Barbara Weinstein is Silver Professor of History at New York University and Past President of the American Historical Association. She is the author of The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (2015), For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964 (1997), and The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (1983).

John M. Monteiro was a professor in the Department of Anthropology of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas and the director of the same university's Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. He also held visiting positions at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University, Massachusetts.