(In order of appearance)

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His first book, the memoir 'In the Dark Room', won the 2006 Irish Book Award for nonfiction. The UK editor of 'Cabinet', a quarterly of art and culture based in New York, he is a research fellow at the University of Kent.

Javier Moscoso is Research Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Spanish National Research Council. He has published extensively on the cultural history of life sciences, mainly in the 18th century. As a curator, he has organised shows at different venues. Among them: 'Monsters and Imaginary Beings' at the National Library, in Madrid, and 'Pain. Passion. Compassion. Sensibility', a Wellcome Trust exhibition at the Science Museum, London. He is the curator of 'Skin'.

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, and Director of the London Consortium. He is a critic and broadcaster whose most recent books are 'Dumbstruck: A cultural history of ventriloquism' (2000), 'The Book of Skin' (2003) and 'Fly' (2006), with 'The Matter of Air: Science and art of the ethereal' and 'Paraphernalia: The secret magic of ordinary things' due to appear later this year. Many of his broadcasts and writings can be found on his website. 

Walter Bodmer did his PhD in population genetics at Cambridge and then postdoctoral work in molecular biology at Stanford. He continued there in the Genetics Department until 1970, when he became Professor of Genetics at Oxford. In 1979 he was appointed Director of Research, and later Director General, of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. Since 1996 he has headed a laboratory at the Weatherall Insitute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford. His research ranges from population genetics to the genetics and biology of colorectal cancer.

Glenn Smith has a doctorate in human geography. His research has used and developed life story methods to explore a range of current and historical sexual, health and medical issues. He is a keen exponent of qualitative research and is an honorary lecturer in qualitative methods at Imperial College London. He has worked on several projects at UCL, Imperial, Royal Holloway and City University, and his research has been covered by local and national media.

Philip Carr-Gomm is is a psychologist, psychotherapist and writer with a special interest in spirituality and religion. Over the last twenty years he has written, or co-written, over a dozen books on topics ranging from Druidism to a survey of sacred sites around the world, and now: 'A Brief History of Nakedness'.

Jill Burke is a Senior Lecturer in Italian Renaissance Art at the University of Edinburgh, and Research Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She held an I Tatti fellowship at Harvard University in 2001, and in 2008 was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in recognition of her outstanding contribution to art history. She has published on art patronage and identity in Renaissance Florence and the High Renaissance in Rome, and is currently working on ideas about the body and nakedness for a book on the Renaissance nude.

Michael Yorke trained as an anthropologist and has worked as an ethnographic documentary maker for the last 30 years. He has worked for the BBC and Channel 4 and as a freelancer. He teaches practical film making in the UCL anthropology department. His anthropological research investigates the tribal people of India and the most extreme of the Hindu monastic traditions. He speaks three Indian languages.