Guido Alfani is Associate Professor of Economic History at Universit... Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. An economic and social historian and an historical demographer, he has published extensively on Early Modern Italy and Europe, specialising in the history of famines and epidemics, in economic inequality, and in social alliance systems. He is the author of Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy: The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2013) and is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project EINITE, 'Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300-1800.'

Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor Emeritus of Economics at University College Dublin. He was awarded the Royal Irish Academy's gold medal for the humanities in 2009 and is currently president-elect of the Economic History Association. He has published on topics ranging from the European Little Ice Age and London's last plague epidemics to the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Recent works include Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (2006), Famine: A Short History (2009), and Eating People Is Wrong and Other Essays on the History and Future of Famine (2015).