A Social Research Conference at The New School

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Arjun Appadurai serves as Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences. Until recently, Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School. He was formerly William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India). During his academic career, he has held professorial chairs at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, Columbia University and New York University. He serves on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe and India. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke University Press, 2006) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Ahmed Bawa is Distinguished Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy at Hunter College, City University of New York and is former Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He worked as Higher Education program officer at the Ford Foundation with the portfolio of building universities across Africa. He has been a member of many policy processes and commissions in post-1994 South Africa and has served on the Boards of Directors of Telkom, the Atomic Energy Corporation and SANLAM. He was also a member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and served as Chair of the Board of the Foundation for Research Development. Bawa is a theoretical physicist and works in the area of Particle Physics.

Robert M. Berdahl Robert M. Berdahl became president of the Association of American Universities (AAU) in May 2006. Prior to this position, Berdahl served as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2004. Prior to going to Berkeley, Berdahl served as president of The University of Texas at Austin from 1993 to 1997. While at The University of Texas and at Berkeley, Berdahl was an active member of AAU, including service as its executive committee chair. Berdahl began his academic career in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1965. He joined the history faculty at the University of Oregon in 1967 and served as Oregon’s Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1981 to 1986, when he left Oregon to become Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. He joined the Department in 1985 after spending two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has published a book in the Philosophy of Language and Mind in 1992 called Belief and Meaning (Blackwell) and another book published in 2006 called Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press). His book Politics and The Moral Psychology of Identity is forthcoming in 2007 from Harvard University Press. He has also published various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Psychology. Some of his articles in these latter subjects speak to issues of current politics in their relation to broader social and cultural issues.

Craig Calhoun has been President of the Social Science Research Council since 1999. He is also University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University. Calhoun taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1977 to 1996. He was Dean of the Graduate School and the founding Director of the University Center for International Studies. He has also taught at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the Universities of Asmara, Khartoum, Oslo, and Oxford. His fellowships and honors include the W.K. Kellogg National Fellowship; Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, ASA Section on Political Sociology; Harry Bridges Lecturer, University of Washington and International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, Seattle; Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles; Sociological Research Association; P&R Hettleman Faculty Fellowship, University of North Carolina. His study of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 resulted in the prize-winning book, Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California, 1994). Among his other works are Nationalism (Minnesota, 1997), Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Blackwell, 1995), and several edited collections including Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT, 1992), Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Minnesota, 1997), Understanding September 11 (New Press, 2002), and Lessons of Empire (New Press, 2005). He was also editor in chief of the Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences.

Itzhak Galnoor is the Herbert Samuel Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a Visiting Professor at McGill University, (Canada), Nanzan University, (Japan), University of Arhus, (Denmark), Oxford University, (UK) and University of California (Berkeley, USA). He has served on the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association, and edited Advances in Political Science and the IPSA book series. From 1994–96, he served as Head of the Civil Service Commission and Professor Galnoor served on the Israel Science Foundation's Executive Committee (2001-2007) and on the Governing Board of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2003-2007). In March 2007 he was appointed by the Israeli Government to the Council for Higher Education and was elected by its Council as Deputy Chair. He was also a Co-chairman of Sikkuy (The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel). He has written many articles and several books, among them The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement and The Israeli Political System forthcoming in 2008. He is also an associate of The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute

Merle Goldman is Professor Emerita of History at Boston University. Professor Goldman was instructor in Far Eastern History at Wellesley College from 1963 to 1964, Lecturer at Radcliffe Seminars from 1968 to 1970, and joined the faculty at Boston University in 1972. She has been a Public Member of the U.S. Delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights since 1993. She is also Adjunct Professor of the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department. Her books include China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (Harvard University Press, 1981) and Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Decade (Harvard University Press, 1994), which the Association of American Publishers, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, selected as the best book on Government published in 1994. Both books were selected as "notable books" by The New York Times. She has also written China: A New History (coauthored with John K. Fairbank, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998) and From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (Harvard University Press, 2005).

