Since 1993 Gerald MacLean has worked on the nature and range of East-West encounters and authored two books on Anglo-Ottoman relations during the early modern period, both of which have appeared in Turkish translation. He is a founding member of The Evliya Çelebi Way Project, an international group of scholars and equestrians who travelled across western Anatolia on horseback in the autumn of 2009 following the route of the great Ottoman travel writer and historian. This project of historical re-enactment has been supported by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and has established a sustainable trekking route between Istanbul and Kütahya. In the spring of 2011 he and the team will follow Evliya's route on horseback from Gaziantep to Aleppo and back to Sanliurfa to establish a second sustainable trekking route within the frame of the Turkish-Syrian Interregional Cooperation Programme.
Nabil Matar completed his B.A. and M.A. at the American University of Beirut, and his Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He taught at Jordan University and the American University of Beirut, and received postdoctoral grants from the British Council (Clare Hall, Cambridge University) and from Fulbright (Harvard Divinity School). In 1986, Dr. Matar moved to the United States and started teaching in the Humanities Department at Florida Institute of Technology. In 1997, he became the Department Head and served until 2007 when he moved to the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He is Presidential Professor in the President's Interdisciplinary Initiative on Arts and Humanities and teaches in the departments of English and History, and in the Religious Studies Program. Dr. Matar's research in the past two decades has focused on relations between early modern Britain, Western Europe, and the Islamic Mediterranean. He is co-executive editor of the Journal of Early Modern History (Brill).