Margaret C. Jacob holds the position of Distinguished Chair of Research in History at UCLA. She has a Ph.D. from Cornell University and an honorary doctorate from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans; Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry in Eighteenth Century Europe; The Newtonians and the English Revolution; and The Secular Enlightenment.

María Eugenia Vázquez Semadeni has a Ph.D. from El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM, México, and at UCLA, as well as Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University. She is a member of the Centro de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería Española, and a founding member of the Centro de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería Latinoamericana y Caribeña. She is the author of La formación de una cultura política republicana: El debate público sobre la masonería. México 1821-1830.