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**Swanee Hunt’s** mission is to achieve gender parity, especially as a means to end war and rebuild societies, as well as to alleviate poverty and other human suffering. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Hunt is the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy. In 1997, she founded the Women and Public Policy Program, a research center concerned with domestic and foreign policy, which she directed for more than a decade. She teaches “Inclusive Security,” exploring how women are systematically excluded from peace processes, the impact, and the policy steps needed to rectify the problem. From 1993 to 1997, Hunt served as ambassador to Austria, where she hosted negotiations and international symposia focused on stabilizing the neighboring Balkan states. Prior to that, she made her mark as a civic leader and philanthropist in Denver, where she led initiatives on public education, affordable housing, women’s empowerment, and mental health services for two mayors and the governor. In 2007, Ambassador Hunt was inducted into the** National Women’s Hall of Fame**. She is a widely published columnist and has authored three books: the award-winning \_This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace\_, her memoir, \_Half-Life of a Zealot,\_ and \_Rwandan Women Rising\_.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Professor Rogers' research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Constitution, American legal history, and the American Revolution. His most recent books are: *Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts*, *The Boston Strangler*, and *Boston: City on a Hill* (with Lisa J. Rogers). An article on State Constitutionalism and the Death Penalty, will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the *Journal of Policy History*. Rogers also has published articles in the* New England Quarterly*, the *Journal of the Early Republic*, and the *American Journal of Legal History*, among other scholarly journals. The undergraduate and graduate courses he teaches parallel his research interests: U.S. Constitutional History, I & II, The Bill of Rights, Anglo-American Law, (with Professor Robin Fleming), and "Atlantic World, a history core course. Rogers is the chair of the Seminar in Early American History, hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a member of the Adams Papers Executive Publication Committee. His current book project is titled Faith, Healing, and the First Amendment.

Karen Elizabeth Chaney earned her master's degree in American history from Harvard University. She wrote her master's thesis on the 1849 George Parkman murder under the auspices of the late Dr. William Gienapp. She recently contributed two chapters on the Parkman case and the 1843 Mary Ann Bickford murder to Praeger's Famous American Crimes and Trials series. She has presented papers at Mt. Auburn Cemetery and the New England Historical Association, and for Mayor Thomas Menino at the Parkman House in Boston. She is also on the board of directors of the Victorian Society.