Elaine Hobby is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Studies at Loughborough University, where she has worked very happily since 1988. As a 1970s feminist, she began her career with the desire to contribute to the rediscovery of forgotten women writers, and both her first book, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649-1688 and her current role, as one of the General Editors of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn, indicate that that fascination has endured. Much 17th-century women’s writing is in genres not generally regarded as literary – those women wrote political pamphlets, religious meditations, cookery books and midwifery manuals rather more than they composed fiction, poetry, or plays. As a result, her research has usually been inter-disciplinary, requiring her to explore the history of medicine and the theology of early Quakers and Baptists, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of literature. Those enquiries also prompted other forays, for instance into the (mostly male-authored) lineage of the English-language midwifery manual (see her The Birth of Mankind, 1540-1654). Elaine has also ventured into the 18th century to finish The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696-1744) for the late Bill Overton.  

Margarete Rubik is Emerita Professor of English literature at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her research interests range from Restoration and eighteenth-century women’s writing to the nineteenth-century novel and modern drama. She has published widely in these fields, including a study on Early Women Dramatists 1550 to 1800 (1998), an edition of plays by Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood (Eighteenth Century Women Playwrights, Vol. 1, 2001), and of a special issue of Women’s Writing on Aphra Behn (2012). She has co-compiled collections of essays on Aphra Behn (Revisiting and Reinterpreting Aphra Behn, 2002; Aphra Behn and her Female Successors, 2011), and also several other volumes, for instance on Intertextual and Intermedial Rewritings of Jane Eyre (2007), on Stories of Empire (2009), on Paris as a Site of Avant-Garde Art and Cultural Exchange in the 1920s (2010) and on Staging Interculturality (2010). She takes an interest in cognitive approaches to literature and in the study of the emotions, and has recently also written on children’s literature about refugees. At the moment she is in the process of editing The Younger Brother and The Young King, as part of a Cambridge University Press project of re-editing the complete works of Aphra Behn.

Line Cottegnies is professor of early-modern literature at Sorbonne Université. She has published a monograph on the politics of wonder in Caroline poetry, L’Éclipse du regard (Droz, 1997), and has co-edited several collections of essays, including Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France (Brill, 2016, with Sandrine Parageau). She has published widely on seventeenth-century literature, in particular on Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn and Mary Astell. She is particularly interested in cultural transfers and the translation and circulation of texts between England and France in the early modern period. She has edited 15 plays for the bilingual Gallimard Complete Works of Shakespeare and one play, 2 Henry IV, for The Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016), and co-edited Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England (an edition of two plays by Mary Sidney and Thomas Kyd) with Marie-Alice Belle (MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation Series, 2017). She is currently editing three of Behn’s translations from the French (La Montre, Agnes de Castro and A Discovery of New Worlds)for the Complete Works of Aphra Behn to be published with Cambridge University Press.

Karen Gevirtz is Professor of English Literature and Co-Director of the Women and Gender Studies Programme at Seton Hall University. A specialist in the long eighteenth century, she is particularly interested in the development of the novel form. She is research member of the Project E-ABIDA (“Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age”), where she is editing “The History of the Nun” for the new general edition of Behn’s complete work for Cambridge University Press. Some of her recent publications include Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727 (New York: Palgrave, 2014) and Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660-1820 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014). She is President of the Aphra Behn Society for Women in the Arts, 1660-1830, and belongs to the editorial board of ABO: International Journal for Women in the Arts, 1660-1830.

Adelaide Meira Serras is an Assistant Professor (w/aggregation) of the English Department of the Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa [School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon], and Head of the University of Lisbon Centre of English Studies – ULICES. There she graduated in Germanic Philology, got her Master’s Degree in Anglo-American Studies, and her PhD in English Culture, specialisation in Eighteen-century English Culture on Bernard Mandeville’s work. Her interest in Modern ideology and the rise of the English/British Empire resulted in her participation in the project Cultura e Império. O Império Britânico: Ideologias, perspectivas e percepções [ Culture and Empire. The British Empire: Ideologies, perspectives and perceptions], and her editing of Empire Building and Modernity. She translated Addison’s Cato, Catão, Uma Tragédia, introduction and notes. She co-directs the Science Fiction and Fantasy Project, Messengers from the Stars. She currently teaches English Culture (17th to 21st century) to undergraduate classes, and MA/PhD seminars concerning the and utopia and city studies. She has written several papers on British culture issues: Enlightenment, the 18th-century political and ideological paradigm, the gender question, and science fiction. Now she is working on utopia and the city studies, and developing The Street and the City project.

Patricia Rodrigues holds a PhD in Literature and Culture, specialisation in English Studies, from the University of Lisbon, where she also completed her Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts degrees.  She is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES) where she is deputy director of Group 2 (Culture). She is also an international rep of the Literary London Society. She received the Research Merit Award of the International Journal of Arts & Sciences in 2010. Since 2015 she has been involved in the “The Street and the City” project and has been a member of the research project “Early Novel in English, 1660-1700: Database and Textual Editing” since 2018. Professionally, she is Adjunct Professor at Santarem Higher Institute of Education where she teaches English and Portuguese Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Her research interests include the Enlightenment, female education, Eighteenth-century pleasures and fashions, Georgian elites, London, the city space, and, more recently, novels of circulation. She has two entries forthcoming in The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660- 1820: “Clark, Emily (1805). The Banks of the Douro; Or, The Maid of Portugal” and “Stuart, Augusta Amelia (1810). The Exile of Portugal: A Tale of the Present Time”.