Hayden White (1928-2018) was Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, The Content of the Form, Figural Realism, and The Practical Past.

Robert Doran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester, the author of The Ethics of Theory and The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, and the editor of Hayden White's The Fiction of Narrative.

Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.