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Joining a rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming communicative power of music, Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire ranging form the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today. Her ability to reach to the heart of music and text has earned her both the devotion of an exceptionally diverse audience, and the awards and distinctions accorded to only the most distinguished of artists. In 2007, she was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year genius prize, and in 2008 she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her acclaimed performances on the opera stage comprise the great Mozart roles as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Messiaen. Dawn Upshaw holds honorary doctorate degrees from Yale, the Manhattan School of Music, Allegheny College, and Illinois Wesleyan University. She began her career as a 1984 winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions and the 1985 Walter W. Naumburg Competition, and was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists Development Program.

Eugene R. Sheppard, is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, and Associate Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. He received his Ph.D. at UCLA in the department of History in 2001. In *Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher *(Brandeis University Press 2006), he critically assesses the development of this controversial and enigmatic German-Jewish refugee's political philosophy and its legacy. Professor Sheppard is co-editing a volume on Simon Rawidowicz with David N. Myers; he and Samuel Moyn (Columbia University) are managing editors of a forthcoming series on Brandeis University Press/UPNE entitled Readings in Modern Jewish Thought. He is co-editor of the AJS Review book review. He is a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy.

Frances Moore Lappe was born in Pendleton, Oregon. A graduate of Earlham College in Indiana, she was a 26-year-old trusting her common sense when she began the research that led to the publication of Diet for a *Small Planet (1971)*, a book which sold over three million copies and changed forever the way people think about food. Her little book showed that human practices, not natural disasters, cause worldwide hunger. Food scarcity results when grain, rich in nutrients and capable of supporting vast populations, is fed to livestock to produce meat which yields only a fraction of those nutrients. In *Food First; Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (written with Joseph Collins, 1977)* she went on to identify other causes of starvation: centralized control of farmland and economic pressures to produce cash crops rather than basic food products. A passion for the democratic process infuses her work as a co-founder of two national organizations: the Institute for Food and Development Policy based in California and the Center for Living Democracy, a ten-year initiative which encourages regular citizens to contribute to problem-solving in all dimensions of public life. In 1987 Lappe became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the Alternative Nobel, for her vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity. In 2002 Lappe and her daughter, Anna, published *Hope's Edge; The Next Diet for a Small Planet.* Like other visionary leaders, Lappe sees hope as something to be lived not sought after: A lot of people think we find hope by marshaling evidence and proving there is grounds for it. But hope isn't what we find in evidence; it's what we become in action. It is not surprising, then, that her next book is called *Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear. *

Leslie was the executive director of the Cambridge Civic Association from 1992 to 1994 and a member of its board of directors from 1996 to 1998. More recently, from 1996 to 2003 Leslie was the director of the Threshold Program, a comprehensive, non-degree program at Lesley University for young adults with diverse learning disabilities. A graduate of Harvard College, Leslie earned his Master's Degree in the Management of Human Services at the Heller School at Brandeis University. Leslie also is the president of the board of directors of the Wellmet Project, a non-profit agency in Cambridge that provides transitional housing and counseling services for mentally ill adults.

On October 6, 1991, Anita Hill's life was dramatically and irrevocably changed when her charges of sexual harassment against a former employer, Clarence Thomas, were made public on the eve of his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. In the ensuing days, Hill was grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee about the graphic details of the alleged harassment and about her personal life. Her compelling testimony before the committee was broadcast live around the globe, sweeping her from the quiet obscurity of her life as a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. Her charges produced a stunning collision of race and gender issues, and reactions to her and her story were highly polarized; some viewed her as a hero and a martyr, while others vilified her as mentally unstable, a liar, and even a racist. An internship with a local judge had turned her ambitions to the field of law, and she sought and won admission into Yale University's demanding School of Law, where she was one of 11 black students in a class of 160. After graduation, she took a full-time job as a professional lawyer with the Washington law firm of Ward, Harkrader, and Ross.

Dorothy Prince is the founder of Sojourns, an enterprise designed to bring the lives of outstanding African American women to students and community organizations across the country. For more than 20 years she has been teaching, directing, and performing throughout the New England area. Prince began developing historical monologues in 1995, when she appeared as Zora Neale Hurston in Tulsa Oklahoma. Since then, she has performed as Ida B. Wells Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Phillis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Frances E.W. Harper.