Routledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge. He later founded a publishing company in partnership in 1851 with his brother-in-law, first formally incorporated under the name George Routledge & Co. For the remainder of the century the firm continued to grow and expand its range of popular illustrated fiction, travel and reference titles, undergoing some further partnership and name changes in the process. However by 1902 the company was running close to bankruptcy, but following a successful restructuring was able to recover and began to acquire and merge with other publishing companies. These early 20th-century acquisitions and mergers brought with them lists of notable scholarly titles, and it is from 1912 onwards as Routledge & Kegan Paul that the company became increasingly concentrated on and involved with the academic and scholarly publishing arena. It was soon particularly known for its titles in the social sciences fields.

Gail Dines is an English–American feminist anti-pornography activist, author, professor, and lecturer. An academic, she has also been described as "The world's leading anti-pornography campaigner".

Dines was born in Manchester, England and studied for a B.Sc degree Salford University, and then a PhD is Sociology at the same institution. She moved to Israel in 1980 at the age of 22, where she married and became a feminist, and then to the United States in 1986. Since 1986 she has been at Wheelock College in Boston, where she is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Chair of the American Studies department.

Dines is the author of three books including Pornland, published in 2010. Her articles have appeared in the New Left Project, the Journal of Violence Against Women, CounterPunch, and the International Encyclopedia of Communication, and also in popular general-interest publications including Newsweek, Time, Working Woman, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Mail. Dines is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and co-founder of the National Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement. She has given lectures and participated in formal debates regarding pornography's effect on society at universities.

David Crystal OBE FBA FLSW (born July 6, 1941) is a linguist, academic and author.

Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. He grew up in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England, where he attended St Mary's College from 1951.

Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He is currently an honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor. His many academic interests include English language learning and teaching, clinical linguistics, forensic linguistics, language death, "ludic linguistics" (Crystal's neologism for the study of language play), English style, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and honorary vice-president of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP). He has also served as an important editor for Cambridge University Press.

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Her research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war. Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence. Politically, she is a strong supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

Theodore "Ted" Judd Serios (November 27, 1918 – December 30, 2006) was a Chicago bellhop known for his production of "thoughtographs" on Polaroid film. He claimed these were produced using psychic powers. Serios's psychic claims were bolstered by the endorsement of a Denver-based psychiatrist, Jule Eisenbud (1908–1999), who wrote a book called The World of Ted Serios: "Thoughtographic" studies of an extraordinary mind (1967) in which he argued for the unproven reality of Serios's feats.

Serios was an unemployed bellhop when his claims that he had the ability to put images on film with his mind came to the attention of Eisenbud. Serios's technique was to hold a small cylinder, or tube, up to the lens of an instant camera, which was then pointed at his forehead and the shutter released. It was also claimed he could project his thoughts from several meters away, or without using the cylinder. He would often be drunk, or at least have been drinking, when he produced his photographs. However, when he performed sober, which he did on several occasions, he would produce images that Eisenbud called "blackies" or "whities", meaning they were entirely black or white photos.