Nicholas McDowell was born and grew up in Belfast and then studied at Cambridge and Oxford. He was a Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before joining the Department of English at the University of Exeter, where he is now Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought. His visiting positions have included Membership of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is a former winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled 'The Poetry of Civil War'.

Henry Power studied Classics and English at Brasenose College Oxford, and then read for a PhD in English at Cambridge. Since 2007, he has taught at the University of Exeter, where he is now Professor of English Literature. He is the author of Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (2015), and has edited Joseph Addison's miscellaneous prose writings for Oxford University Press. He has held visiting positions at All Souls College, Oxford and at the Beinecke Library in Yale.