Hanna Holborn Gray is Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emerita and Former President of the University of Chicago. When she was a child, her family came to the US, in exile from Nazi Germany. She started teaching at Harvard in 1957. She helped to redesign the College history requirements and was appointed to head a committee whose work was hailed when it reaffirmed that appointment decisions must be based on teaching and research productivity, and that these standards must be applied equally to all faculty members. Recognition of Gray's administrative acumen led to her being named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University in 1972, one of many appointments she was to hold as the first woman in a position. While at Yale, she was provost and professor of history from 1974 to 1978, and she served as acting president for 14 months after Kingman Brewster left in 1977. Returning to the University of Chicago in 1978 in a similar atmosphere of deficits and retrenchment, with balancing the budget one of her first tasks, Gray worked to strengthen the University's historical commitment to scholarship. The problems to be faced were real: erosion of material resources, inflation, changing demographic trends, shifting policies and attitudes of external sources of support, and narrowing opportunities for young scholars. But the greatest danger, she said in her inaugural address, "would be to engage in an apparently principled descent to decent mediocrity." In the next few years she embarked on an ambitious building program for a new science quadrangle, made sweeping changes in PhD programs to combat the decline in graduate enrollments, and initiatives were also taken with the establishment of new ventures such as the Department of Computer Science, the Chicago Humanities Institute, and the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. Responding to changes in medical care and research, Gray led the separation of the hospitals from the University and their establishment as a corporation of which the University is the sole member.

Sergei Guriev is Associate Professor and Rector at the New Economic School in Russia. He joined the New Economic School in 1998 doing research, teaching and administering NES Outreach Activities and later becoming NES Vice-Rector for Strategic Development (2002) and Rector (2004). In 1999, Mr. Guriev has become the first NES full-time permanent faculty member. Sergei Guriev teaches graduate courses in microeconomic theory, economics of development and contract theory. Sergei Guriev has published in Russian and international journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of European Economic Association, and Journal of Economic Perspectives and presented in the leading international conferences in economics. In 1993-1997, Mr. Guriev worked in the Department of Mathematical Modelling of Economic Systems of the Computing Center of Russian Academy of Science, where he got his PhD in 1994. Dr. Guriev has taught in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow State University and University of Colorado at Denver. In 1997-98, Mr. Guriev visited the Department of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a one-year post-doctoral placement. In 2001, Sergei Guriev defended a habilitation thesis at Central Economics and Mathematical Institute of Russian Academy of Science becoming one of youngest Doctor of Science in economics in Russia. In 2003-04, Sergei Guriev taught at Princeton University as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics. In 2004, Sergei Guriev has been promoted to the tenured Associate Professor of Economics at NES. Since 2005, he is also a CEO of the Center of the Economic and Financial Research at NES.

Ronald Kassimir is Associate Provost for Curriculum and Research at The New School. For the past ten years, Kassimir has worked at the Social Science Research Council as program director. During his tenure at the SSRC, he directed its Africa Program and, between 2000 and 2005, headed up its International Dissertation Field Research (IDRF) Fellowship Program. Arguably, the IDRF Program is the most prestigious fellowship program for social science doctoral students in the United States. Its mission is to support innovative and interdisciplinary research whose aims are international in the best sense. He also took the SSRC in new directions via the internationalization of long-standing programs as well as the creation of new ones. Of particular importance to Kassimir is youth activism and citizenship in Africa, the public role of African universities, the relationship between transnational studies and African studies, and the social science of humanitarian intervention. These issues have long mattered to him as both a scholar and administrator. Indeed, while working at the SSRC, he continued publishing scholarly work in many journals and periodicals, including Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Africa Today, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and the Journal of Higher Education in Africa. Kassimir also co-edited three books: Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia; Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa; and Youth, Globalization, and Law. Kassimir started teaching courses in the Department of Political Science beginning in fall 2006.

