Zalfa Feghali is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Leicester, UK. An American Studies scholar, she works primarily on contemporary North American literature and culture and publishes in border studies, reading studies, and vulnerability studies. She is the author of Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic Reading Practice in Contemporary American and Canadian Writing (2019).

Deborah Toner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Leicester, UK. She publishes on the history of alcohol in the Americas, with a particular focus on ideas of nationhood, gender, race, and ethnicity in Mexico, the United States, and Guyana. She is the author of Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (2015) and the editor of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War (2021). She was a cöFounder and cöDirector of the Drinking Studies Network from 2010 to 2024.