Shapan Adnan graduated in Economics at the University of Sussex and obtained his PhD in Social and Political Sciences (SPS) from the University of Cambridge. He has formerly taught at the Universities of Dhaka and Chittagong, followed by the National University of Singapore (NUS). He has been a Visiting Scholar at Queen Elizabeth House and subsequently a Visiting Research Fellow of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme (CSASP) of the University of Oxford, and continues to be an Associate of CSASP up to the present. Shapan Adnan is on the international advisory board of the Journal of Peasant Studies and is a member of the international Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission. His research and publications cover topics in political economy, sociology, demography and development including agrarian structure, capitalist development, primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, land grabs and green grabs, resistance and mobilization, village studies, peasant societies, indigenous peoples (Chittagong Hill Tracts), ethnic conflict, forced migration and displacement, international refugees (Rohingyas), determinants of fertility trends, women's position, gender relations, as well as issues related to development, flood control, water management, cyclones and disaster management.

Spencer Leonard is a scholar of the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism, especially over the period 1757–1876. Currently in a visiting position at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Leonard completed his Ph.D. at the departments of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2010. He has recently edited a volume of Marx’s journalism from the 1850s entitled Marx and Engels on Imperialism and also a volume of scholarly papers from a conference held in Mumbai in 2017 on the legacy of Mountstuart Elphinstone in Central and South Asia. The project he currently has in hand is a short book on Karl Marx and the English socialists’ response to the debates surrounding the renewal of the East India Company’s charter in 1853. Related to this is a substantial historical paper on the history of the 20th century rediscovery and publication of, and the controversy surrounding, Marx’s writings on India. In the long term, he is also working on a book entitled Adam Smith in Kolkata. This is both a retelling of the history of the initial conquest of Bengal by the East India Company from 1756 to 1776 and a reconceptualization of the relationship between radical Enlightenment thought, the emergence of the Company’s territorial empire in India, and the crisis of the British Revolution.