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University. He was an assistant and associate professor at Columbia University from 1969-1974 and returned in 1994. In the interim, he taught at the University of Chicago, chairing its department of political science from 1979 to 1982, and the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research, where he was Dean from 1983-1989. His most recent books are When Affirmative Action Was White (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2003). Other books include Black Men, White Cities (Oxford University Press, 1973), City Trenches (University of Chicago Press, 1981), Schooling for All (with Margaret Weir, Basic Books 1985), Marxism and the City (Oxford University Press, 1992), and Liberalism’s Crooked Circle (Princeton University Press, 1996). He has co-edited Working Class Formation (with Aristide Zolberg, Princeton University Press, 1986), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (with Pierre Birnbaum, Princeton University Press, 1995), Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (with Martin Shefter, Princeton University Press, 2002), Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Centennial Edition (with Helen Milner, Norton, 2002), and Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection Between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (with Barry Weingast, Russell Sage Foundation, 2005). Professor Katznelson was President of the American Political Science Association for 2005-2006. Previously, he served as President of the Politics and History Section of APSA, President of the Social Science History Association, and Chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Bob Kerrey is President of The New School. Throughout his career in public service, while serving as a governor and U.S. senator from Nebraska during the 1980s and 1990s, Bob Kerrey advocated for increased education spending. He continues to do so, recognizing that democratic life flourishes most when all citizens are properly educated and given every chance to participate in the political process. At The New School, plans are underway for a new signature building at 65 Fifth Avenue, university-wide undergraduate and graduate programs are being developed, the International Affairs graduate program has expanded, and the India China Institute and Tishman Environment and Design Center were launched. Along with his duties as president of The New School, Bob Kerrey leads a five-year writing challenge sponsored by The National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges and is co-chair with Newt Gingrich of The National Commission for Quality Long-Term Care. He is a recipient of the Robert L. Haig Award for Distinguished Public Service from the New York State Bar Association, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from New York Law School, as well as the Distinguished Nebraskan Award and numerous other citations. He has served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is an active member of the 9/11 Commission. In 2002, President Kerrey published a widely praised memoir, When I Was A Young Man.

Anthony W. Marx is President of Amherst College. Previously, he was professor and director of undergraduate studies of political science at Columbia University. During his last year at Columbia, he served as director of the Gates Foundation-funded Early College/High School Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which establishes model public high schools as partnerships between school systems and universities. He founded the Columbia Urban Educators Program, a public school teacher recruitment and training partnership. In the 1980s, he helped found Khanya College, a South African secondary school that helped prepare more than 1,000 black students for university. Marx is the author of a dozen substantive articles and three books, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (Oxford University Press, 1992), Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2003). Making Race and Nation received the American Political Science Association’s 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award (co-winner for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism) and the American Sociological Association’s 2000 Barrington Moore Prize (for the best book of the preceding three years in comparative-historical sociology). Marx received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 (the youngest member of the Columbia political science faculty to be so honored). He also has received fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Humanities Center, the Howard Foundation and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

James E. Miller is Chair of the Liberal Studies Program and and Professor of Political Science at the The New School for Social Research. His publications include Examined Lives: What We Can Learn from the Eminent Philosophers (forthcoming), Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977 (Fireside, 1999), The Passion of Michel Foucault (Anchor, 1993), Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Harvard University Press, 1987), Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (Hackett Publishing, 1984), History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), and The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (editor, Random House, 1980).

Deepak Nayyar is Distinguished University Professor of Economics at The New School and Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Earlier, he has taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Sussex, and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Professor Nayyar was Vice Chancellor of the University of Delhi from 2000 to 2005. He also served as Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance. He was educated at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. Thereafter, as a Rhodes Scholar, he went on to study at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he obtained a B. Phil and a D. Phil in Economics. He has received the V.K.R.V. Rao Award for his contribution to research in Economics. He is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Professor Nayyar is Chairman of the Board of Governors of the UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki. He has also served as a Member of the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council in the United States, and Chairman of the Advisory Council for the Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. He is a member of the National Knowledge Commission in India. Professor Nayyar has published several books and articles in professional journals. His books include: Migration, Remittances and Capital Flows (Oxford University Press), The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalization (Penguin Books), and Governing Globalization: Issues and Institutions (Oxford University Press), Stability with Growth: Macroeconomics, Liberalization and Development (Oxford University Press)..

