Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University, where she specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (16th-17th centuries), with an emphasis on France. Her interests include the history of the book and of reading, the history of the disciplines and of scholarship, and the history of interactions between science and religion. She is currently completing a book on the various mostly hidden helpers who worked with authors and scholars in early modern Europe.

James Engell is the Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature. His research interests include romantic, eighteenth-century, and restoration British literature; comparative romanticism; criticism and critical theory; rhetoric; environmental studies; history and economics of higher education. Engell is a member of the Committee on the Study of Religion and a faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. He has also directed dissertations in American Studies, as well as Romance Languages & Literatures (French).

Rachelle Gaudet is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She has been on the faculty in Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology since 2002 and is the Principal Investigator of the Gaudet Lab. She is broadly interested in the mechanisms of signaling and transport across cellular membranes.

David R. McCann is the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, Emeritus. He is the former director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. He has published twenty-four books: anthologies, studies on Korean literary culture, and translations, as well as four collections of his own poetry. His current work explores the performance functions of literature during periods of cultural confrontation, the case-study functions of historical compilations, and other features of Korean literature and literary culture.

Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology and is currently doing research on a diverse array of topics in psychology, including the role of common knowledge in language and other social phenomena; historical and recent trends in violence and their explanation; the psycholinguistics of good writing; the nature of the critical period for acquiring language; the neurobiology and genetics of language; and the nature of regular and irregular phenomena in grammar.

Margo Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science until 2018. She is now a Canada 150 Research Chair at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare.

Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Director of the Harvard Law School Library, and Faculty Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His research interests include the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, human computing, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education.