Matthew Harris is a scholar of race and religion who researches and writes at the intersection of African American religious history, Black radical traditions, and the politics of culture. His work aims to recover the ways communities have deployed religious resources to create everyday practices of freedom and enduring cultures of liberation. His current book project, Black Religion Under the Sign of Saturn, is a religious history of how outer space became the place of Black freedom dreams in the twentieth century. Matthew earned his PhD in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a BA in religious studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mohit Manohar specializes in the arts of South Asia, with a special focus on Deccan India. His research examines the processes, motivations, and meanings through which premodern patrons and makers constructed architectural and urban spaces. Alongside, his scholarship explores how architecture and urbanism can shed light on issues of race, religion, cross-cultural encounter, and ecology in premodern South Asia. Manohar is at work on first book, provisionally titled Refracted Cities: Daulatabad and Delhi in Late Medieval India. The book analyzes the complex architectural and urban relationship between two important cities in medieval India—Delhi and Daulatabad—and proposes a new theoretical lens through which the histories of cities closely linked to one another can be examined. Manohar received his BA from Princeton University and his PhD from Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded a Frances Blanshard Prize. Prior to coming to Chicago, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.