Aryeh Neier is President of the Open Society Institute. Prior to joining the Open Society Institute in 1993, Aryeh Neier served for 12 years as Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. Before that, he spent 15 years at the American Civil Liberties Union, including eight years as national Executive Director. Mr. Neier has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University for more than a dozen years. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation and The New York Review of Books, and has published in periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Foreign Policy. Mr. Neier has contributed more than a hundred op-ed articles in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The International Herald Tribune. Author of six books, Mr. Neier has also contributed chapters to more than twenty books. He has lectured at most of the country’s leading universities, and has appeared frequently on such television shows as “Nightline,” the “Mc-Neil-Lehrer Newshour,” and the “Today Show.” Mr. Neier, a naturalized American, was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age. He is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award.

Robert M. O'Neil is Professor of Law Emeritus and Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia School of Law. He was President of the University from 1985 to 1990. After his law school graduation, O'Neil clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. In 1963 he began his law faculty career, first as a teacher at the University of California-Berkeley and then as a teacher-administrator. His posts included provost of the University of Cincinnati, vice-president of Indiana University, and president of the statewide University of Wisconsin system. O'Neil has served as the president of the Virginia Council for Open Government, chairman of the Council for America's First Freedom, director of the Commonwealth Fund and the James River Corporation, and chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is currently director of the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues program, chair of the American Association of University Professors' Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in Time of Crisis, and is a consultant to the Association of Governing Boards on issues of Board Accountability. He has served as a trustee for the Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association (TIAA), WVPT Public Television, and the Piedmont Council for the Arts. From 1979-95 O'Neil served as a trustee for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He has also chaired the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, a commission on the future of Virginia's judicial system, and a commission of the Markle Foundation on media coverage of presidential elections.

Ellen W. Schrecker Professor of American History, Yeshiva University. Dr. Schrecker has taught at Yeshiva University since 1987, first as an assistant, then professor of history, one of the longest tenures in the department. Over the years, she taught numerous courses, mostly pertaining to American political and cultural history, which recently included History of the Cold War, History of American Foreign Diplomacy, African-American History and the United States and Vietnam. She received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at New York University for the academic year 2007-2008. Before joining Yeshiva, Dr. Schrecker taught in various fields at Princeton University, Harvard University, New York University, and The New School. Dr. Schrecker has written and edited several books on the Cold War in America, including Cold War Triumphalism: Exposing the Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (New Press, 2004), Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Little, Brown, 1998), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Books, 1994), No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986), Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s (with Craig Kaplan, Praeger, 1983), and The Hired Money: The French Debt to the United States, 1917-1929 (Arno Press, 1979).

Joan Wallach Scott is Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience. Drawing on a range of philosophical thought, as well as on a rethinking of her own training as a labor historian, she has contributed to the formulation of a field of critical history. Written more than twenty years ago, her now classic article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," continues to inspire innovative research on women and gender. In her latest work she has been concerned with the ways in which difference poses problems for democratic practice. She has taken up this question in her most recent books: Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Harvard University Press, 1996), Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (University Of Chicago Press, 2005), and The Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, 2007). She is currently extending her work on the veil to examine the relationship between secularism and gender equality. She is also preparing a collection of her essays that deals with the uses of psychoanalysis, particularly fantasy, for historical interpretation. The book will be called The Fantasy of Feminist History.

Khalil Shikaki is an Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (Ramallah). He is a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He taught at several universities including Bir Zeit University, al-Najah National University, the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), and the University of South Florida (Tampa). Between 1996-98, he served as Dean of Scientific Research at al-Najah National University in Nablus. He spent summer 2002 as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Between 1998-99, jointly with Dr. Yezid Sayigh, Dr. Shikaki led a group of more than 25 Palestinian and foreign experts on Palestinian institution building. The findings of the group were published in a Council on Foreign Relations’ report, Strengthening Palestinian Public Institutions (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999). Shikaki and Sayigh were the principal authors of the report. Since 1999, Dr. Shikaki has continued to work with the sponsors of the report, the Independent Task Force on Strengthening Palestinian Public Institutions, advising them on Palestinian reform and annually updating the 1999 report. The latest update covered the period up to April 2006. Dr. Shikaki has conducted more than 100 polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1993. His polls included three comprehensive surveys among Palestinian refugees in the West Bank-Gaza Strip, Jordan, and Lebanon. His other publications include, Palestinian Democracy Index 1996–97 (with Mudar Qissis and Faisal Awartani) [Arabic], The Palestinian Refugee Problem and the Right of Return (with Joseph Alpher), Jordanian-Palestinian Relations (with Mustafa Hamarneh and Rosemary Hollis), The First Palestinian Elections: Political Context, Electoral Behavior, and Results [Arabic], Elections and the Palestinian Political System [Arabic], Palestinian-Israeli Negotiations [Arabic], and The Gaza Strip and the West Bank: Future Political and Administrative Links [Arabic].

