Jeanette R. Davidson (Ph.D., University of Texas, Arlington) is director of African and African American Studies and associate professor of social work at the University of Oklahoma. Her areas of research include: African American Studies; black-white interracial marriage; white privilege related to clinical practice and higher education; culturally competent social work practice; racial identity attitudes; and success in engineering studies of students from underrepresented racial minority groups. She has published in many scholarly journals including: Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development; Journal of Multicultural Social Work; Journal of Intergroup Relations; Clinical Social Work Journal; Health and Social Work; Law and Social Work and more. She is currently editing a text on African American Studies and is co-authoring a text on interracial marriage.
Maria del Guadalupe Davidson (PhD, Duquesne University) is assistant professor of African and African-American studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Race: Toward a Revolutionary Construction of Black Identity (University of Valencia Press, 2006). She is currently coediting a book on black feminism and continental philosophy, writing a chapter on Womanist literature for a book on black studies, and cowriting the article “Ethics as First Philosophy: King, Levinas, and the Future of Peace” with Scott Davidson. This piece will appear in an anthology (edited by Robert E. Birt) that explores the work of Dr. M. L. King, Jr. as a philosopher.
Tim Davidson received his doctorate in 1982 from Edinburgh University where he pursued interdisciplinary studies in philosophy, psychology, and theology. His studies focused on existentialism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis and resulted in an original thesis on a humane and clinically useful conceptual approach to the experience of people suffering from schizophrenia. Prior to teaching at the University of Oklahoma, he worked for approximately twenty years in the mental health field as a licensed professional counselor and marriage and family therapist, as a public administrator, and as the president and chief executive officer of his own corporation for counseling services. Dr. Davidson joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma in 1997. His research interests are typically cross-disciplinary, in keeping with a key tenet of human relations studies. His writings in the 1990s, challenging the workings of managed care systems on ethical, clinical, and fiscal levels, were influential in forming the debate on topics like client confidentiality in the social work literature. Recently, he has been focused on various issues relating to race relations in the United States, evaluating aspects of this topic in the context of families, education processes and society at large. Most of his writings reflect his background in philosophical and clinical studies.
Marilyn Edelstein (PhD, State University of New York at Buffalo) is associate professor of English and also a faculty member in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Santa Clara University in California. She teaches courses on contemporary American literature, feminist theory, literary and cultural theory, postmodernism, and multicultural literature and theory. She published one of the first articles on bell hooks, as well as articles and book chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Julia Kristeva, feminist theory and postmodernism, literature and ethics, and multiculturalism.Her most recent publications include an essay in the edited collection on Narrative Beginnings (University of Nebraska Press, 2009) and one in an MLA volume on Approaches to Teaching Lolita (2008). She is working on a book on ethics in/and feminism, postmodernism, and multiculturalism.
Arnold Farr (PhD, The University of Kentucky) is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Africana Studies Program at Saint Joseph’s University. His research areas include: German idealism, social theory, and modern philosophy. His book Marginal Groups and Mainstream American Culture was published by University of Kansas Press in 2000. He has published extensively in edited book collections and his articles have appeared in The Journal of Social Philosophy, The Proceedings of the North American Fichte Society, and New Athenaeum.
Gretchen Givens Generett (PhD, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an associate professor in the Department of Foundations and Leadership at Duquesne University. She coedited the book Black Women in the Field: Experiences Understanding Ourselves and Others through Qualitative Research (2003) with Rhonda Baynes Jeffries. Her research interests include: transformative leadership, teacher-action research, social theory, African American studies, and women’s studies.
Kathy Glass (PhD, University of California at San Diego) is assistant professor of English at Duquesne University. Her areas of research include: African American literature, black feminist critical theory, American literature, women’s studies, American studies, and black studies. Her publications include: “Tending to the Roots: Anna Julia Cooper’s Sociopolitical Thought and Activism” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 6. no. 1(2005), and Courting Communities: Black Female Nationalism and “Syncre-Nationalism” in the Nineteenth-Century North (Routledge, 2006).
Susan Hadley, associate professor of music therapy at Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania received her bachelor’s degree in music therapy from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and her master’s and PhD degrees in music therapy and psychoeducational processes from Temple University. She is editor of Qualitative Inquiries in Music Therapy, Vol. 4 (Barcelona Publishers, 2008), Feminist Perspectives in Music Therapy (Barcelona Publishers, 2006) and Psychodynamic Music Therapy: Case Studies (Barcelona Publishers, 2002) and she is coeditor (with George Yancy) of Narrative Identities: Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction (Jessica Kingsley Press, 2005). She has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews.
Clevis Headley (PhD, The University of Miami) is currently associate professor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master’s in Liberal Studies program. Professionally, he serves as the vice-president and treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of critical race theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege.
