Walter D. Ward (Ph.D., UCLA) is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has published several scholarly articles on the Roman Near East, early Christianity, and trade in the Red Sea, and he is putting the finishing touches on his first book manuscript, Inventing the pre-Islamic Saracen "Other": Monastic and Saracen Identity Formation in the Sinai Peninsula from Constantine to Mohammad.
Denis Gainty (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is a professor of history at Georgia State University. He is the author of several pieces on Tokugawa and Meiji social history, including a book chapter on the inclusion of martial arts in the modern Japanese public school curriculum. He is currently writing his first book, Martialing the National Body.