Edward S. Cooke, Jr., the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, focuses upon American material culture and decorative arts. His books include Making Furniture in Pre-industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Inventing Boston: Design, Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World, 1680–1720 (Yale University Press, 2019), both of which focus upon the context of craftsman-client relations in colonial North America. His most recent book, Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (Princeton University Press, 2022), looks at the production, consumption, and circulation of functional aesthetic objects made from clay, fiber, wood, and nonferrous base metals.

Dr. Vimalin Rujivacharakul is Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Delaware, and Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University. She has published on Sino-European architectural and intellectual history, the production of knowledge, history of collecting, and theories of things and material culture. Among her publications are the edited volume Architecturalized Asia, which was selected by CHOICE as an Outstanding Academic Title of the 2014; and Liang Sicheng and the Temple of Buddha’s Light, which was included in the China Classic series by the Ministry of Education, People’s Republic of China, in 2015. In 2017, she led the Andrew W. Mellon workshop on “Chinese objects outside of China,” which based on her earlier publication Collecting China: The World, China, and A Short History of Collecting. She is actively working with colleagues at Tsinghua University to revitalize abandoned heritage sites and villages in China.