Professor of World History, Faculty of History
University of Cambridge

Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. 'Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire' is his third book. It was awarded the British Academy Book Prize in 2021 and Jerry Bentley Book Prize in World History in 2022. This book and his broader work draws the Pacific and Indian oceans into a conversation around histories of the environment, the history of race, imperial history and the history of science. 'Waves Across the South' included discussions of the histories of Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is currently President of the Pacific Circle, a group of scholars devoted to the study of knowledge and environment across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. He is now working on a long environmental history of the Indian ocean and on an urban history of Colombo, a multiply-colonised and engineered city in the centre of the Indian Ocean, a transit point between Europe and Australia, in addition to other maritime routes.

Professor of Music  
University of California, Berkeley

James Q. Davies is Professor of Music at UC Berkeley. He is author of Romantic Anatomies of Performance (2014), co-editor with Ellen Lockhart of Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789-1851 (2016), and series editor with Nicholas Mathew of the book series New Material Histories of Music with University of Chicago Press. His new book is Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath 1817-1913 (Chicago, 2023), which explores musical orders of environmentality, coloniality, and political ecology: ideas about breath control, air-conditioning systems in buildings, as well as music and climate.

Professor of English, School of Cybernetics
Australian National University, Canberra

Chris Danta is Professor of English in the newly formed School of Cybernetics at the ANU. His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is currently working on an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship with the title Future Fables: Literature, Evolution and Artificial Intelligence (2021-24).

Associate Professor in Chinese Studies
University of Melbourne

Delia Lin is an Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her motivation for research has been to discover the underlying patterns of contemporary Chinese governance through examining how cultural terms, traditional ideas and key concepts are built into the integrands of law, education and government polices by various actors, shaping the ways the society thinks, functions and interacts with the world. Her monograph, Civilising Citizens in Post-Mao China: Understanding the Rhetoric of Suzhi (Routledge, 2017) examines the predominant discourse of suzhi (roughly translated as 'human quality') and the cultural, philosophical and psychological underpinnings of this discourse. Using a new method to analyse Chinese governance—one that is both historical and discursive in approach—the book demonstrates how suzhi has been made into a political resource by the Chinese Communist Party-State, journeying from Confucian political thought to Chinese Socialism. She is now working on projects relating to the ways elites use references to traditional ideas, particularly those with significant cultural resonance, to garner support for policies and institutions.