Ryan McDermott is associate professor of medieval literature and culture in the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh. He earned his Ph.D. in English from University of Virginia after completing an M.T.S. at Duke Divinity School. His first book, Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), tracks changes and continuities in vernacular religious literature across the intellectual and cultural watershed of the English Reformation. Ryan is the host and executive producer of the second season of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast. For AY 2023-24, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, where he is working on a second book, Genealogies: How to Think about the Past and the Future in the Humanities.

Jake Grefenstette is president and executive director of the International Poetry Forum, a nonprofit organization based in Pittsburgh, PA. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.Phil. from Peking University in Beijing. He completed undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oxford. A scholar of Romantic literature and theology, Jake has instructed undergraduates at Saint Vincent College (PA) and the University of Cambridge, where he is now Senior Non-Resident Member of King’s College.

Kirsten Hall Herlin is an Assistant Professor of Literature in the Center for Arts and Letters at the University of Austin. Formerly, she served as the Director of the Literature Program at Ave Maria University. She graduated from Hillsdale College and completed her PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on religion and eighteenth-century British literature, and her work has been published in academic journals such as Modern Philology, Renascence, and Notes & Queries. She has also appeared as a guest on National Review’s podcast The Great Books and has written articles for The Weekly Standard and The New Atlantis.

Terence Sweeney works on philosophical theology in the Continental tradition. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Villanova University. His dissertation is a consideration of Augustine and the ethics and metaphysics of participative community. He is currently assistant teaching professor in the Honors Program and Department of Humanities at Villanova. His scholarly work has been published in Heythrop Journal, the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Theology, and Logos. He has also written for First Things, America Magazine, Dappled Things, Plough Journal, Ekstasis, Macrina, and Church Life Journal.

Jessica Sweeney is the Program and Communications Coordinator at the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture. She completed her M.A. in Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas where she wrote her thesis titled: “How Did I Forget You? How Did I Lose You?: An Augustinian Exploration of Childhood and the Cosmic in Malick’s Tree of Life.” She then taught art history, Spanish, and Humane Letters at Trinity School at River Ridge. Jess completed her undergraduate studies in art history and English with work at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Florida. She is the founder of Commonplace Living.

Christopher Nygren is associate professor of early modern art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2022, his book, Titian’s Icons: Charisma, Tradition, and Devotion in the Italian Renaissance (Penn State, 2020), won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. His scholarship on this topic has appeared in several leading journals, including Art Bulletin and the catalog for a major international loan exhibition held at the Galleria Borghese in Rome in 2022-23. Additionally, Professor Nygren has won several prestigious fellowships that allowed him to develop Sedimentary Aesthetics, including a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2017-18) and the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, DC (2021-22).