written for many other publications.

In 2007, she was awarded a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs to do research in Turkey. She currently lives in Istanbul. Notes on a Foreign Country is her first book.

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, cultural critic, and activist. A professor at Rutgers UniversityNewark, she is a regular contributor to the New York Times. She lives in New Jersey.

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40.

Her first published story, 'Muzungu', was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize for African writing. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for her story The Sack. 

Mark McGurl is the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. His last book, The Program Era, won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He previously worked for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.