Chiara Betta is an independent researcher based in London. She has published widely on the trade diaspora of Baghdadi Jews in China, on the life of the tycoon Silas Aaron Hardoon and on ethnic nationalism in Chinese Central Asia

Thomas Bickford is currently a China analyst for the Center for Naval Analyses. Previously he was an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh where he taught international relations and Chinese politics. He is also a former associate director of the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He is the author of several articles and book chapters on Chinese security issues including civil–military relations, defence reform, and defence economics. He is engaged in research on Chinese national defence policy and foreign policy

Jeremy Brown is assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. His publications include Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People's Republic of China, edited with Paul G. Pickowicz (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Xinyin Chen is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and Association for Psychological Science (APS) and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD). His research interest is mainly in children and adolescents' socio-emotional functioning, parenting and social relationships from a cultural-contextual perspective. He has edited several books and published a number of book chapters and articles in major journals in the field (e.g., Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Annual Review of Psychology).

Sei Jeong Chin is a full-time lecturer at Ewha Woman's University, Seoul, Korea. She gained her PhD in Chinese history at Harvard University. Before joining Ewha, she also worked as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Pamela Kyle Crossley is professor of Chinese, Inner Asian and East Asian intellectual history at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA. Her most recent book is The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800, an Interpretive History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

Huihua Deng is professor at the Research Center for Learning Science, Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is dean of media and communication at RMIT University and immediate past president of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia.

Harriet Evans is professor of Chinese cultural studies, and director of the Contemporary China Centre, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages, University of Westminster. She is author of Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Polity Press, 1997), and The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). She is currently working on an oral history of urban change in central Beijing and local practices of cultural heritage.

David Faure is Wei Lun professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of Emperor and Ancestor, State and Lineage in South China (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Douglas B. Fuller is lecturer of international and comparative management in the department of management at King's College, University of London. His main research interests are the political economy of development and comparative technology policy with a regional focus on East Asia.

Vanessa L. Fong is associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on childbearing, childrearing, education, work, health, language development, gender, citizenship and transnational migration among Chinese singletons and their children. She is the author of Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Gao Xiaoxian is secretary general of the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family, a non-governmental women's organization set up in 1986. Born in 1948, she trained in history and sociology and works as an official in the Shaanxi Provincial Women's Federation. Gao was a pivotal figure in establishing the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family, and since then has managed many research and activist projects to empower rural women in the west region of China. Gao has also been involved in rural development projects, particularly concerning rural girls' education and rural women's political participation.

Hill Gates, retired from teaching, is engaged in an NSF project on preindustrial girls' labour in China (with Laurel Bossen and Melissa Brown). She is finishing a book on a Sichuan segment of that project, and comparing connections over the past 40 years between folk religion and grassroots politics in democratizing Taiwan.

R. Kent Guy is professor of history and East Asian studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His publications include: The Emperor's Treasuries: Scholars and the State in Late Imperial China (1988); Limits of the Rule of Law in China (1995, co-edited with Karen Turner and James Feinerman); and Qing Governors and Their Provinces (2010).

Austin Jersild is an associate professor of history and international studies at Old Dominion University. He graduated from St. Olaf College in 1984, the University of Michigan in 1989 (MA), and the University of California, Davis in 1994 (PhD). He is the author of Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), and articles on the expansion and formation of the Russian empire. His current research on Sino-Soviet relations and the Cold War has been supported by the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Fulbright Program, and the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research.

Ellen R. Judd is a distinguished professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Manitoba. She is continuing her work on gender and mobility in rural west China, and currently extending this to an exploration in the political economy of care, investigating the means through which trans-local migrants care for their own and their families' health and well-being.

Deborah Kaple is associate research scholar and lecturer in the sociology department at Princeton University. She recently published her translation of Fyodor Mochulsky's memoir, Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir (Oxford University Press, 2010). She is also the author of Dream of a Red Factory (OUP, 1994). She is currently working on a study of the Soviet experts in China in the 1950s.

Rebecca E. Karl is author, most recently, of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World (Duke University Press, 2010) and previously, of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2002) along with other works on modern and contemporary China. She teaches at New York University.

Sung won Kim is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, concentrating on human development and education. She is interested in the transmission of parenting beliefs, parental involvement, fatherhood, and in the academic resilience of children in different cultural contexts. She graduated from Oxford University with a BA in Chinese studies and taught English for six months in Beijing.

Lars Peter Laamann is lecturer in the history of China at the SOAS History department, specializing in popular religion and medicine, as well as inter-ethnic relations during the late imperial and republican periods.

David M. Lampton is Hyman professor, director of China studies and dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins–SAIS. He is the author of The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds (University of California Press, 2008, and published in Chinese in 2009). Among his previous books is, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing US–China Relations 1989–2000 (University of California Press, 2001). He is the inaugural winner of the “Scalapino Prize” awarded in June 2010 by the National Bureau of Asian Research and The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Samuel Y. Liang is visiting lecturer in the department of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Earlier he taught art history and Chinese culture in China, the United States and Great Britain. He is the author of Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners' City 1853–98 (Routledge, 2010).

Cary Y. Liu is curator of Asian art at the Princeton University Art Museum. An architect and specialist in Chinese art and architectural history, his publications include “Archive of Power: The Qing Dynasty Imperial Garden-Palace at Rehe” in Taida Journal (2010); “Chinese Architectural Aesthetics: Patterns of Living and Being between Past and Present,” in Knapp and Lo, eds., House, Home, Family: Living and Being Chinese (2005); Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the “Wu Family Shrines” (2005); and “Between the Titans: Constructions of Modernity and Tradition at the Dawn of Chinese Architectural History,” in Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen C. Fong (forthcoming).

Zuhong Lu is professor and director of the Research Center for Learning Science, Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Kimberley Ens Manning is assistant professor in the department of political science, Concordia University. She is co-editor (with Felix Wemheuer) of Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China's Great Leap Forward and Famine (UBC Press, 2010).

Shannon May is a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork throughout China and in Sub-Saharan Africa; her recent research and publications focus on political ecology, household economics, governance, design and development.

Julia C. Strauss is the editor of The China Quarterly and senior lecturer in Chinese politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Edward Vickers is reader in education at the Institute of Education, University of London. He is currently working on a study of education and society in Post-Mao China, co-authored with Zeng Xiaodong, to be published by Routledge in 2012.

Danning Wang received her doctoral degree in anthropology from the City University of New York. She is now teaching, as an instructor, in the anthropology department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research specialty is in the field of urban studies, applied anthropology, and the study of gender and family issues in China. Her current research project is to edit a collection volume with two colleagues at CUHK on Gender and Family in East Asia.

Wang Zheng is associate professor of women's studies and history at University of Michigan, is the author of Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (University of California Press, 1999), and co-editor of Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up on the Mao Era (Rutgers University Press, 2001) and Translating Feminisms in China (Blackwell Publishing, 2007). She is the founder and co-director of the UM–Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai.

Niobe Way is professor of applied psychology at New York University.

Rod Wye is a freelance commentator on Asia and a former analyst in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

Hirokazu Yoshikawa is professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He conducts research on early childhood development, immigration and public policy in the United States, China and Chile.

Qiang Zhai is professor of history at Auburn University, Montgomery. He is the author of China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).