David L. Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History at Harvard University and Editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. He received his B.A. from the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton before joining the Harvard faculty in 2010. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005) as well as numerous articles. 

Howell’s research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century. His current projects include a short survey of the Meiji Restoration period and a history of human waste and garbage in the cities of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. He is also a co-editor of a new edition of the Cambridge History of Japan.

Melissa J. Brown is Managing Editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. She received her BA and MA degrees from Stanford University and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Washington-Seattle. She was on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati and Stanford University before coming to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard in 2011 and joining the HJAS staff in 2014. Brown’s publications include Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities (2004), Explaining Culture Scientifically (2008), “Dutiful Help: Masking Rural Women’s Economic Contributions” (in Transforming Patriarchy, 2016), “Footbinding, Industrialization, and Evolutionary Explanation: An Empirical Illustration of Niche Construction and Social Inheritance” (Human Nature 27.4, 2016),  “Economic Correlates of Footbinding: Implications for the Importance of Chinese Daughters’ Labor” (PLOS ONE Sept 20, 2018), and “Taiwan’s Intersectional Cosmopolitanism: Local Women in Their Communities” (Cross-Currents 33, 2019). 

Max L. Bohnenkamp is a scholar of modern Chinese literature and culture and a freelance translator specializing in Chinese scholarly writings in the Humanities and Social Sciences and fiction. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and has taught on Chinese literature, popular culture, and cinema at NYU, Harvard, and the University of Iowa. Bohnenkamp’s research focuses on the adaptation of Chinese folk culture for modern and contemporary literature, cinema, and performing arts, the reception of Western and Soviet theories of literary and dramatic aesthetics in China, and the relationship of creative expression to politics and critical social theory. He is currently completing a book-length study on the famous revolutionary drama The White-Haired Girl and his most recent translation is a collection of essays by Chinese scholars of religion, entitled Beyond Indigenization: Christianity and Chinese History in a Global Context, published in 2023.