Peter has lived and worked in Hong Kong since 1988. He holds degrees from the universities of Bristol, Wales, Sussex, Essex and Trinity College, Dublin. He has taught  in Greece, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Brunei and China. Until August 2012, he was Associate Professor/Principal Programme Director at the University of Hong Kong, in charge of a broad range of programmes for over 2,000 students a year. He is now enjoying a creative 'Phase Two' – teaching and writing – free from admin. duties! 

Philip Chan has a B.A.(English and Comparative Literature) and an M.A. (Literary Studies) from the University of Hong Kong; a Diploma in Education (English Language) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and a Ph.D. (English Studies) from the University of Nottingham, U.K.. His research interests are critical discourse analysis, language-literature interface, and literature in language education.

Dr Gaye Gould studied at the University of Hong Kong, completing the Certificate in Chinese Language, B.A. in English, M.A. in Applied Linguistics, and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in literature, sociolinguistics, and Italian opera. She is a generalist in both literature and linguistics, and has taught at HKU since 1994. From 2002 to 2007, she taught literature and linguistics at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, USA, where she was the Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics, Chair of the Online Education Committee, and Coordinator of the Pakistan Educational Leadership Institute. She also holds the degree-equivalent "Diploma of the College of Radiographers" (UK). In the 1980s, she taught Diagnostic Radiography at the HK PolyU.

Dr Haewon Hwang completed her undergraduate studies in Russian Literature at Harvard University and holds an MA and PhD in English from King's College London. Her research interests include literature of the city, modernity, literary theory and global literatures.  Her monograph London's Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840-1915 (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) examines the relationship between the construction of underground infrastructure in London, such as the sewers and railways in the nineteenth century, and connects them to the fears, anxieties and revolutionary ideas that erupted on the surface of the city, notably in the literature of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She is currently working on a project that looks at transnationalism and the city, focussing on the lives of Russian revolutionary émigrés in fin-de-siècle London, as well as the role of the translator Constance Garnett in the transmission of Russian literature to western audiences that shaped the development of modernist sensibilities. 

Dr. Jennifer McMahon received her B.A. from Lafayette College, her M.A. from Boston University, and her Ph.D. from The City University of New York.  Her monograph, based on her dissertation, is entitled Dead Stars:  American and Philippine Literary Perspectives on the American Colonization of the Philippines.  It won the Philippine National Book Award for Literary Criticism in 2012.  Currently her research is focused on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and the way that novel explores the commodification of information in the twentieth century.  She mainly teaches courses focused on Modernism and American literature.