Aldis Purs is an academic and specialist in Latvian history. He has published widely on the Baltic region including The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (co-authored with Artis Pabriks et al., 2002).
William Warren was born in the southern USA, and has lived in Bangkok since 1959. He has written many books on Thailand, from gardens to Thai arts, crafts and cuisine, and also a biography of Jim Thompson.
Kieron O’Hara is a Senior Research Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, and a Research Fellow for the Centre for Policy Studies. He is the author of several books, including After Blair: David Cameron and the Conservative Tradition (2007), The Enlightenment: A Beginner’s Guide (2010) and, with Nigel Shadbolt, The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy As We Know It (2008).
Robert Appelbaum is a senior lecturer in Renaissance studies in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University, and has published on topics as varied as seventeenth-century utopias and the freeway culture of California. His previous book on food and culture, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns, won the the 2007 Roland H. Bainton Prize.
Bettina Bildhauer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German, University of St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval Blood (2007), and co-editor of The Monstrous Middle Ages (2003) and Medieval Film (2009).
Lars T. Lih is an independent scholar who has written widely on Soviet history. His books include Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (1990), the English-language edition of The Stalin-Molotov Letters, 1925-1936 (1995) and Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What is to be Done?’ In Context (2006).
Stephen Martin is currently a Senior Project Officer at the State Library of New South Wales, Australia. He has published many books and articles on Australian and Antarctic history, including A History of Antarctica (1996)and The Whales’ Journey: A Year in the Life of a Humpback Whale and A Century in the History of Whaling (2001).
Nancy Leys Stepan is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, New York. Her previous books include The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation (1991) and Picturing Tropical Nature (Reaktion Books, 2002).
Carol Helstosky is Associate Professor of History at the University of Denver, USA. She is the author of Garlic and Oil: Politics of Food in Italy (2004) and Food Culture in the Mediterranean (2009).
Kelly Enright is a cultural and environmental historian, and a museum anthropologist based in New Jersey, USA.