Conrad Schirokauer currently serves as Senior Scholar and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University as well as Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York. In addition to A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE CIVILIZATIONS (and its separate volumes on China and Japan), he has published articles on Song intellectual history and served as co-editor (with Robert Hymes) of ... Read moreORDERING THE WORLD: APPROACHES TO STATE AND SOCIETY IN SUNG DYNASTY CHINA and as translator of CHINA'S EXAMINATION HELL, by Miyazaki Ichisada. David Lurie received a B.A. in Literature from Harvard University and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Columbia University. He teaches Japanese history and literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research concerns the history of writing systems in Japan, and more broadly, in pre-modern East Asia. David Lurie also works on the cultural and intellectual history of Japan through the Heian period. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled "Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing" and is also working on a project analyzing the interconnections among biography, historiography, education, and the production and circulation of texts in Nara and Heian period Japan. Suzanne Gay is Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. Her research interests include the social and economic history of medieval Japan, with a particular emphasis on the role of commoners in history. Her monography, THE MONEYLENDERS OF LATE MEDIEVAL KYOTO, was published by University of Hawaii Press in 2001. She is currently working on the history of two merchant families of medieval Kyoto, and her next project will focus on commerce and pilgrimage in the Oyamazaki area southwest of Kyoto. Show Less