Edward Muir is the Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences in the Department of History at Northwestern University. He is the author of Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice; Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy; Ritual in Early Modern Europe, and the forthcoming, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera.

Lawrence M. Bryant is the author of The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance. He teaches at California State University, Chico, and researches and publishes on the transformations and "fortunes" of Renaissance political ideas and thought when they are represented in ceremonies, art and engravings, and various other cultural media.

Samuel Kinser, Presidential Research Professor, emeritus, at Northern Illinois University, is Director of the Center for Research in Festive Culture. While his early books and articles studied French humanist historiography, more recent works have turned towards comparison of European carnivalesque traditions with those emergent in the Americas since the sixteenth century.

Dr. Henry Dietrich Fernández is a specialist on the Vatican Palace in the time of Bramante and Raphael. During the academic year 2006/2007 he is the Kress Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London.

Patricia Waddy, Distinguished Professor of Architecture Emeritus, Syracuse University, is author of Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan. Her current research extends issues of family structure, use, and change over time to the design of smaller dwellings in Rome.

Nicola Courtright teaches the art and architecture of early modern Europe in the Fine Arts Department at Amherst College. Since her book, The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII and the Tower of the Winds in the Vatican, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003, her research has focused on ideologies of rule for early modern French queens in the art and architecture of royal palaces. She is currently the president of the College Art Association.

Frederick Hammond is a music historian and performer. He holds the Irma Brandeis Chair of Romance Studies and Music History at Bard College.

Louise Rice is an associate professor of art history at New York University and J. Clawson Mills Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-2007. Her publications include The Altars and Altarpieces of New St. Peter's and, with Joseph Connors, Specchio di Roma barocca.