Timothy Brook is a historian of China whose work has focused on the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but extends to issues that span the period from the 13th century to the 20th century. In addition to serving as the general editor of Harvard University Press’s History of Imperial China, he has published extensively on China in the world. A co-edited volume on the inter-polity relations of Inner and East Asia, Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. One of his most recent books, Great State: China and the World, appeared in Britain and France (the French edition under the title of Le Léopard de Kubilai Khan) in September 2019 and on this side of the Atlantic by HarperCollins in March 2020. The French edition was awarded the Grand Prix des Rendez-vous de l’Histoire in October 2020. He published The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China (Princeton University Press) in 2023. 

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Dept of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015). He was President of the Association for  Asian Studies, USA from 2019-2020 and was  awarded the doctor philosophiae honoris causa from the University of Oslo in 2017. In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future  (Cambridge 2014). He has edited Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy and  Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages.

After receiving her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, Hansen joined Yale University where she is now the Stanley Woodward Professor of History. Hansen has been fortunate to spend 1991-92 as a visiting scholar at Hong Kong University, 1995-96 at Peking University, 2005-06 at East China Normal University. In 2008–09 and 2011–12, she taught at Yale's joint undergraduate program with Peking University, and fall 2015at Yale-NUS college in Singapore. At Yale, she teaches "China: from Present to Past," (a class she and Peter Perdue co-designed), and seminars on the Song dynasty, the Silk Road, and world history. Hansen's first book was Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276 (1990). Her second book, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400 appeared in 1995. Her Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 was published in 2000, and  a second edition of the book going up to 1800 was released in 2015. In 2012, Hansen published The Silk Road: A New History, and in April 2020, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began, which has been translated into fifteen languages. She is now working on a history of the Asian Age of Exploration (800-1500).

Kenneth Pomeranz is a Professor of History at The University of Chicago; he previously taught at the University of California, Irvine. His work focuses mostly on China, though he is also very interested in comparative and world history. Most of his research is in social, economic, and environmental history, though he has also worked on state formation, imperialism, religion, gender, and other topics. His publications include The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), which won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the AHA, and shared the World History Association book prize; The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (1993), which also won the Fairbank Prize; The World that Trade Created (with Steven Topik, first edition 1999, 3rd edition 2012), and a collection of his essays, recently published in France. He has also edited or co-edited five books, and was one of the founding editors of the Journal of Global History. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other sources. His current projects include a history of Chinese political economy from the seventeenth century to the present, and a book called Why Is China So Big? which tries to explain, from various perspectives, how and why contemporary China's huge land mass and population have wound up forming a single political unit.

Since 2022 Hilde De Weerdt is Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History at KU Leuven and Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. Professor De Weerdt is broadly interested in intellectual, social, and political history, both within an East Asian context, and within a comparative or global historical framework. She studied Chinese and Chinese History at KU Leuven (BA) and Harvard University (PH.D.) and taught Chinese and world history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (2002-2007, Assistant Professor), Oxford University (2007-2012, Associate Professor), and King’s College London (2012-2013, Senior Associate Professor) before becoming Chair Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University in 2013. She has published five volumes on Chinese political culture and intellectual history, focusing on the workings of late imperial Chinese bureaucratic infrastructures and political communication (Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, ed., 2021; The Essentials of Governance, tr. and ed., 2021; Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China, 2015; Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127-1276), 2007; Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print--China, 900-1400, ed., 2011). ). She has recently completed a monograph on the global history of medieval Sinitic political advice literature and, with the financial support of the European Research Council and the Dutch Council for Scientific Research she has started working with a team of historians, archeologists, and computer scientists on a longue-durée social history of material infrastructures.

Xin Zhang is a Professor of History at Indiana University, Indianapolis. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago and is the author of three books:Social Transformation in Modern China: The State and Local Elites in Henan, 1900-1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 二十世纪中国社会之演变(北京:中华书局,2004), and The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). His expertise is in Chinese urban and rural history, specializing in the theoretical interpretation of local changes due to globalization and social transformation in the late Qing and modern periods.

Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. His first book,The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England, was published by Cambridge University Press, and received the 2018 Presidents Award from the Social Science History Association and the 2018 Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. His second book, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. He has published articles and book chapters on a wide array of topics, winning awards from several academic organizations, and is a regular essayist on Chinese law, society, and politics in media outlets. Zhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School. He has also taught at the Duke University School of Law, the University of Hong Kong, Brown University, and the Tsinghua University School of Law.