Debjani Ganguly is head of the Humanities Research Centre in the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University. A literary and cultural historian by training, she has published in the areas of postcolonial studies, global Anglophone literatures, caste and dalit studies, cultural histories of mixed-race, Gandhi and nonviolence and Indian literary criticism. Her recent publications are Caste, Colonialism and Countermodernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (Routledge, 2005), Pigments of the Imagination: Rethinking Mixed Race, co-editor (Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2007), and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives, co-editor (Routledge, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2000).

Ned Curthoys is an ARC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research, Research School of Humanities, Australian National University. His project analyses the recuperation of Goethe's 1827 proposal of a 'world literature' by anti-fascist emigrant philologists such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer in the twentieth century.