Caroline Baylis-Green is an independent postdoctoral researcher and visiting lecturer at the University of Sussex, specialising in long nineteenth-century poetry and life writing, with a particular focus on links between queer theory, identity and women’s writing. She has published on closeting and decoding in long nineteenth-century poetry, material culture and the Victorian short story form, and previously taught nineteenth-century literature as an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she completed her PhD. She also teaches on film, performance art and drag.

Angela Clare has more than fifteen years’ experience working in museums and heritage, including eight years at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds and the Tower of London working on various interpretation projects and exhibitions. She has worked for Calderdale Museums, which manages Shibden Hall and Bankfield Museum in Halifax, for several years now, completing various collection projects, gallery changes and developments, a wide range of exhibitions, publications and films, all to improve access and engagement with collections and history, and she has written non-fiction articles and publications on a range of topics including Anne Lister of Shibden Hall.

Anna Clark is the author of Alternative Histories of the Self: a Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets (2017), which includes a chapter on Anne Lister that rethinks her original article, ‘Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity’, Journal of the History of Sexuality (1996). She is also the author of Desire: a History of European Sexuality (2008), Scandal: the Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2004), The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995) and Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England (1987). She is a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Emma Donoghue is a writer of fiction, drama, screenplays and literary history. Born in Dublin, she did a PhD on eighteenth-century English fiction at Cambridge University before settling in Canada. She is best known for Room – the novel (2010; shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize), the film (nominated for four Oscars) and the play. Her latest novel, Learned by Heart (2023), is about Eliza Raine and Anne Lister at the Manor School.

Caroline Gonda is College Associate Professor and Glen Cavaliero Fellow in English at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge University, where she is also the college’s first official LGBTQ+ Fellow. She is the author of Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (1996), and has published articles on lesbian and queer representation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Women’s Writing, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, Journal of Lesbian Studies and The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature. She is the co-editor of Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800 (2007) and of Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century (2010), the first collection of scholarly essays on desire between women in this period.

Susan S. Lanser is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English and WGS at Brandeis University. She has written widely on topics of sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century, most extensively in The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (2014), winner of the American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Prize and runner-up for the Louis D. Gottschalk Prize, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Studies, ECTI, Eighteenth-Century Life, PMLA, Feminist Studies and Narrative. She is a past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the International Society for the Study of Narrative.

Kirsty McHugh is Curator of the John Murray Archive and Publishers’ Collections at the National Library of Scotland and has recently completed her PhD at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. Trained as an archivist, she is interested in the use of manuscript sources for studying the history of travel writing, and the interaction of manuscript and print. Her interest in Anne Lister grew out of her doctoral research on tours of Scotland and Wales in the Romantic period, and she published the first study of Anne Lister’s 1828 tour of Scotland in Studies in Travel Writing in 2019.

Chris Roulston is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and French Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Her books include Virtue, Gender and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1998) and Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (2010). She has recently published on marriage in A Cultural History of Marriage in the Age of Enlightenment (2020), on Mme de Graffigny in Françoise de Graffigny: femme de lettres des Lumières (2020) and on Anne Lister in After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century (2018), Journal of the History of Sexuality (JHS), Journal of Lesbian Studies (JLS) and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her current project, School Daze: Queer Nostalgia in Modern British Girls’ Boarding School Narratives, focuses on queer sexuality in girls’ boarding school novels, with recently published articles on Rosemary Manning’s The Chinese Garden in Twentieth-Century Literature (2019) and on Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia in Modernism/Modernity (2020).

Laurie Shannon is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of Literature at Northwestern University and a historian of ideas. Her first book, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (2002), assesses the impact of classical friendship on the political imaginary of the long sixteenth century. Her second, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (2013), analyses cosmic membership and the species concept before Descartes, earning the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize for its contribution to literary studies of the English Renaissance. Projects underway include Frailty’s Name: Shakespeare’s Natural History of Human Being and Anne Lister’s Hand, an account of Lister’s hospitable theory of nature.

Angela Steidele has written several books about LGBTQ+ lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Love Story: Adele Schopenhauer and Sibylle Mertens (2010) was shortlisted for the NDR Kultur non-fiction prize, and she won the Gleim Literature Prize for In Men’s Clothes (2004, revised edition 2021), her biography of Catharina Linck, and the Bavarian Book Prize for her novel Rosenstengel (2017). Her biography of Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack (2019), was longlisted for the Portico Prize and praised by the Guardian as ‘a triumph of truth over fantasy’. Her latest book, Enlightenment. A novel (2022), was shortlisted for the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In 2023 she gained the Klopstock Prize for her entire literary work.

Stephen Turton is a Research Fellow in English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He specialises in the history of English dictionaries from 1600 to the present, with a particular interest in their representations of marginalised sexualities, genders and linguistic varieties. His essay ‘The Confessional Sciences: Scientific Lexicography and Sexology in the Oxford English Dictionary’ was awarded the Vivien Law Prize by the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas in 2019. His first book, Before the Word was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and he is co-editing a digital edition of the letters of Sir James A. H. Murray, the first chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, at www.murrayscriptorium.org.

Cassandra Ulph is a specialist in British women’s fiction and non-fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular focus on literary and artistic professionalism, women’s intellectual identity and sociability. Her publications include articles on Frances Burney, Hester Piozzi and Anne Lister. She was a Research Associate in Reading Practices at the University of Manchester on Unlocking the Hamilton Papers, a major AHRC-funded project to reconstruct, digitise and transliterate the correspondence and other writings of bluestocking diarist and courtier Mary Hamilton. She works at the University of Leeds as the Digital Development Officer for the Digital Creativity and Cultures Hub in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

Sally Wainwright, OBE, is a Yorkshire-born television writer, producer and director, who started as a scriptwriter for the BBC Radio 4 drama The Archers before launching her television career in 2000 with the television series At Home with the Braithwaites (2000–3). In 2009, she won the Royal Television Society’s Writer of the Year Award for her mini-series Unforgiven. She is also the creator of ITV’s Scott & Bailey (2011–16) and the BBC’s Last Tango in Halifax (2012–20) and Happy Valley (2014–23), the last two winning the British Academy Television Awards (BAFTAs) for Best Drama Series in 2013 (Last Tango), 2015 and 2017 (Happy Valley). In 2016, she wrote and directed a two-hour drama series for the BBC on the Brontës, To Walk Invisible: the Brontë Sisters, and in 2019, created season one of the BBC/HBO television series Gentleman Jack, with season two airing in 2022. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society in 2016.

Helena Whitbread, MBE, is a writer, born in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1931, whose education was cut short at the age of fourteen, before, in 1965, she gained a BSc (Hons) at Bradford University and a PGCE in Further Education. Following the discovery of the journals of Anne Lister in 1983, she spent five years transcribing extracts from them. The edited extracts have been published in her two books, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (2010) and The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, vol. ii: No Priest but Love (2020). She has been employed as a consultant on the following television productions: A Skirt through History, episode one (BBC; 1994), the documentary Revealing Anne Lister (BBC; 2010) and the first season of Gentleman Jack (BBC/HBO; 2019). She was also on The One Show (2019), a live BBC TV interview with Suranne Jones and Sophie Rundle. She is presently working on a biography of Anne Lister’s early life (1791–1826). In January 2023 she was awarded an Honorary D.Litt. from the University of Sheffield for her research and publications on Anne Lister’s diaries. A short biographical film of her life entitled ‘The Helena Whitbread Story’, filmed at Shibden Hall, Halifax in November 2022, was released on April 3rd 2023.