Melissa Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She is a cultural historian whose research interests move between the history of food, the representation of urban space, and material culture in early modern Italy. Recent publications have focused on selling food on the street, urban kitchens, and the Grand Tour of the eighteenth-century Welsh painter, Thomas Jones. She was co-curator with Victoria Avery of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800 in 2019-2020. She is co-editor of the journal, Global Food History.

Marta Manzanares Mileo is Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where she examined the confectionery trade in early modern Catalonia. Her current research interests explore women's roles in sugar-related trades and consumption in early modern Hispanic cities.