Efraín Agosto is Visiting Professor of Latinx Studies and Religion at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. During the 2021-22 academic year he was the Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies at Williams. Previously, he served as Professor of New Testament Studies at New York Theological Seminary (2011 to 2021), and Professor of New Testament and Director of the Programa de Ministerios Hispanos at Hartford Seminary (1995-2011). He also served brief tenures at both schools as Academic Dean. Efraín, a Puerto Rican born and raised in New York City, has degrees from Columbia University (B.A., 1977), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1982) and Boston University (PhD in New Testament and Christian Origins, 1996). Besides a number of essays and book chapters, he has published four books, including Servant Leadership: Jesus and Paul (2005) and a co-edited volume with Jacqueline Hidalgo, Latinxs, the Bible and Migration (2018). His current research includes a book on ministry issues in the Pauline letters; a commentary on 1 Corinthians, and comparative studies in Paul and the “apostle of Puerto Rican independence,” Pedro Albizu Campos. His service to the wider academic community has included Member of the Society of Biblical Literature Council, including three years as Chair, and Mentor and Steering Committee Member for the Hispanic Theological Initiative. Efraín lives with his wife of 39 years, Olga Gisela Rodriguez, in West Hartford, Connecticut, and they have two adult children, Joel and Jasmin.

Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon, an Indian national, is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies at the Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia, where she has been since May 2012. Before this, she served on the Biblical Studies faculty of the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, Chennai, India for 17 years. She is grateful for the opportunity to facilitate the learning and growth of her students and is indebted to the many who have partnered her and enabled her own formation as a theological educator.  She positions herself as a feminist advocate and a liberation theologian, committed to producing reflections and texts that resist and counter cultures and languages of dominance that exclude the voices of the oppressed. She has published in various academic books focusing primarily on interpretations of OT texts from the perspective of the Indian context and the marginalized adopting an approach that is critical, contextual, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and liberative. She draws on insights derived from the lived experiences and social biographies of the marginalized, particularly women and Dalits to interpret the biblical text. Her most recent works include the co-edited volumes, Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender and Violence (IVBS, SBL, 2021), and Bible Blindspots: Dispersion and Othering (PICKWICK Publications, 2021)