Nathalia E. Jaramillo (PhD, University of California at Los Angeles) earned a master’s degree in international education policy at Harvard University before pursuing doctoral studies at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She has coauthored numerous publications with McLaren, including “Alternative Globalizations: Toward a Critical Globalization Studies” and “A Moveable Fascism: Fear and loathing in the Empire of Sand.” She was recently appointed assistant professor of educational studies at Purdue University.
Cindy LaCom is professor of English at Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania. Her teaching and scholarship have been deeply influenced by the transformative and liberatory pedagogies of bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Henry Giroux and by the feminist and postcolonial theories of Chandra Mohanty, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. Her teaching and scholarship integrate and wed her interests in Victorian and disability studies, and she has published in both fields, with articles appearing in Disability and Literature, NSWA, PMLA, Disability Studies Quarterly, Biography, Writing Women: A Newsletter for the 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Association, and Scholars, and chapters appearing in Feminist Disability Studies and in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Passionately committed to the vocation of teaching, she strives to create classroom communities where all members are engaged and willing to critically consider various and complex issues openly and collaboratively. For inspiration, or when such a project challenges her, she hikes in the woods with her two dogs and contemplates ways to make our world a better place.
Carme Manuel teaches in the Department de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya of Spain’s University of Valencia. In 2002 she founded the independent scholarly collection Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans (published by the University of Valencia) devoted to publishing work on American studies. Her interests lie in African American studies and genre studies and she has published and lectured widely on nineteenth-century American and African American women writing. Among other publications, she is the author of the first Spanish translations of Our Nig (Harriet E. Wilson), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet A. Jacobs), Behind the Scenes (Elizabeth Keckley), and is the author of the first anthology published in Catalan of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American women poets.
Donna-Dale L. Marcano (PhD, The University of Memphis) is currently assistant professor at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. She has published on Sartre and race as well as the French feminist Julia Kristeva. She is currently working on developing black feminist thought from within the discipline of philosophy.
Peter McLaren (PhD, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto) is professor of education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author, coauthor, editor, and coeditor of approximately forty books and monographs. Several hundred of his articles, chapters, interviews, reviews, commentaries, and columns have appeared in dozens of scholarly journals and professional magazines since the publication of his first book, Cries from the Corridor (1980). This book was one of Canada’s top-selling nonfiction books of the year and consistently appeared on Canada’s bestseller list. Some of the journals in which Professor McLaren’s work has appeared include: The Journal of Advanced Composition, Ethnicities, The Harvard Educational Review, Cultural Studies & Critical Methodologies, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Cultural Studies, Educational Theory, Social Text, Strategies, Polygraph, the Australian Journal of Education, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, American Journal of Semiotics, Semiotic Inquiry, Discourse: Theoretical Studies of Media and Culture, Interchange, International Journal of Leadership in Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Theoria, Journal of Thought, Educational Policy, Cultural Critique and Socialist Review.
Nancy E. Nienhuis holds a doctorate in Religion, Gender, and Culture from Harvard University. She is the Dean of Students and Community Life and Faculty of Theology at Andover Newton Theological School, where she teaches courses on engaging oppressions. Her scholarship is wide, with a particular interest in issues of domestic violence and abuse, particularly as those issues are addressed in the training of clergy. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, The Journal of Pastoral Care, The Journal of Religion and Abuse, and in Sojourner. She is currently working on a book comparing theological responses to domestic violence in the lives of medieval saints with contemporary responses to such violence, with Harvard Divinity School colleague Beverly Mayne Kienzle.
Susana Vega-González lectures at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She holds a PhD in literature and is the author of Mundos mágicos: la otra realidad en la narrativa de autoras afroamericanas (Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo, 2000) and a number of literary articles which have appeared in Spanish and international scholarly journals. Her research interests are African American literature and popular culture as well as ethnic women writers in the United States.
George Yancy teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University. He received his PhD (with honors) in philosophy from Duquesne University where he was the first McAnulty Fellow. He received his master’s in philosophy from Yale University and his bachelor’s (cum laude) in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He received a second master’s from New York University in Africana Studies where he received the prestigious McCracken Fellowship. He has published in such scholarly journals as African American Review, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Review of Metaphysics, The Western Journal of Black Studies, the CLR James Journal, and more. He is the author of Black Bodies, White Gazes (2008). His influential edited books include: Philosophy in Multiple Voices (2007), White on White/Black on Black (2005), which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award winner, Narrative Identities: Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction (2005, with Susan Hadley), What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question (2004), The Philosophical i: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy (2002), Cornel West: A Critical Reader (2001), and African-American Philosophers, 17 Conversations (1998), which also won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. In 2008, Yancy won the Duquesne University McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship.