Howard Chiang is the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies, professor of East Asian languages and cultural studies, and director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia, 2021). Between 2019 and 2022, he served as the founding chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.

Shu-mei Shih is the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities and professor of Asian languages and cultures, comparative literature, and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (2007), which has been credited as having inaugurated the field of Sinophone studies, and coeditor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia, 2013).