Dr. Aireen Barrios-Arnuco is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Applied Linguistics, De La Salle University-Manila. She obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the same university and has taught graduate courses on Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, in addition to various undergraduate courses. Her research interests include cross-linguistic influence, mother tongue-based multilingual education, and language education.

John D. (Jody) Blanco teaches the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian), comparative empire studies (Spanish and US) and modern Philippine, Latin American, and Asian-American literatures at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the 19th Century Philippines (UC Press, 2019), and has also translated and published Julio Ramos’s book Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: cultura y política del siglo XIX [Divergent Modernities of Latin America: Culture and Politics of the Nineteenth Century] (Duke UP 1999). He currently serves on two editorial boards indexed by the Modern Language Association: the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and UNITAS. He also serves on the organizing committee of the Tepoztlán Institute Collective, which hosts an annual conference in Tepoztlán, Mexico. In addition to research and teaching, Professor Blanco has served as the Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Division of Arts and Humanities (2016-18); and is the incoming director to the Latin American Studies Center and program at UCSD.

George Emmanuel R. Borrinaga, Ph.D., is assistant professor in history at the Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and History of the University of San Carlos (USC). He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Hull (UK) in 2019. His research interests include local history, environmental history, community studies, and Leyte-Samar Studies. He is currently secretary of the Executive Council of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ National Committee on Historical Research (NCCA-NCHR) for 2020–2022. He is a lifetime member of the Philippine National Historical Society (PNHS) and his articles on Samar-Leyte history have appeared in the PNHS’s The Journal of History and USC’s Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society. In 2015, he was co-awardee of the National Committee on Historical Research's (NCCA-NCHR) Young Historian’s Prize 2014 for his MA thesis entitled “The Pulahan Movement in Leyte, 1902–1907.” In 2021, he was awarded the Philippine Social Science Council's (PSSC) Virginia A. Miralao Excellence in Research Award for his article, “José Rizal in the Emotional Landscape of Samar and Leyte at the Turn of the 20th Century,” published in the Philippine National Historical Society's The Journal of History Vol. LXVI (January–December 2020).

Florina H. Capistrano-Baker received the Ph.D., M.Phil, and M.A. from the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, New York City. She received the A.B. in Humanities (cum laude) from the University of the Philippines-Diliman. Dr. Capistrano-Baker was formerly museum director of the Ayala Museum (Philippines), where she is currently a consultant. Formerly research assistant for Oceania in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she curated the exhibition “Divine Protection: Batak Art of North Sumatra” and authored the book Art of Island Southeast Asia: The Fred and Rita Richman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1994). Since 2000, her research has focused on Philippine specificities within a metanarrative of global exchange from the 10th–13th and 16th–19th centuries, investigating historical patterns and genealogies of forms, cultural hybridity, and renegotiated identities. Her book Philippine Ancestral Gold (NUS Press and Ayala Foundation, 2011) documents previously unpublished material suggesting early trade between the Philippines and its neighbors in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In 2014, she curated the permanent installation of the Pacific Gallery at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 2015, she co-curated the exhibition “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms” at the Asia Society Museum in New York and wrote the exhibition catalogue of the same title (Asia Society, 2015). She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume published by the Getty Research Institute, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institute), and Ayala Foundation entitled Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires, 1565–1898. Her scholarly work has been supported by grants from Columbia University, Ford Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, American Association of University Women, Japan Foundation, Locsin Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Getty Research Institute. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Skidmore College, Bard Graduate Center, and City University of New York.

Nikki B. Carsi Cruz Ph.D. holds a Bachelor of Arts in European Studies from De La Salle University and a Master in Peace and Development Studies from Universitat Jaume I in Castellon, Spain. She acquired her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore under the supervision of the historian Reynaldo Ileto.  Her dissertation "From War Dance to Theater of War: Moro-Moro Performances in the Philippines" was awarded the Wang Gung Wu Medal and Prize for Best Thesis in the Arts and Social Sciences. Nikki is currently Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Editor of Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia Journal of the School of Humanities of Ateneo de Manila University. As former President of Asia-Europe Foundation University Alumni Network (ASEFUAN), she has organized a number of events in Asia and Europe aimed at promoting intellectual, cultural, and people-to-people exchanges between the two regions. 

Sandra Castro received a BA in Humanities from the University of the Philippines Diliman, and a postgraduate diploma in Museum Studies from the University of Manchester with a fellowship from the British Council. She also holds an MS in Information Science from the State University of New York at Albany. She was curator for seven years at the Intramuros Administration in Manila, where she organized several exhibitions on Philippine colonial history and material culture. Her study of the piña embroidery collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London led to her monograph Nipis (Intramuros Administration, 1990) which accompanied an important exhibition of Philippine textiles.  She was later curator at the Geronimo Berenguer de los Reyes Museum in Cavite Province, and the Ayala Museum in Makati City, where she curated the exhibition and wrote the monograph entitled Art of the Cross (Ayala Foundation, 2002). She was also curator at the Chapman Museum in New York. She has contributed numerous essays on textiles and 19th-century Philippine material culture in journals and multi-author volumes. Her most recent publication is Textiles in the Philippine Colonial Landscape: A Lexicon and Historical Survey (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019). 

