Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke was a professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo, where she also obtained all her degrees. She is now a research associate at the Centre of Latin American Studies, Cambridge. She has worked on the cultural history of the European Enlightenment and its reception in Latin America, and on the circulation and reception of ideas in European and Latin American contexts. She has also worked on the intellectual trajectory of thinkers who had a great impact on Brazilian history, includingGilberto Freyre, his friend Rüdiger Bilden and Anísio Teixeira, a disciple of John Dewey, who fought a battle for the democratisation of education in Brazil since the 1920s until 1964, when he was banned by the military dictatorship. She is the author, among other works, of As Muitas Faces da História: Nove Entrevistas (2000 – translated into Spanish, English, Korean and Chinese); Gilberto Freyre, um vitoriano dos trópicos (2006, which received a prize from the Academia Brasileira de Letras and the Prêmio Jabuti), Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (with Peter Burke, 2008) and O Triunfo do Fracasso: Rüdiger Bilden, o amigo esquecido de Gilberto Freyre (2012) .

Peter Burke studied at Oxford and taught at the new University of Sussex (1962-78) before moving to Cambridge, where he became Professor of Cultural History. He retired from the Chair in 2004 but remains a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College Oxford, and has been awarded honorary degrees by the Universities of Lund, Copenhagen, Bucharest, Zürich and Brussels. He has published 26 books and his work has so far been translated into 31 languages. For most of his career he has worked on the cultural and social history of early modern Europe, with some incursions into the 19th and 20thcenturies. Among his many publications, he has co-authored Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics, with Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke. His latest books are Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge (2017) and Polymaths: a cultural history (forthcoming 2019).