J. R. McNeill is the former President of the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association. The author or editor of 23 books, McNeill is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the Royal Academy of Morocco. He received the Heineken Award for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

Erin Stewart Mauldin is the John Hope Franklin Chair of Southern History at the University of South Florida. She is the author of the award-winning Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South and the co-editor of the Environmental History and the American South series.