Jo Carruthers is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. Her books include: The Politics of Purim: Law, Sovereignty and Hospitality in the Aesthetic Afterlives of Esther (2020) and a cultural history of simplicity in England's Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (2011).

Nour Dakkak is Assistant Professor at the Arab Open University, Kuwait, where she teaches humanities and literature. She is the co-editor of Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy (Palgrave 2020) with Jo Carruthers and Becky Spence and is working on a book of E. M. Forster's materialities.