Alfred Stepan is Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion at Columbia University. He also taught at Yale University for thirteen years (1969-82), later was Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University (1983–1991), the first Rector of Central European University (1993-1996), and was Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls College, Oxford University (1996-1999). Stepan’s publications include Democracies in Multinational Societies: India and Other Polities (with Juan Linz, and Yogendra Yadav, Johns Hopkins, 2007); Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford: 2001); Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post Communist Europe (with Linz, Johns Hopkins, 1996); The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (with Linz, Johns Hopkins, 1978). His recent publications relating to religion and politics include “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the “Twin Tolerations”, in Arguing Comparative Politics, “An ‘Arab’ More Than ‘Muslim’ Electoral Gap” in the Journal of Democracy (July 2003) and a Forum debating this in JoD (October 2004). Working with Yogendra Yadav and Juan Linz, Stepan helped prepare the questions on religion and politics for the 50,000 person survey of the five countries of South Asia in 2005-6 and Stepan and Linz cooperate with Amaney Jamal, the PI, in the design of a Pew-sponsored Arab Barometer study. Ared Stepan is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991- present, and a member of the British Academy, 1997-present.

Andre du Toit is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research interests are: Intellectual history of South African political thought and traditions; political ethics, ideologies and discourse; philosophical reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the narrative interpretation of political violence in South Africa. His recent publications include "The Moral Foundations of Truth Commission: Truth as Acknowledgement and Justice as Recognition as Principles of Transitional Justice in the Practice of the South African TRC" in Robert Rotberg & Denis Thompson (eds), Truth versus Justice (Princeton U.P, 2000) and "Critic and Citizen: The Intellectual, Transformation and Academic Freedom," Pretexts (Vol.9,2000).

Jonathan Veitch is Associate Professor of Literature and History and Former Dean of Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. He is the author of American Superrealism, about Nathanael West and the Literary Avant-Garde in the 1930s in which he explored the different ways American artists "imagined" the Depression. Colossus in Ruins, focuses on places that were once central to the American imagination and aren't any more—places such as Maritime New England, the Industrial Rust Belt and the Cold War West. Veitch's next book is on higher education in the U.S. which will use case studies of colleges and universities in the U.S., including Black Mountain, Antioch, Bard, and NYU, to examine a range of contemporary issues. He was previously Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Madison and chairman of humanities at the New School for Social Research.

Charles M. Vest is President Emeritus and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the recipient of ten honorary doctoral degrees. Dr. Vest served as President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1990 through 2004. During this time, he placed special emphasis on enhancing undergraduate education, exploring new organizational forms to meet emerging directions in research and education, building a stronger international dimension into education and research programs, developing stronger relations with industry, and enhancing racial and cultural diversity at MIT. Dr. Vest has worked to bring issues concerning education and research to broader public attention and to strengthen national policy on science, engineering and education. He chaired the President’s Advisory Committee on the Redesign of the Space Station and serves on the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. He chaired the U.S. Department of Energy Task force on the Future of DOE Science Programs, was vice chair of the Council on Competitiveness for 8 years, and is a past chair of the Association of American Universities. Dr. Vest recently completed service as a member of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction and of the U.S. Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. He now serves on the Department of State Secretary's Advisory Committee on Transformational Diplomacy and the Rice-Chertoff Secure Borders, Open Doors Advisory Board Subcommittee. He has been nominated to serve as president of the National Academy of Engineering for the period of 2006-2012. Dr. Vest is the author of two books on higher education and research policy: Pursuing the Endless Frontier: Essays on MIT and the Role of the Research University (MIT Press 2004), and The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web (University of California Press, to be published in summer 2007). Dr. Vest is a Life Member of the MIT Corporation, the Institute’s board of trustees.

