Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto holds an MA in the History of the Portuguese Expansion (1994) and a Ph.D. in Historical Sciences (2011). His Ph.D. thesis focused on a comparative approach to the Portuguese and Spanish empires and their roles in Asia. From 2012 to 2017, he developed a post-doctoral project about “Conflict and Collaboration—Presences and Representations of the Overseas Chinese in the Ibero-Asian Societies (16th–19th centuries).” He is currently a researcher at CHAM—Centro de Humanidades (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa–NOVA FCSH) and Invited Assistant Professor at NOVA FCSH. His fields of work include Early Modern Southeast Asia and the European presence in Asia (16th–18th centuries) and the Iberian overseas empires. He has published several works on these subjects, namely The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 1575–1619: Power, Trade, and Diplomacy (Singapore University Press, 2012).

Rene B. Javellana, S.J., teaches with the Fine Arts Department of the Ateneo de Manila University, of which he was the founding director. He is the author of numerous books in Philippine cultural history, especially the visual arts and architecture. Among them are Wood and Stone for God’s Greater Glory: Jesuit Art and Architecture in the Philippines (1991), Great Churches of the Philippines (with Fr. Pedro Galende, OSA, 1993); Fortress of Empire: Spanish Colonial Fortifications in the Philippines, 1565–1898 (1997), and La Casa de Dios: Filipino-Hispanic Churches in the Philippines (2010). He was also the editor of the Architecture volume of the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. He is the editor of critical editions of two Tagalog pasyon. Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565–1850 (2017) is a comprehensive analysis of the interplay between the foreign and the indigenous which resulted in Philippine culture. Its thesis is a key theme of this international conference series.

Barbara Watson Andaya is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. She was formerly Director of the UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and in 2005–06 she was President of the American Association of Asian Studies. She has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Award as well as the University of Hawai‘i Regents Medal for Excellence in Research. She has lived and taught in Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore, the Netherlands, and the United States. Her specific area of expertise is the western Malay-Indonesia archipelago on which she has published widely, though she maintains an active teaching and research interest across all Southeast Asia. Her publications include Perak, The Abode of Grace: A Study of an Eighteenth Century Malay State (1979), The Precious Gift (with co-editor Tuhfat al-Nafis ) (1982), To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993); The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (2006); A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia (with Leonard Y. Andaya) (2015), and a third edition of A History of Malaysia (2017). She is the General Editor of the new Cambridge History of Southeast Asia and is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asia.

Vicente L. Rafael (PhD Cornell, AB Ateneo) is the author of several works on the historical and cultural politics of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines, including Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1992), Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation (2016), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005), and White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (2000). He is the editor of Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays in Filipino Cultures (1995), Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (1999), and Nick Joaquin’s collection of short stories, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic (2017). Currently, he is finishing a manuscript on politics and aesthetics of the Duterte regime, “The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte,” to be published by Duke and the Ateneo de Manila.

Javier Ruescas is President of Asociación Cultural Galeón de Manila, a Madrid-based cultural group that promotes and studies Spanish-Philippine history and cultural ties. He has written a number of articles on Spanish-Philippine history and participated in conferences on this subject in Manila and Madrid. Javier has written and directed the documentary "El Idioma Español en Filipinas," premiered in Instituto Cervantes (Madrid) in 2013. An economist by profession, Javier works in the Market Intelligence and Competitiveness department of the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in Madrid, Spain.

Ambeth R. Ocampo is a public historian whose research covers the late 19th-century Philippines, its art, culture, and the heroes who figure in the emergence of the Filipino nation.

A Professor and former Chair of the History Department, Ateneo de Manila University, he writes a widely read editorial page column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He has published over 30 books and moderates growing Facebook and Instagram pages.

In another life,  he served as President of the Philippine Historical Association, Chairman of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and Chairman of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines.

Dr. Beatriz Alvarez-Tardio is currently teaching at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid (Spain). She has taught at the University of Alcala de Henares (Spain), the Ateneo de Manila University, and the University of the Philippines. She has been Visiting Scholar at De La Salle University in the Philippines. Her endeavors in the preservation and revaluation of Philippine Literature in Spanish brought forth her two books about the Filipina writer Adelina Gurrea (Writing Athwart: Adelina Gurrea's Life and Works [with the Ateneo de Manila University] and the critical edition of Gurrea's short stories Cuentos de Juana) and recently the collection of short stories by Enrique K. Laygo, Relatos, with Instituto Cervantes, besides other essays and lectures about Philippine Literature in Spanish.

Leia Castañeda Anastacio is an AB Interdisciplinary Studies (Summa Cum Laude and Departmental Awardee) and JD (Class Salutatorian, Second Honors Silver Medal, and Gold Medal for Best Thesis) graduate of the Ateneo de Manila University. Selected one of the Ten Outstanding Students of the Philippines (in the field of Law), Leia placed first in the 1993 Philippine Bar Examinations then received her LLM (Master of Laws) and SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) from Harvard Law School, becoming the first Filipino woman to earn the latter degree. Previously a visiting scholar with Harvard Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies Program and Dartmouth College’s History Department and a fellow with the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Leia was awarded Harvard Law School’s Yong Kim ’95 Memorial Prize in 2008 and the American Society of Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize in 2010. She is the author of The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State: Imperial Rule and the American Constitutional Tradition in the Philippine Islands, 1898–1935 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Aitor Anduaga (BSc. Physics, Barcelona, 1991; BA. Philosophy, UNED, 1996; PhD. Physics, UPV-EHU, 2001) has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Oxford, Sydney, Montreal, and Toronto, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science of Berlin, and the Smithsonian Institution of Washington. He is at present Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Basque Museum of the History of Medicine and Science at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU). He has been a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) at the Ateneo de Manila University (2011, 2012, 2014). In 2019, he was Ritter Memorial Fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at the University of California, San Diego. In 2020, he was an Invited Research Fellow at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies working on a project on the Basques in Asia.

His main research interests lie in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (particularly geophysics), the Jesuits and science, the production and circulation of scientific knowledge, and the Basque studies in general. He has widely published in all these areas.

Greg Bankoff is a historical geographer who focuses on the way societies interrelate with their environments over time, especially the way people adapt to frequent hazards. For the last 25 years, he has focused his research primarily on Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Pacific, and the North Sea, seeking to understand how societies, both past and present, have learned to normalize risk and the manner in which communities deal with crisis through an applied interdisciplinary approach that combines archival analysis with fieldwork, community mapping, interviews, and focus groups. He is Professor of Environmental History at the University of Hull and has published extensively, including over 100 refereed journal articles and book chapters. Among recent publications are co-authoring The Red Cross’s World Disaster Report 2014: Focusing on Culture and Risk, and a companion edited volume entitled Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction (2015).