Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Asian American Studies and Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning, 'Partly Colored': Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (2010); Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature (2001); and Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (2022).
Russ Castronovo is the Tom Paine Professor of English at the University of of Wisconsin-Madison. He has held positions as Director of the American Studies Program, English Department Chair, and Director of the Center for the Humanities. Castronovo has published widely on American aesthetics, literature, and politics on topics such as democracy, propaganda, nationalism, citizenship, and security. His books include Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (2014), Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (2007), Necro-Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001), and Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995).