Laura Doyle is Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founding Co-Director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP) with Mwangi wa Githinji. Book publications include Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labors, and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Wallerstein Prize); Bordering on the Body (Leeson Prize); Freedom's Empire; and two edited collections Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture; and Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Doyle has received a Leverhulme Research Professorship (UK), a Rockefeller Fellowship in Intercultural Scholarship in Afro-American Studies (Princeton University), and two ACLS Fellowships.

Simon Gikandi is Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University and Chair of the English Department. His most recent book, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, was awarded both the MLA James Russell Lowell Award and the Melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association. In addition to numerous articles, his several books include The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 (Volume 11 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English). Gikandi has served as President of the Modern Language Association and as editor of PMLA, its official journal.

Mwangi wa Githinji is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founding Co-Director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project with Laura Doyle. His publications include Ten Millionaires and Ten Million Beggars: A Study of Inequality and Development in Kenya; the co-authored An Employment Targeted Plan for Kenya; and numerous articles. He has served in multiple editorial roles and consulted with agencies and NGOs, including the UNDP, Economic Commission for Africa, Africa Center for Economic Transformation, and the Society for International Development.