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Professor Jeffrey Collins received BA, MA, and PhD degrees from Yale, and a BA and MA from the University of Cambridge. Before arriving at the Bard Graduate Center in 2003, he was associate professor of art history at the University of Washington, Seattle. A scholar of 17th- and 18th-century Italian art, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and recipient of Andrew W. Mellon, Fulbright, and American Philosophical Society Fellowships. He is the author of *Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts *(Cambridge, 2004) and has contributed to publications including the *Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians*, *Eighteenth-Century Studies*, *The Burlington Magazine*, and *Ricerche di Storia dell Arte*.

Melissa Delbridge has published her writing in *Atlanta Press, Crescent Review, *and *Southern Humanities Review.* She was one of the winners of the 1999 Southern Women Writers Conference's Emerging Writers competition. She works as an archivist in Duke's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. *Family Bible*, the trilogy of essays from which this introduction is excerpted, was written during the year she served as the first Library Fellow for Duke University's John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. The essays appear in their entirety in *Southern Humanities Review*.

Mr. Weiner is a reporter for *The New York Times*. He has written on American intelligence for twenty years, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on secret national security programs. He has traveled to Afghanistan and other nations to investigate C.I.A. covert operations firsthand. *Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA*, is his third book.

Shelley Lewis is the author of two books, contributing editor of two more, and co-founder of the website, Howdini.com. She spent the first 25 years of her career in mainstream media as a producer and executive producer of news programs for NBC, ABC, and CNN. In 2003 she was a co-creator of Air America Radio, and served as vice president of programming for two years. She began a second career as a writer and website owner in 2006, and she's never regretted it for a minute, except when she misses the bloated salary she used to earn as a network executive.

Ralph E. Reed Jr. is president of Century Strategies, a political consulting firm. He has served as president of the Georgia Republican Party since 2001. Reed was Executive Director of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) 1983-1985, founded Students for America in 1984, and was Executive Director of the Christian Coalition 1989-1997. He lost his 2006 bid for lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledging Senator Casey Cagle's victory in Georgia's Republican primary on July 18, 2006. Reed promised to support Cagle's bid for lieutenant governor.

Angelos Pangratis is the senior career official serving at the Delegation of the European Commission to the United States, in Washington, DC. He is the Deputy Head of Delegation, the Ambassador and Head of Delegation being John Bruton, ex-Prime Minister of Ireland. Angelos Pangratis is the former Ambassador and Head of Delegation for the European Commissions Delegation to Argentina (2003-05). He also served at senior functions in the Delegations of the European Commission in South Africa (1995-1997) and South Korea (1990-1994). Highlights of Mr. Pangratis' career at the EU's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, include being Head of Unit responsible for relations with China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, South Korea and Mongolia; Head of Unit for Personnel and Budget of the Directorate General: External Relations and Trade Policy ; Head of Investigation teams of the Anti-Dumping and Anti-Circumvention Division to name but a few positions. Mr. Pangratis has represented the European Commission at numerous Multilateral Organizations (WTO, OECD, Club de Paris, UNCTAD, others). Mr. Pangratis lectured at universities in the Czech Republic, France, Belgium, United Kingdom, Korea, South Africa, Argentina and the United States. He had articles and interviews on EU matters published in many countries. Angelos Pangratis was born on the island of Corfu, Greece (1956), and is married with three children. Mr. Pangratis speaks Greek, French, English and Spanish. He has obtained a doctorate from the University of Paris I, Panthon Sorbonne (1983) in International Economics, Monetary Policies and Finance. This followed studies in Economics, European Studies and International Law at the Universities of St.-Etienne, Paris I and Paris II.

Born of French and Scottish parents, a US citizen since 1988, Teissier-duCros obtained his degree in material sciences from the Advanced Institute for Industrial & Mechanical Materials. Teissier- duCros has worked on issues such as tax policies and innovation with state and local governments and agencies in France, Italy, Belgium, India and Quebec. From 1988 to 1999, he was president of the US southeast chapter of the French Foreign Trade Advisors. He is an adjunct professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Management.