Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She has worked extensively on the Indian Ocean world and oceanic themes more generally. Recent publications include Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013) and a special issue of Comparative Literature (2016) on 'Oceanic Routes' co-edited with Kerry Bystrom.

Phindezwa (Phindi) Mnyaka is a senior lecturer in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape where she teaches courses in African history. She has previously taught art history and visual culture at Rhodes University and also held a Dulcie September Research Fellowship at the University of the Western Cape. She received her doctorate from the University of Fort Hare, which paid attention to mid-20th century photography in Africa. Her current research interests include visuality and experimental history writing.

Charne Lavery is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and researcher at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She explores literary and cultural representations of the deep ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Ocean and Antarctic seas, researching oceanic underworlds of the global South from a postcolonial-ecological perspective. She is co-editor of the Palgrave series Maritime Literature and Culture, a South African Humanities and Social Sciences delegate to the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), and has recently published ‘Antarctica and Africa’, 'Thinking from the Southern Ocean' and 'Diving into the Slave Wreck'.