Jon Whitman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (co-published by Oxford UP and Harvard UP, 1987) and a collective study that he edited with introductory essays, Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Brill, 2000), the first attempt to offer a detailed historical and conceptual framework for approaching interpretive allegory at large in the West.

James Christie is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His dissertation is on the work of the American Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson, with a specific focus on Jameson's long-standing engagement with allegory as a political form, extending from early publications such as Marxism and Form (1971) to A Singular Modernity (2002), and involving a variety of influences, including Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man and Northrop Frye.

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz. His publications include numerous articles and monographs on the cognitive study of figurative language and literature, most recently Interpreting Figurative Language (with Herbert L. Colston; Cambridge UP, 2012). His article on "The Allegorical Impulse" has been published in the 2011 special issue of Metaphor and Symbol on "Cognitive Allegory".

Before taking early retirement, Penelope Murray was a founding member and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics, University of Warwick. Her publications include Plato on Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1996), Classical Literary Criticism (Penguin, 2000), and, co-edited with Peter Wilson, Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford UP, 2004). Her current projects include the editing, with Pierre Destrée, of A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics in the Blackwell Companions series, and a book on the Muses for Routledge.

Marco Nievergelt is a research fellow in the Department of English, University of Lausanne. His publications include Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser (D. S. Brewer, 2012) and, co-edited with Mary Carr and K. P. Clarke, On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

Lisa Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Art History at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge UP, 2005) and, co-edited with Cristelle Baskins, Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning (Ashgate, 2007).

Ery Shin is a third-year doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Oxford. Among her areas of interest are modernism, queer theory, and phenomenology. Her dissertation approaches the modernism of Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein through queer theories and representations of loss and embodiment.

Catherine Bates is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Head of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. Her most recent book is Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford UP, 2013) and she has edited The Cambridge Companion to Epic (Cambridge UP, 2010). Her current projects include the editing of the Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry and a monograph on Sidney's Arcadia.

Philip Gaydon is a third-year part-time PhD student in the Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick. His research examines the texts and writers of the "Golden Age" of children's literature (roughly 1870-1890) in terms of a wider philosophical debate concerning the existence and usefulness of artistic knowledge. He is co-organizer of 21st Century Theories of Literature: Essence, Fiction and Value, an interdisciplinary conference taking place at Warwick in March 2014.

Andrew Laird is Professor of Classical Literature at the University of Warwick. His numerous publications include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power: Speech Presentation and Latin Literature (Oxford UP, 1999) and The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landívar and the Rusticatio Mexicana (Duckworth, 2006). His current projects include an edition of Petrarch’s Africa and studies of the culture of Latin in colonial Mexico and ancient biographies of Latin poets. His article on “Figures of Allegory from Homer to Latin Epic” appeared in Metaphor, Allegory and the Classical Tradition, ed. George Boys-Stones (Oxford UP, 2003).

Máté Vince has recently received his PhD at the Department of English and Comparative Literary studies at the University of Warwick, where he is currently a part-time tutor. His dissertation explored the changing concepts of ambiguity in early modern English religious controversies and literature. He is now organising a conference on using, misusing and abusing Latin in the Renaissance, and plans to work on the ethical implications of understanding in the Renaissance commentary tradition of the classics.

Iman Sheeha has recently submitted her PhD thesis at the Department of English and Comparative Literary studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis examined the roles of household servants in early modern English domestic tragedy. Her areas of interest include the institution of domestic service in early modern English culture and theatre, domesticity, privacy, the household/state analogy and its implications for both the early modern English house and state.

Vladimir Brljak is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, writing on "Allegory and Modernity in English Literature, c. 1575-1675". He has published and presented on the role of allegory in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetics and allegorical readings of Milton's Paradise Lost.