Janet Afary is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, US. She is the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (2009, winner of the British Society for Middle East Studies Annual Book Prize), The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism. She has co-authored Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (with Kevin B. Anderson, 2005, winner of the Latifeh Yarshater Book Award for Iranian Women's Studies); and co-authored Molla Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster (with Kamran Afary, 2024, winner of the Eugenia M. Palmegian Prize from the American Historical Association)

Roger Friedland is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, US. He is the author of Amore (2014), co-author of The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship (with Harold Zellman, 2007), Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice (with John Mohr, 2007), and To Rule Jerusalem (with Richard Hecht, 2000). Friedland is currently writing two books, one with the philosopher Ted Schatzki on practice institutionalism and the case of cryptocurrency, and the other with the French sociologist, a theoretical and dialogical autobiography with Laurent Thévenot on institutional logics and the theory of conventions.