Bryan Wagner is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley. He received a PhD in English from the University of Virginia before coming to Berkeley in 2002. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has secondary interests in legal history and popular music. He has published Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Tom McEnaney works on the history of media and technology, Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, computational (digital) humanities and new media studies. He has contributed articles to Cultural Critique, The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, La Habana Elegante, Representations, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Sounding Out!, Variaciones Borges, and others.