Anne E. Bailey completed her doctorate in 2010 and currently holds a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include saints’ cults and pilgrimage, hagiography, women's religious history and medical history, focusing chiefly on England during the High Middle Ages.

Esme Cleall is a Lecturer in the History of the British Empire at Sheffield University. Her recent book, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Difference in the British Empire, analyses families, sickness and violence in a colonial context. She also works on disability in Britain and in the Empire.

Maya Corry is currently a Research Associate on the three-year ERC-funded project ‘Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Renaissance Italian Home, 1400–1600’, at the University of Cambridge. She completed her doctorate in the History of Art department at the University of Oxford, with a thesis titled ‘Masculinity and Spirituality in Renaissance Milan: The Role of the Beautiful Body in the Art of Leonardo da Vinci and the Leonardeschi’. While at Oxford, she was a Graduate Teaching and Research Scholar at Oriel College and co-convened the annual Italian Renaissance seminar series.

Érica Couto-Ferreira is currently working on the project ‘Medical Systems in Transition: The Case of the Ancient Near East’ at the University of Heidelberg. Her main research interests include gynaecology and diseases of women in cuneiform texts, medical professions in antiquity, constitution and transmission of medical knowledge in the Ancient Near East, and lexicography of the body in Sumerian and Akkadian.

Pat Cullum is Head of History at the University of Huddersfield. She is the editor, with Katherine J. Lewis, of Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (2005). She has written widely on clerical masculinity, lay piety and hospitals and almshouses in late medieval England.

Joy Dixon is an Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is the author of Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (2001) and co-editor of ‘Religion and Sexuality’, a special issue of Victorian Review (2011). Her current project – tentatively titled ‘Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Britain, 1870–1930’ – explores the impact of the new sexual sciences on religious life in Britain.

Susan Gane is a doctoral student researching the social history of the British army, 1730–70. Her work is built around autobiographies of men who were common soldiers in this period.

Agnès Garcia-Ventura is a researcher involved in Assyriology and gender studies. Her thesis (at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) combines both fields and deals with the organisation of work in the Ur III textile industry. She is also carrying out research into the historiography of Ancient Near Eastern studies in Spain during the twentieth century.

Effi Gazi is Associate Professor of Modern History and Theory of Historiography in the Social and Education Policy Department, University of the Peloponnese, Greece. She received her doctorate from the European University Institute, Florence in 1997 and conducted post-doctoral research at Princeton University. Her publications include Scientific National History: The Greek Case in Comparative Perspective (2000); The Second Life of the Three Hierarchs: A Genealogy of the ‘Helleno-Christian Civilization’ (in Greek, 2004) and ‘Fatherland, Religion, Family’: History of a Slogan (1880–1930) (in Greek, 2011). Her research interests include the history and theory of historiography, intellectual and cultural history as well as the history of nationalism and the history of politics and religion.

Daniel J. R. Grey is Lecturer in World History Plymouth University, researching gender and violence in modern Britain and India. His book, Degrees of Guilt: Infanticide in England 1860–1960, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

Joanna de Groot is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York. She works on gender and sexual histories of imperialism and orientalism, and of social, cultural and political movements in Iran and Europe. She is currently researching a gendered study of nineteenth-century Iran.

Wilson Chacko Jacob is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University, Montreal. During 2012–13, he was a EURIAS Visiting Fellow at CRASSH and Clare Hall, Cambridge University. This article forms part of a larger SSHRC-funded research project: ‘Sovereignty in Times of Empire: Islam, Gangsters, and Preachers’.

Yuet Keung Lo is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. He specialises in Chinese intellectual history covering Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism and their interactions from the classical period to late imperial times. He has published a book and numerous articles in these areas, and his recent publications include ‘The Drama of Numskulls: Structure, Texture, and Functions of the Scripture of One Hundred Parables’, Early Medieval China 12 (2006); ‘Conversion to Chastity: A Buddhist Catalyst in Early Imperial China’, Nan Nu 10 (2008); ‘Change Beyond Syncretism: Ouyi Zhixu's Buddhist Hermeneutics of the Yijing’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (2008) and ‘From a Dual Soul to a Unitary Soul: The Babel of Soul Terminologies in Early China’, Monumenta Serica 56 (2008). He is currently completing two books on early medieval China; one on Buddhist storytelling and one on gendered virtues.

Kathleen M. McIntyre is an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. She received her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 2012. She is currently revising her thesis, ‘Contested Spaces: Protestantism in Oaxaca, 1919–95’ for publication.

Clare Midgley is Research Professor in History at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of Women Against Slavery (1995), Gender and Imperialism (1998) and Feminism and Empire (2007) and is currently researching a monograph on ‘Liberal Religion and the “Woman Question” in the Age of Empire’.

Zubin Mistry is currently preparing for publication a monograph on perceptions of abortion in the Early Middle Ages.

Sue Morgan is Professor of Women's and Gender History at the University of Chichester, UK. She writes on the history of gender, religion and sexuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and has edited Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (2002) and The Feminist History Reader (2006). She has also co-edited several collections including Manifestos for History (2007) with Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow; Women, Gender and Religious Cultures: Britain, 1800–1940 (2010) with Jacqueline deVries and, most recently, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain (2013) with Lucy Delap. She is currently working on a history of religious discourses of love, sexuality and gender between 1880 and 1940.

Michelle M. Sauer is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota. She specialises in Middle English language and literature, especially women's devotional literature, and publishes regularly on anchoritism, mysticism, asceticism, hagiography and Church history. Her recent books include The Lesbian Premodern (2011); How to Write about Chaucer (2009); The Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry (2008) and a forthcoming volume, Gender in Medieval Culture (Continuum). Her current projects include an edition of the Wooing Group; an anchoritic guidebook; a collection on late medieval Carmelite Rules and several edited collections as well as articles and essays.

Mary Vincent teaches history at the University of Sheffield, where she is Professor of Modern European History. She is the author of various articles on gender, religion and politics in Republican and Civil War Spain and her most recent book is Spain 1833–2002: People and State (2007). She is currently working on a monograph of Franco's Crusade, looking at religious violence in the Spanish Civil War.

Carolyn E. Watson is Profesora Titular in the Escuela de Historia y Ciencias Sociales y at the Universidad ARCIS in Santiago, Chile. Her research analyses the role of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the formation of national identity in twentieth-century Cuba.

Rina Verma Williams currently teaches in the Departments of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati. She received her doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University. Her areas of specialisation include South Asian politics; women and gender; ethnicity and nationalism; religion and politics; and politics of the developing nations. Her first book, Postcolonial Politics and Personal Laws: Colonial Legal Legacies and the Indian State, was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. Her current research examines the role of women and gender in religious nationalism in Indian politics.