Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British literary critic who taught English literature at University College London, the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, and Harvard University. His criticism was regularly featured in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and he was the author of many books including The Sense of an Ending; The Classic; The Genesis of Secrecy; and, most recently, Concerning E. M. Forster. Kermode was knighted in 1991.
Joan Richardson is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Her book, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 and nominated for the 2011 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.