Shuyuan He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Beijing University of Chemical Technology. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Zhengzhou University and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in History from Sun Yat-sen University. He once conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and his main research focus is the history of modern Chinese education.

Michael Hauser’s research focuses on foreign affairs and policy in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia and Singapore, with specific attention to conflict, security, economic development, and state partnerships.

Hankyul Kim received a BA in English language and literature and MA in English linguistics at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. He is expecting to receive a Ph.D. in linguistics at Cornell in the near future. His scholarly interests encompass syntax, phonology, phonetics, and their interface. Comparing various languages, he has found many interesting features in Korean and wanted to share them with learners of Korean. This linguistics grounding has helped him to employ different approaches for teaching Korean to students with various language backgrounds. 

Maya Vinokour is an Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU and the author of Work Flows: Stalinist Liquids in Russian Labor Culture (Cornell University Press, 2024). Recent academic articles have appeared in journals like Monatshefte, 

Kim Haines-Eitzen (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997) is a Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions with a specialty in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and Religion in Late Antiquity in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her most recent book is Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton University Press, 2022), a project that traces how desert sounds shaped early Christian monasticism and includes field recordings she has made in desert environments.

Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik is a historian of 20th century Africa and the Middle East. She specializes in questions of race, gender, and sex in the post-colonial Maghreb. She has published in Jadaliyya, the Arab Studies Journal, World Art, Monde(s), The Markaz Review, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, amongst others. Tolan-Szkilnik is committed to writing and promoting transnational and transregional histories of Africa and the Middle East.

Jonny Lawrence completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2022, where he then worked as the Departmental Lecturer in Classical Arabic Literature until coming to Cornell. His current book project, Sexual Sinners and Chaste Heroes, focuses on how stories and storytelling, both religious and profane, became central to the construction of moral ideas around sexual lives and desires, how stories were used to imagine the feelings and emotional experience of people caught in the grip of passion. 

Deborah Starr is Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature and Film in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. She writes and teaches about identity and intercommunal exchange in the modern Middle East, with a focus on the Jews of Egypt. She is the author of Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema (University of California Press, 2020) and Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire (Routledge, 2009).

Karen Lalrindiki Donoghue teaches in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. She holds a PhD from the North Eastern Hill University, which is focused on media representation of Northeast India in mainstream Indian media, and her research interests include Media Representation, Media and Culture and Oral History. She is currently a member of the executive committee of the Oral History Association of India.