Joseph W. Westphal is Provost at The New School and was recently Vice President and Director of The New School's Tishman Environmental Design Center. Previously, he was University System Professor and a tenured member of the political science faculty at the University of Maine. From 2002 to 2006, Dr. Westphal was the Chancellor of the University of Maine System. Dr. Westphal's areas of teaching and research are American Politics, Congress, and Public Policy to include environment, national security, homeland security and education. He spent 12 years on the faculty of Oklahoma State University. He also taught as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. From 1988 to 1995, Dr. Westphal worked in the United States Congress. He was later confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary of the Army and head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and then as Acting Secretary of the Army. During his career, Dr. Westphal serves as Special Assistant, Office of the Secretary of the Interior and Senior Policy Advisor on Water at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Biographies of Featured Endangered Scholars in the Keynote Event

Belarus / Education
This scholar teaches classes in Human Rights education, International education and gender studies. She is the author of 6 books and more than 50 articles. She participated in the implementation of the discipline of gender studies in her country and establishing gender education. She managed a lot of projects on gender leadership, international education and human resource management. She is involved in many international educational projects in different countries around the world.

China / Human Rights
This scholar is a Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. He was recently a visiting scholar in Political Science at Northwestern University and was a lecturer in Administrative Law from 1991 to 1992 and an instructor in Administrative Law from 1989 to 1991 at Peking University Faculty of Law. His most famous works are the papers, "On Republic" (1999), and "A Second Treatise on Republic" (1999).He was awarded the prize in honor of the 90th Anniversary of Peking University for the paper "The Backbone of a Constitution: A Preliminary Inquiry Into Its Legal Attributes" in 1988. He is co-translator of western political classics Freedom and Tradition: Political Writings of Edmund Burke (2001); The History of Liberty: Selected Writings of Lord Acton (People's Press of Guizhou, 2001); and Political Crime by Louis Proal (Reform Press, 1999). He is also the founder of the independent party, the Liberal and Democratic Party of China and the founder of Free Labour Union of China. Due to his pro-democracy activities in China, he was arrested and imprisoned from 1992 through 1997. Upon his release, he was banned from lecturing at universities and faced restrictions on publishing opportunities.

Ethiopia / Economics
This scholar is a Research Fellow in the Department of Economics at The New School for Social Research. He was Assistant Professor from 1974 to 1978, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Research at Addis Ababa University from 1982 to 1991; Visiting Research Fellow at the International Monetary Fund in 1996, Senior Economic Affairs Officer for the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Team Leader and Lead Author of the Economic Report on Africa from 1994 to 2000, and Senior Researcher and Director of the Center for Economic Studies and Policy Analysis 2001 to 2005. His political activity includes being Vice President of Rainbow Ethiopia: Movement for Democracy and Social Justice in 2005 and member of the Executive Committee and Chairperson of the Finance Committee - Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party (CUDP) in 2005. He contested and won a Parliamentary seat in one of the Addis Ababa constituencies, in the May 2005 national election and was imprisoned, charged, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment on a politically motivated case that was globally condemned in September 2005. Human Rights Watch classified him and other prisoners as "Prisoner of Conscience" and was "pardoned" and released from prison in July, 2007. Recent publications include The Role of Urbanization in the Socio-Economic Development Process, (Ethiopian Economic Association/Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute 2003), "Conflict and Post Conflict Economic Performance in Ethiopia" in Post Conflict Economies in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2005), and "Explaining African Economic Growth Performance: The Case of Ethiopia" in Growth Working Papers No.11 May 2005. He is also Member of the American Economic Association, the Ethiopian Economic Association, the Advisory Committee for the African Journal of Economic Policy. He was a Visiting Research Fellow of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1996 and was President of the Ethiopian Economic Association from 2000 to 2004.

Zimbabwe / Political Science
This scholar teaches classes in International Relations, African Politics and Political Philosophy at a liberal arts college in the United States. He has previously taught at universities in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He has also presented academic papers at various colleges and universities in the United States and has also written extensively on Democracy and Human Rights in Africa, including two books published in Germany. His research and teaching interests include human rights, international law and agrarian reform.