James A. Toronto is professor of Islamic and Arabic studies, teaching courses in comparative religion, Islamic humanities, and Arabic language. He has lived in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey) for twelve years and in Italy for five years, teaching in international schools, studying Arabic language and literature, and publishing books and articles on issues of Islamic education, legal status and integration of religious minorities in Europe and the Middle East, and Latter-day Saint missiology. He has worked as a consultant for Harvard’s Institute for International Development in Egypt and for Amideast in the West Bank and Gaza. For four years, he served as assistant director of the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University before accepting a three-year assignment as director of BYU’s Center for Cultural and Educational Affairs in Amman, Jordan. He was later appointed coordinator of BYU’s Middle East Studies/Arabic program. Toronto received a BA in English with minors in history and Italian from BYU and an MA and PhD in Islamic and Arabic studies from Harvard University.

Kent F. Schull is associate professor of Ottoman and modern Middle East history at Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY), and the director of Binghamton University’s Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies (CMENAS). He received his doctorate from UCLA (2007) and is a twice Fulbright scholar to Turkey. His publications include Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (EUP, 2014); the coedited volumes Living in the Ottoman Realm: Sultans, Subjects, and Elites (IUP, 2016), Law and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire & Republic of Turkey (IUP, 2016), and Subjects of Ottoman International Law (IUP, 2020); and numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is also book series editor for Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire, Edinburgh University Press, and was editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) from 2013 to 2018. His research and teaching interests include the social and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East, criminal justice, Middle East diaspora studies, Israeli and Palestinian history, and forced migration and genocide studies in the MENA region.