Angelo Cattaneo is a permanent Research Fellow of the CNR-National Research Council of Italy (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) based at the Institute of History of Mediterranean Europe (ISEM) in Rome. He is also a Research Associate of the CHAM-Center for the Humanities at the New University of Lisbon (NOVA\FCSH) and of the Laboratoire Géographie-Cités, Équipe E.H.GO-C.N.R.S. in Paris.

His research revolves around two main topics: 1) the cultural construction of space from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, by studying cosmography, cartography, travel literature, the birth of the atlas, and the spatiality of world languages and religions; and 2) the history of cultural encounters with a focus on missionary practices, trade, mapping, and linguistics in South-East Asia from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, at the interface of both European and Asian expansions as well as empires, from a global perspective.

Between 2012 and 2015, he was one of the coordinators of the project Interactions Between Rivals: The Christian Mission and Buddhist Sects in Japan (c.1549–c.1647), financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Between 2015 and 2017, he was the Principal Investigator of the exploratory research project "The Space of Languages: The Portuguese Language in the Early Modern World (15th–17th centuries)" financed by the NOVA\FCSH.

He has authored several publications, including Fra Mauro’s Mappa mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice (Brepols 2011), "Geographical Curiosities and Transformative Exchange in the Nanban Century (c. 1549–c. 1647)," Études Épistémè 26 (Paris, 2014), the edited volume Shores of Vespucci (Berlin 2018), and the BPJS journal issue Shores of Matteo Ricci (Lisbon 2018). He recently curated with Sabrina Corbellini the exhibition "The Global Eye: Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese Maps in the Collections of the Grand Duke Cosimo III de Medici" (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana 2019–2020) as well as the exhibition catalogue and digital repository.

His research has been supported by numerous awards, such as the FCT, C.N.R.S., and Harvard University-I Tatti post-doctoral fellowships, as well as the John Carter Brown Library, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research-NWO, and the Japan Foundation research fellowships.

Ros Costelo is an Assistant Professor in the UP Department of History. She is also affiliated with the Instituto de Historia-Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones  Científicas. She obtained her Doctorado en Historia Contemporánea (2021, mención internacional) and Master Interuniversitario en Historia Contemporánea (2015) degrees in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with her research ¨Public Works and the Spanish Colonial Agenda of Sanitation, Order, and Social Control in the Late Eighteenth to Nineteenth-Century Manila.¨ She finished BA History (2007) and MA History (2012) in the UP Department of History. Her research interests include: Spanish colonial public works and engineering in the Philippines; colonial public works in the Spanish, British, and French empires; the history of urbanization, corruption, and public works, and the local history of Leyte.

Jose Mari Cuartero is a faculty member of the English Department at the Ateneo de Manila University and he teaches classes in literature, literature and globalization, and the interdisciplinary relationship between literature and the social sciences. His research interests have been defined by the folklore archive of Isabelo de Los Reyes, and at present, he is expanding such a research interest by also integrating it with cultural anthropology, specifically through the concepts of care and suffering. He is also currently doing a curatorial research residency under the Sandbox Program of Arete Art Gallery of the Ateneo de Manila. Some of his writings have appeared in Kritika Kultura and Philippine Studies. 

With a Ph.D. in History of Art (Nanban Art and Its Circulation between Asia and America: Japan, China and New Spain [c. 1550–c. 1700]), Alexandra Curvelo is Associate Professor at NOVA-FCSH, board member of the Art History Institute (IHA), and Associate Researcher of the Center for Humanities (CHAM). She is the author and/or editor of several books, including Nanban Folding Screen Masterpieces, Japan-Portugal, XVIIth Century (Paris: Chandeigne, 2015), book chapters, and scientific articles. She has participated in and co-organized several international conferences and workshops. She was the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies from 2010 to 2016 and is currently a member of the Board of Direction of the Art History journal published by IHA. She was the Principal Investigator of the research project Interactions Between Rivals: The Christian Mission and Buddhist Sects in Japan (c. 1549–c. 1647), financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). She was co-curator of the exhibitions A Striking Story: Portugal-Japan 16th–20th Centuries (Lisbon: November 2018–March 2019), Portugal, Jesuits, and Japan: Spiritual Beliefs and Earthly Goods (Boston: February–June 2013), and scientific curator of the exhibition Nanban Commissions: The Portuguese in Modern Age Japan (Lisbon: December 2010–May 2011). In January 2018, she was appointed Adviser of Nanban Culture by the Mayor of Amakusa Island, Japan.

Teresa Nobre de Carvalho is a postdoctoral researcher at CHAM—Centre for the Humanities, FCSH (Lisbon) in a MCTES-funded project. Her research interests focus on the history of early modern Iberian science, in particular botany of the 16th–17th centuries. She has worked on the appropriation of natural knowledge by the Portuguese imperial agents and the circulation of new medical-botanical knowledge between Asia and Europe in the early modern period. She wrote a dissertation on Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas e Coisas Medicinais da Índia (Goa, 1563). She has a long-held interest in the visual depiction of tropical plants, especially in early modern botanical sources. 

Teresa Nobre de Carvalho has a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Sciences (University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences, 2013), a master’s degree in Integrated Pest Management (University of Lisbon, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, 1996), and a licentiate degree in Agronomic Engineering (University of Lisbon, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, 1989).