Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities. He is currently writing a book about nightwalking in cities, Midnight Streets.

Gregory Dart is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University College London. Among his books are Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism and Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked. He is writing a book on the art and literature of the early nineteenth-century city.

Marshall Berman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and CCNY Graduate Center, where he teaches political theory and urban studies. He writes frequently for The Nation and The Village Voice, and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. He is the author of The Politics of Authenticity; All That Is Solid Melts into Air; and On the Town.

Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and sits on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History.