Christopher Cannon is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and Classics at Johns Hopkins University. He was educated at Harvard and has taught previously at UCLA, Oxford (as a Fellow of St Edmund Hall), Cambridge (as a Fellow of Girton College), and New York University. He works primarily on writings in Middle English from 1100 to 1500 and, in particular, on the emergence of 'English literature' as a meaningful category in this period.

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He was educated in the universities of Melbourne and Oxford. Previously Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge (1999-2003), he is a Life Fellow of Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He works across the broad period from 1200 to 1700 at the intersections of literary, theological, and political writing.