Vanessa Smith is a research fellow at King's College, Cambridge University. She is the author of Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters.
Nicholas Thomas is a professor of anthropology at the Australian National University and the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in Canberra. He is the author of, among others, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture and In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories, and coauthor of Bad Colonists: The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke.