Andrew Hui is a literary historian who traces the smallest turns of language to uncover the largest ideas.

The author of three books—The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton 2025); A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, 2019, translated into five languages); and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (Fordham, 2017), he explores the movement of knowledge—how ideas migrate, traditions rupture, and new forms emerge.

His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal and writings have appeared in Paris Review, Public Domain Review and LitHub. He has also spoken on BBC radio and Swiss TV.

After earning his PhD from Princeton, Hui held fellowships at the Warburg Institute in London, Villa I Tatti in Florence, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He taught for three years at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow, and from 2012 to 2025, was one of the inaugural faculty members at Yale-NUS College (now defunct). He currently teaches at National University of Singapore, where he is at work on The Emperor’s Maze: the Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age.

As an Asian American teaching the European classics in Asia, he has devoted his life to studying the languages and cultures of both worlds.

Photo courtesy of Maurice Weiss

Non is a writer, garden designer and wildflower hunter.  She writes extensively and imaginatively on gardens and plants. She is Contributing Editor at House & Garden, writes regularly for Country Life and has a monthly column for The English Garden, taking over in 2021 from Katherine Swift (The Morville Hours).  She has contributed to Gardens Illustrated, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Spectator Online.

As a designer, her emphasis is on using plants to create atmosphere. As well as private gardens in London, Suffolk, Sussex and Oxfordshire, public projects include the Fox Garden at the South London Gallery, the Church of St Mary the Boltons in South Kensington and currently the Leach Pottery in St Ives.

Based in London but frequently travelling in search of wonder, wildness and astonishingly flowery places, her first book Flora Alpina, The Wild Romance of Mountain Flowers will be published in 2027.

Photo courtesy of Rachel Warne

Emily is interested in how children are cared for, and who by. Her first book, Saving the Children (UCP, 2021), was shortlisted for the RHS Whitbread Prize and Grace Abbott Book Prize. Now, she is working on a new project titled Love’s Labour: A History of Love and Work, which traces the story of infant care from Victorian baby farms to modern day nursery schools. Her writing on childcare, child rights and contemporary welfare states can be found in Jacobin, Tribune, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Emily has worked and studied at universities across the world, including in New York, Florence and Cape Town, and is now a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield. She has also collaborated extensively with the humanitarian sector, teaching history to aid workers and helping modern NGOs grapple with the legacies of their colonial pasts. She’s the chairperson of a community playschool in Sheffield

Photo courtesy of Andrew Roberts

Alex Kaiserman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He works on questions at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics; for example, questions which explore the connections between causation and responsibility, possibility and free will, or time and punishment.

Alex’s first book, How to Get Back to the Future, will be published in the UK by Viking Press. It traces the history of philosophical thinking about time travel from its origins in 19th-Century utopian fantasy, through the pulp fiction magazines of the 20s and 30s, right up to cutting-edge developments in metaphysics and tense logic, in search of answers to the questions at the heart of all time travel stories: Could a time-traveller change the past? For that matter, could they change the future? What would happen if they tried? What would happen if they succeeded?

Caroline is a historian, curator and broadcaster specialising in the arts of early modern Europe with a particular focus on decorative arts, women’s lives and the history of collecting. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds and is currently Lecturer in French and British History of Art, c.1650-1900 at the University of Edinburgh.

Previously, Caroline was Curator of Ceramics and Glass 1600-1800 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Curator of The Chitra Collection, London. She is especially passionate about making art and its histories accessible to all and regularly collaborates with museums and schools on public engagement projects.

Caroline frequently contributes as a consultant and expert for exhibitions, radio and television, most recently for BBC Scotland, BBC Radio 4 (Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time), and BBC History Extra. She has lectured at the Rijksmuseum, the Gardiner Museum, the Wallace Collection and the Scottish National Galleries. Her words have appeared in Apollo, Ceramic Review, BBC History Magazine and in numerous scholarly journals. She has authored two academic monographs; the first Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector with Lund Humphries (September, 2025), and the second entitled Sèvres-Mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship with Bloomsbury Academic (Spring, 2026). She is currently working on her first trade book.

Photo courtesy of Susannah Alltimes

Serena is a historian, writer, and broadcaster specialising in histories of fashion, shopping, and women’s lives from the sixteenth century to the present day. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Warwick, and she is Associate Professor of Fashion History at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Her words have appeared in The Independent, History Today, and The Conversation and she is a regular expert contributor and consultant for radio and television. She writes and presents Fashion Through History, a digital media series produced by Our Media for English Heritage.

She is the author of two academic monographs, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18^th Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and Labour of the Stitch: The Making and Remaking of Fashionable Georgian Dress (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and has edited volumes including Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: Bodies, Gender, and Material Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), Shopping and the Senses: A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption, 1800-1970 (Palgrave, 2022), Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks, 1600-1970 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Material Literacy in Eighteenth Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is currently working on her first trade book.

Priya Khanchandani is a writer, curator and broadcaster who grew up in Luton and lives in London. She studied modern languages at Cambridge University and design history at the Royal College of Art. She was a lawyer before becoming a critic and curator, most recently working as head of curatorial of the Design Museum. She has curated exhibitions on contemporary design at museum and biennials internationally and her writing has appeared in publications like the Guardian, the Financial Times, Frieze, Vogue and in books and anthologies. She studied creative writing at the Faber Academy following a serious illness and was selected for the Penguin Books’ WriteNow scheme.