Silvia Nagy-Zekmi is a professor of Hispanic and Cultural Studies and director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at Villanova University. She authored Transatlantic Parallelisms: Postcoloniality and Writings by Women in Latin America and North Africa ; History of Andean Folksons; edited Paradoxical Citizenship; Orientalism in Latin America and coedited with Fernando Leiva Democracy in Chile.

Chantal Zabus is a professor of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the University Paris 13; a researcher with the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, as well as a senior scholar at the Institut Universitaire de France, Paris. She is the author of Between Rites and Rights, The African Palimpsest, and Tempests after Shakespeare. She has also edited Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies on Excision and Circumcision; Changements au féminin en Afrique noire; and with Jacques Derrida, Le Secret.