Didem Havlioglu is a literary historian working on women and gender in the Ottoman intellectual culture. She has published several articles both in Turkish and English. Her book Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History (2017) introduces Mihrî Hatun (ca. 1460-1515), the first woman writer in Ottoman history whose work survived in manuscript copies, and contextualizes her work in the early modern intellectual culture. She is currently an associate professor of the practice, teaching in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.

Zeynep Uysal is an associate professor of modern Turkish literature at Bogaziçi University. As a visiting scholar, she taught modern Turkish literature and gave public lectures in the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford between 2001 and 2003. She published a book titled Olaganustu Masaldan Cagdas Anlatiya: Muhayyelat-i Aziz Efendi [From Marvelous Tales to Modern Narratives: Aziz Efendi's Imaginations] in 2006. She edited a book, titled Edebiyatin Omzundaki Melek: Edebiyatin Tarihle Iliskisi Uzerine Yazilar, about the relationship between history and literature in 2011. Her recent book, Metruk Ev, on the leading modern Turkish writer Halit Ziya Usakligil, was published in 2014. She has also written extensively on various issues in modern Turkish literature, including the relationship between literature and space, literature and history, and literature and nationalism in leading academic journals.