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Leonard Barkan is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and NYU. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Phi Beta Kappa, and the PEN America Center. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy, where he writes on the subject of food and wine. He has recently published Satyr Square, which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. His current projects include a scholarly study of the relations among words, images, and pleasure from Plato to the Renaissance, and a book on Michelangelo's drawings and writings.

Professor David M. Golove specializes in the constitutional law of foreign affairs and has written extensively in the constitutional history pertaining to that field. He is best known for a book-length article published in the *Michigan Law Review*, "Treaty-Making and the Nation: The Historical Foundations of the Nationalist Conception of the Treaty Power". In this article, Golove comprehensively considers a question of constitutional law that has been controversial from the moment of the nation's birth in 1776 and remains so today. Can the United States government, through its power to make treaties, effectively regulate subjects that would otherwise be beyond the reach of Congress's enumerated legislative powers? For example, a treaty prohibiting the death penalty? He answers yes, and in doing so has produced both a major work of legal historical scholarship and an important legal and constitutional defense of federal power. In 1995, an article by Golove in the *Harvard Law Review* (co-authored with Bruce Ackerman) dealt with another fundamental issue in foreign relations law: the undeniable fact that many international accords today are approved not through the treaty processes mandated in the U.S. Constitution, but by majority votes of both houses. His most recent work, for a book project, focuses on the relationship between the international laws of war and presidential and congressional constitutional powers. Golove received his BA from Berkeley in 1979 and has law degrees from Boalt Hall and Yale. He teaches in the fields of Constitutional Law and International Law. Professor Golove is a Co-Director of the NYU's Center on Law and Security.

US Senator Byron Dorgan was raised in the southwestern North Dakota town of Regent, where his family worked in the farm equipment and petroleum business and raised cattle and horses. At age 26, he became North Dakota's youngest ever constitutional officer when he was appointed State Tax Commissioner. First elected to Congress in 1980, Dorgan has devoted his career to fighting for the interests of rural America. Senator Dorgan served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. He is a senior member of the Appropriations, Commerce and Energy committees. He also serves as Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. As Chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, he has worked to fund development of renewable energy sources like wind, solar and biofuels, as well as clean coal research that will help us find better ways to use the resource that fulfill 50 percent of our nation's energy needs.

Yaron Brook serves as the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute and the Ayn Rand Center of Individual Rights; ARI's Washington, DC-based public policy arm. He is a prominent advocate for Objectivism, the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand. Dr. Brook is a contributing editor of *The Objective Standard*, contributing author to the anthology *Winning the Unwinnable War*, and co-author of *Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea*. He is a weekly guest on *Front Page* hosted by PJTV, the first center-right online television network broadcasting over the Internet, and makes frequent guest appearances on national radio and TV with Objectivism's unique perspective on current events. A popular speaker at universities, public forums, industry conferences, academic panels, community and professional groups, his recent talks encompass the moral foundations of capitalism and individual rights--including the right to not be your brother's health care keeper.

Lisa Mullins is the anchor and senior producer of The World. In addition to hosting from the Boston studios, Mullins has produced and reported from China, Albania, Italy, Mexico, and Northern Ireland. She anchored the program from Hong Kong when the territory was handed back to China in 1997. She also covered the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996 and anchored that year's presidential election coverage from Washington. Mullins brings to The World more than 20 years of experience in broadcast journalism. Her reports have aired on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," and "Performance Today." She co-produced "The Vegetable Chronicles," an award-winning series of public radio documentaries about diet and disease. For 6 years, she hosted the American broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Day concert, performed in the Austrian capital. Public radio program directors across the United States have named Lisa Mullins one of the best announcers in the public radio system. She has received the bronze award for "Best Network Anchor" in the New York Festival's international radio competition, and Boston Magazine has honored her with its "Best Radio Voice" award. Her interview with the Episcopal bishop of Honduras, Leo Frade, won "The World" the Golden Reel Award in the category "National News and Public Affairs" from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters.

John Micklethwait is Editor-in-Chief of The Economist. Before that he edited the US section of the newspaper (1999 - 2006) and ran the New York Bureau for two years, having edited the Business Section of the newspaper for the previous four years. His other roles have included setting up The Economist's office in Los Angeles, where he worked from 1990 - 1993 and being Media Correspondent. He has covered business and politics from the United States, Latin America, Continental Europe, Southern Africa and most of Asia. He is a frequent broadcaster and has appeared on CNN, ABC News, BBC and NPR. He is the co-author of "The Witch Doctors", "A Future Perfect: the Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation" and "The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea" and "The Right Nation", a study of conservatism in America, with Adrian Wooldridge, also an Economist journalist.

Andrew Sussman is senior program producer of PRI's *The World*, the daily one-hour radio news magazine created at WGBH Radio in Boston and broadcast on 210 public radio stations nationwide. In addition to producing *The World* each day, Sussman has reported for the program from Egypt and Russia. He was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and has been with the show since its inception in 1995. Previous to that, he was based in Moscow and Paris as an editor and reporter.

Barack Obama is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 2005 until November 2008, when he resigned after his election to the presidency. Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of *the Harvard Law Review*. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for United States Senate in 2004. His victory from a crowded field in the March 2004 Democratic primary raised his visibility, and his prime-time televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 made him a rising star nationally in the Democratic Party. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 by the largest margin in Illinois history. He began his run for the presidency in February 2007. After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination, becoming the first major party African American candidate for president. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican candidate John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.

Walter Benn Michaels is a literary theorist, known as the author of Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004). Michaels' work has generated a set of arguments and questions around a host of issues that are central to literary studies: problems of culture and race, identities national and personal, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and difference, and meaning and intention in interpretation. Michaels was born in 1948. He earned his BA in 1970 and PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Afterwards, he taught at Johns Hopkins University (1974-1977, 1987-2001) and the University of California, Berkeley (1977-1987). Since 2001, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is well-known for his study of American Naturalism, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; American Literature at the Turn of the Century, published in 1987. Michaels is a renowned teacher. His article "Against Theory," co-written with Steven Knapp, is included in the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. He is currently Professor in the Department of English, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he served as Head from 2001-2007.