Achille Mbembe is a political theorist and the managing director of the Innovation Foundation for Democracy, a new project aimed at bringing democratic innovation to life across the African continent. He is a professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His works include On the Postcolony (2005), Critique of Black Reason (2017), and Out of the Dark Night (2021), and he is the recipient of the prestigious 2024 Holberg Prize.

Felwine Sarr is the Ann Marie Bryant Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Afrotopia (2016) and African Meditations (2022) and co-author of the influential 2018 "Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage," commissioned by the French government. Sarr is also a musician, novelist, playwright, and frequent contributor to debates on the future of democracy in Senegal.

Emily Burrill is a scholar of 20th century West African history and the history of gender and sexuality in the French empire. Her scholarship and teaching explore historical questions of gender and belonging in colonial and postcolonial communities, law and society, rights formation, and feminist theory. At UVA, she is associate professor in the department of history, a member of the Karsh Institute's John Nau III History and Principles of Democracy Lab, and co-host of the Karsh Institute's podcast Democracy in Danger. She teaches classes on histories of gender and sexuality and modern Africa, and she develops and supports programming for the Nau Lab. 

Burrill’s first monograph was States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (2015), which won the 2016 French Colonial Historical Society Heggoy Prize. She is also the co-author of two edited volumes: Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (2010) and Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State (2021). She has written numerous articles and chapters on a range of topics, including forced marriage, gender and enslavement in the Senegambia, masculinity, and gun rights.