Valerie Burton’s first reason for becoming a maritime historian in the 1980s was an interest in a field that for too long had preserved a silence about gender through normalizing to masculinity. Her pioneering analysis recently resulted in a Signs symposium, “Fish/Wives.” As co-editor of Changing Places she continues the interest in collaborative projects using feminist methodologies that were important to her when as the Memorial University’s Women’s Studies Program Graduate Coordinator and Speakers’ Series Chair she first met several of the collection’s authors. She is currently the Academic Director of Memorial’s “First Year Success” Program. Co-editor Jean Guthrie retired in 2007 from Memorial University of Newfoundland, where shetaught rhetoric and composition in the Department of English and contributed to the translation of Alciato's emblems for the Memorial University Alciato Web Site. She served as Coordinator, First-Year English; Associate Director of General Studies; Associate Dean of Arts; Coordinator, Graduate Program in Teaching; and Coordinator, of Women’s Studies. She was awarded the Memorial President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2002, and the Anne-Marie MacKinnon Award for Educational Leadership (2004) by the Association of Atlantic Universities.