Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, Egypt. She previously held a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University, UK and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. She is co-founder and currently Chair of the Board of the Women and Memory Forum in Egypt and author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt: 1892-2008 (2012). She co-founded Hagar, an interdisciplinary journal in women's studies published in Arabic and was a member of the 50-Committee that drafted the Egyptian Constitution endorsed in a referendum in January 2014.

Seteney Shami is founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, Lebanon. She has been Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, Georgetown University, University of Chicago and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences. She has also been a consultant for UNICEF, ESCWA and the Ford Foundation. Her most recent publication is the co-authored book Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (2018).