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Eugenie Clark is a world-renowned ichthyologist and authority on sharks who is popularly known as the Shark Lady. Although she is now retired from teaching in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she joined the faculty in 1968, she still holds the title of Senior Research Scientist and Professor Emerita. She currently works on her research in the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory Mote Marine Labs , where her title is Senior Research Scientist and Founding Director. She was a research assistant at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the New York Zoological Society, and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She was the founding director (1955 to 1967) of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, now a leading center for shark research called the Mote Marine Laboratory with which she is still affiliated. Dr. Clark is the recipient of three honorary D.Sc. degrees and awards from the National Geographic Society, the Explorers Club, the Underwater Society of America, the American Littoral Society, the Gold Medal Award of the Society of Women Geographers, and the President's Medal of the University of Maryland. She has authored three books and over 160 scientific and popular articles. Clark has conducted 71 deep submersible dives. Her latest research projects concern the behavior of tropical sand fishes and deep sea sharks. These studies have been featured in 12 articles she has written for National Geographic magazine.

Susan Mitchell Crawley is associate curator of folk art at the High Museum of Art. Her traveling retrospective exhibition of the sculpture of the Georgia wood carver Ulysses Davis is currently touring the United States. Her previous exhibitions include “Dreamscapes: Imaginary Landscapes from the Folk Art Collection” (2009), “Louis Monza: From Politics to Paradise” (2007), and “Southern Vernacular: Nineteenth Century Folk Art,” an ongoing installation of vernacular furniture, pottery, and textiles from the High’s permanent collection. Crawley received a master of arts degree in art history from Georgia State University in January 2005.

Charles Reagan Wilson is the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he has taught since 1981. He has worked extensively with graduate students and served as Director of the Southern Studies academic program from 1991 to 1998, and Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture from 1998-2007. Wilson received bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and earned his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Texas Tech University before coming to Oxford. Wilson is the author of *Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920* (1980), a study of the memory of the Confederacy in the post-Civil War South, and *Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis* (1995), which studies popular religion as a part of the culture of the modern South. He is also coeditor (with Bill Ferris) of *the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture* (1989), which received the Dartmouth Prize from the American Library Association as best reference book of the year and is also coeditor of *The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture*, currently in production. He is editor or coeditor of *Religion and the American Civil War* (1998), *The New Regionalism *(1996), and *Religion in the South* (1985).

Jim Grimsley is a playwright and novelist who was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1955. Jim's first novel *Winter Birds* won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix Charles Brisset, given by the French Academy of Physicians. The novel also received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation as one of three finalists for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Jim's second novel, *Dream Boy*, was published by Algonquin in September, 1995, and won the 1996 Award for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the American Library Association; the novel was also one of five finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Jim has written eleven full-length and four one-act plays, including *Mr. Universe*, *The Lizard of Tarsus*, *White People* and *The Existentialists*. He has been playwright-in-residence at 7Stages Theatre of Atlanta since 1986 and was playwright in residence at About Face Theatre of Chicago from 2000-2004. In 1988 he was awarded the George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright for his play *Mr. Universe*. He was also awarded the first-ever Bryan Prize for Drama, presented by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for distinguished achievement in playwriting.

Hampton Sides is an American historian and magazine journalist. He is the author of several bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction. *Ghost Soldiers* won the 2002 PEN USA award for nonfiction. Sides is editor-at-large for *Outside* magazine and has written for such periodicals as *National Geographic*, *The New Yorker*, *Esquire*, *Preservation*, *Men's Journal*, *Men's Vogue*, and *The Washington Post*. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. Sides is native of Memphis, and has a BA in history from Yale. He is a past fellow of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Japan Society, and a media fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He is an adviser and board member of the Mayborn Journalism School's annual conference on Literary Non-fiction. Hampton has guest-lectured at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford, Colorado College, SMU, the Autry Museum of the American West, and the National World War II Museum, among other institutions. He has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as *The American Experience*, the *Today Show*,* Book TV*, the History Channel,* Fresh Air*, CNN, CBS *Sunday Morning*, *The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer*, and NPR's *All Things Considered*.

MIichael A. Fletcher covers the White House for the *Washington Post*, where he has been a reporter since 1995. He has previously covered education and race relations, chronicling issues including the racial achievement gap, racial profiling, criminal justice disparities, and the battle over the future of affirmative action.

Jean-David Levitte was ambassador of France to the United States from December 2002 until May 2007. Ambassador Levitte has had a distinguished and outstanding career in the French foreign service, serving on the staff of three French Presidents and holding various senior positions in the French foreign service. Born in 1946 in the south of France, Ambassador Levitte earned a law degree and is a graduate of Sciences-Po (the renowned Institute for Political Science in Paris) and of the National School of Oriental Languages, where he studied Chinese and Indonesian. Having successfully passed the Foreign Service exam in 1970, he was first posted in Hong Kong and Beijing in the early 1970's. A few months after his election in 1974, President Valery Giscard d'Estaing asked him to work on his staff at the Elysee Palace, where he stayed from 1975 to 1981. Mr. Levitte was then assigned to his first position in the United States as Second Counselor at the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations in New York. Upon returning to Paris, Mr. Levitte was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary in the African Bureau. He was then assigned as Deputy Chief of Staff to the Foreign Minister, a position he held from 1986 to 1988. In 1988, he was designated to his first position as Ambassador and served as the French Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva from 1988 to 1990. Returning to Paris in 1990, he held senior positions in the French Foreign Ministry, first as Assistant Secretary for Asia and then as Undersecretary for Cultural and Scientific Cooperation. After the presidential elections in 1995, President Jacques Chirac asked Ambassador Levitte to be his Senior Diplomatic Adviser. He served in that position from 1995 to 2000. President Jacques Chirac appointed him as French Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 2000. In New York, Ambassador Levitte successfully handled several international negotiations, including resolution 1441 on Iraq. After serving as Ambassador of France to the United States for four-and-a-half years, he was appointed as President Nicolas Sarkozy's Diplomatic Adviser and Sherpa (personal representative of the head of state who prepares international summits) on May 16, 2007.