Professor Joshua Fogel is a distinguished scholar of modern Asian history, specializing in the cultural and political interactions between China and Japan. He served as the Canada Research Chair in the History of Modern China at York University from 2005 until his retirement in 2024, after which he was named professor emeritus. His research spans topics from early Sino-Japanese relations in the 14th to 19th centuries to the intellectual history of the modern period. More recently, he has focused on the transnational Esperanto movement in China and Japan (1895–1932), with particular attention to its links to anarchist and reformist currents. His recent publications include Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History (2023, co-edited with Ori Sela and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite), Sino-Japanese Reflections: Literary and Cultural Interactions between China and Japan in Early Modernity (2022, co-edited with Matthew Fraleigh), and A Friend in Deed: Lu Xun, Uchiyama Kanzō, and the Intellectual World of Shanghai on the Eve of War (2019). In recognition of his scholarly contributions, a Festschrift titled The Sinosphere and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Joshua Fogel was published in 2024, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023.

Yurou Zhong is currently an associate professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Toronto. She has been primarily concerned with how the question of script and writing impacts languages, literatures and cultures. Her first book Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (Columbia University Press, 2019) examines how movements that sought to eradicate Chinese characters conditioned the making of a new national literature. The book received the Honorable Mention of Association for Asian Studies’ Joseph Levenson Book Prize and has a revised Chinese edition Hanzi geming (Sanlian shudian, 2024). Zhong is currently working on a project that seeks to bridge the analog and the digital in seals—Chinese and otherwise—and to reconceptualize the logographic form as the technological infrastructure of our increasingly digitized world as well as its potential antidote. She is also the senior editor of Oxford Research Encyclopedia’s series “Literatures of the Sinosphere.”

Professor Johann-Mattis List leads the Chair for Multilingual Computational Linguistics at the University of Passau. In his research, he develops computational approaches to compare languages historically and typologically, with a particular focus on South-East Asian languages. While interested in the potential of computational applications, List tries to keep a close connection to traditional methodology in historical linguistics. His goal is to combine classical and computational approaches in a computer-assisted framework that embraces traditional insights into language history and linguistic typology. In this context, List exhibits a special interest in the traditional discipline of Chinese Historical Phonology, which uses various forms of evidence to reconstruct how the Chinese language and its dialects evolved into their current shape. He has proposed to use network approaches to study rhyme patterns in Ancient Chinese poetry (List 2016) and to investigate character formation patterns in the history of the Chinese writing system (Hill and List 2019). More recently, he has tested how cross-linguistic standards for linguistic annotation can be used to annotate Ancient Chinese documents written on bamboo slips (List and Pulini 2025).