Eric Baratay is Senior Lecturer in History at the Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon.
Stephen Kern is Distinguished Research Professor at Northern Illinois University and the author of several books including The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (1983) and The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (1992).
Matthijs van Boxsel is a literary historian who has been researching, writing and lecturing on stupidity for the last 20 years.
Eugen Gomringer was one of the founders of the Concrete Poetry movement, and has published many volumes of poetry, and essays on poetics.
Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003) was Professor of Indo-Muslim Culture at Harvard and Bonn universities, and published widely in the field of oriental art and culture.
Helen Ennis is Senior Lecturer in Art Theory at the Australian National University School of Art. She was the former Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia and has also independently curated exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, the National Library of Australia, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is also the author of Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss, and Photography (2005) and Intersections: Photography, History, and the National Library of Australia (2004).
Peter Larsen is Professor in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Marshall Berman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and CCNY Graduate Center, where he teaches political theory and urban studies. His books include On The Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (2006) and All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983). Born and raised in the Bronx, he lives in Manhattan with his family.
Brian Berger is a poet, journalist, and photographer who remembers the view of Playland from the terrace of his grandparents’ apartment in Rockaway Beach, Queens. He has written about music for Forced Exposure, the Austin Chronicle and Geek Weekly, while his verse has appeared at jargonbooks.com and elsewhere. His own dark hollow is www.whowalkinbrooklyn.com
Predrag Matvejevic was born in 1932 in Mostar from a Russian father and a Croatian mother. He teaches at the New Sorbonne, Paris and the Sapienza, Rome, and is also the author of Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (1999).