Jocelyne Cesari is Associate Professor at La Sorbonne-Paris and a Visiting Professor at Harvard University. Her areas of interest include: Islamic minorities in Europe and America, North African political and cultural life, and the cultural dimensions of globalization. Her most recent publication is European Muslims and the Secular State (Aldershot, 2005)

William Granara is Professor of Arabic and directs the Arabic language program at Harvard. He specializes in the history and culture of Muslim Sicily and teaches courses on contemporary Arabic literature in North Africa. Among his publications are a translation of the novel The Earthquake by the Algerian novelist Tahar Wattar, and articles on North African literature in the Encyclopedia of African Literature and the Encyclopaedia of Islam.

Mary D. Lewis is a member of the Harvard History Department. She has taught and written about immigration in France and the history of France's imperial expansion and contraction in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940, will be published by Stanford University Press in 2007. She is currently working on a new project entitled “Divided Rule: French Conquest, Tunisian Sovereignty, and the Imperial Game in North Africa, 1881-1956,” which explores the effects of French, Italian and British competition on social life and legal institutions in Tunisia during the Protectorate period.