Professor James Stevens Curl is a leading architectural historian. His many books include Funerary Monuments and Memorials in St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh (2013); Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: Architecture, Symbols, and Influences (2011 - an earlier version of which won (1992) the Sir Banister Fletcher Award as Best Book of the Year); Spas, Wells, and Pleasure-Gardens of London (2010); Victorian Architecture: Diversity and Invention (2007); and The Honourable The Irish Society and the Plantation of Ulster, 1608-2000 (2000). He contributed to, and edited, the scholarly monograph Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins and Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824-2001 (2001), the first major study of any nineteenth-century cemetery in the world. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, was twice Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, and is currently Professor of Architecture at the University of Ulster. Dr Susan Wilson is an historian with an especial interest in garden architecture, landscape aesthetics, and places of commemoration. Her doctorate was conferred (2010) by the University of Bristol for her study of the 'Swiss Garden Cottage: the origins of the ch'let-style in British architecture'. She published her early findings in Exercises in Translation: Swiss-British Cultural Exchange (2006). In 2013 she chaired an interdisciplinary conference-session on the Rustic Tradition in Garden Art in New York.
She taught the history of the applied and decorative arts at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2000-6), and gained recognition for her teaching practice as a Fellow of The Higher Education Academy (2007). She has collaborated with Professor Stevens Curl on this edition of the Dictionary since 2012. Awarded (2012) the Opler Grant for Emerging Scholars by the Society of Architectural Historians (USA), she is also an Academic Member of the Landscape Institute.