Andrew Pettegree is the Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. He has worked and published extensively on the Reformation and more recently on the History of Communication. His books include the prize-winning Book in the Renaissance (2010), The Invention of News (2014) and Brand Luther (2015), an examination of the reformer’s interactions with the book trade. The Library. A Fragile History, co-authored with Arthur der Weduwen, has sold 50,000 copies in English and been translated into eight languages. His latest book The Bookshop. A History of Bookselling from the Birth of Print to the Twenty-first Century will be published in October 2026.

Eric Slauter is Deputy Dean of the Humanities and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate professor in the Department of English, an associate faculty member in the Divinity School, and serves as the founding director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. Slauter is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, which received honorable mention in the MLA Prize for a First Book. He has published articles on the “trade gap” between history and literature in Atlantic studies, a short biography of the enslaved eighteenth-century painter Scipio Moorhead, and a series of essays on the language of rights and equality in early America. He recently recorded twelve lectures on the Declaration of Independence for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York and is completing a book on the Declaration’s origins, meanings, and afterlives. Over the past decade he has also given invited talks on a research project that blends environmental, labor, and literary history, “Walden’s Carbon Footprint: People, Plants, Animals, and Machines in the Making of an American Classic,” and he is preparing a book addressed to a general audience.

Adrian Johns is Allan Grant Maclear Distinguished Service Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College at the University of Chicago. Johns is the author of The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago, 2023), Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (Norton, 2010), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, 2009), and The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998). He is also co-editor (with James Evans) of Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present (Osiris 38, 2023). He has authored dozens of papers in the histories of science, the book, media, and information.