Bill Hickman is former Associate Professor of Turkish Language and Literature at the University of California (Berkeley), now retired. He is the author of an ongoing series of articles on 15th century Anatolian poet-sheikhs, published in journals in Turkey and Europe, and his most recent publication is The Story of Joseph. A Fourteenth Century Turkish Morality Play by Sheyyad Hamza.

Gary Leiser is an independent scholar. He completed graduate work in Middle Eastern history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. He has published widely on the social history of the Eastern Mediterranean world in the twelfth-thirteen centuries. His most recent work is Prostitution in the 　Eastern Mediterranean World: The Economics of Sex in the Late and Antique Medieval Middle East (forthcoming).