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H. Robert Baker studies the place of law and constitution in the many struggles that make up North American history. Primarily interested in civil rights and dissent of all stripes, he examines legal concepts and how they permeate popular culture. Baker's interest in legal history stems from my year as a Fulbright scholar in Canada. Studying the western fur trade colony at Red River (the site of modern day Winnipeg, Manitoba), he was struck by the power of the colony's only law court to unite a fractious, polyglot community of Scots, French, English, and Motis settlers. For a colony that began with the Battle of Seven Oaks and ended with the Riel Rebellion, the court seemingly held the peace in between. He has published *The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution*, and *the Coming of the Civil War* in 2006 with Ohio University Press. the latter won the Gambrinus Book Prize from the Milwaukee County Historical Society. A paperback edition was released in January of 2008. His current work continues to look at the question of fugitive slaves in the early republic.

Dr. John Garver holds several degrees including a B.S. in Psychology and B.A. in Political Science from Oklahoma State University as well as a M.S. and PhD in Political Science from the University of Colorado. The focus of Dr. Garver's research has been mainly concerned with Chinese foreign relations and Asian international relations. Dr. Garver has authored nine books on Sino-Soviet, Sino-American, and Sino-Indian, Sino-Iranian, and Sino-Middle East relations, and nearly one hundred articles on China's foreign relations. He is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, participates frequently in various Asia policy related fora, and has lived for extended periods in China, Taiwan, India, and Pakistan. He speaks Chinese and German and is the recipient of awards from the U.S. National Academy of Science.

Konrad Oberhuber, curator of drawings and professor of fine arts from 1975 to 1987, died of brain cancer on Sept. 12 in San Diego. He was 72 years old. Born in Linz, Austria, he studied at the University of Vienna, and worked for a decade at the Albertina, the renowned Viennese museum. Before coming to Harvard he served as curator at the National Gallery of Art. When he left Cambridge in 1987, it was to return to the Albertina as its director, a post he held until his retirement in 2000. As an art historian, Oberhuber was best known as the world's pre-eminent authority on the drawings of Raphael, but his expertise extended beyond the Italian Renaissance in many directions and across five centuries. In every European and American museum collection he visited, he correctly attributed unidentified and misidentified drawings by French, Netherlandish, Italian, and German draftsmen. As the most prominent expert in the United States on Renaissance drawings, during the 1970s and 1980s Oberhuber was inundated with requests for help from students, scholars, collectors, dealers, and auction houses. Not only did he nurture Harvard undergraduates and graduate students, but he also served formally and informally as surrogate adviser to Ph.D. candidates from other institutions.

Madeleine Korbel Albright was nominated by President Clinton on December 5, 1996 as Secretary of State. After being unanimously confirmed by the US Senate, she was sworn in as the 64th Secretary of State on January 23, 1997. Secretary Albright is the first female secretary of state and the highest ranking woman in the history of the US government. Prior to her appointment, Secretary Albright served as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations (presenting her credentials at the UN on February 6, 1993) and as a member of President Clinton's Cabinet and National Security Council. Secretary Albright formerly was the President of the Center for National Policy. The Center is a non-profit research organization formed in 1981 by representatives from government, industry, labor and education. Its mandate is to promote the study and discussion of domestic and international issues. As a Research Professor of International Affairs and Director of Women in Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in international affairs, US foreign policy, Russian foreign policy, and Central and Eastern European politics, and was responsible for developing and implementing programs designed to enhance women's professional opportunities in international affairs. From 1981 to 1982, Secretary Albright was awarded a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian following an international competition in which she wrote about the role of the press in political changes in Poland during the early 1980's. She also served as a Senior Fellow in Soviet and Eastern European Affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, conducting research in developments and trends in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. From 1978-1981, Secretary Albright was a staff member on the National Security Council, as well as a White House staff member, where she was responsible for foreign policy legislation. From 1976-1978, she served as Chief Legislative Assistant to Senator Edmund S. Muskie. Awarded a BA from Wellesley College with honors in Political Science, she studied at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, received a Certificate from the Russian Institute at Columbia University, and her Masters and Doctorate from Columbia University's Department of Public Law and Government. Secretary Albright is fluent in French and Czech, with good speaking and reading abilities in Russian and Polish.

Catherine V. Scott teaches in the political science program at Agnes Scott College in Decauter, Georgia. Her interests include U.S. foreign policy, development theory, gender politics, feminist theory, and U.S. foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era.

Gerald Graff is one of his generation's most influential commentators on education, not only as a historian and theorist, but also through his impact on the classroom practice of teachers. His 1987 book, *Professing Literature: An Institutional History*, is widely regarded as a definitive work. This book also helped launch Graff's argument, subsequently developed in *Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education* (1992), that schools and colleges should respond to curricular and disciplinary conflicts by "teaching the conflicts," incorporating debates, for example, about literature, history, and how these fields should be studied into courses themselves. Graff's idea of teaching the conflicts has also inspired two widely used "Critcial Controversy" textbooks, editions of Twain's *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* and Shakespeare's *The Tempest*, both edited by Graff and James Phelan. Graff (and now Graff and Birkenstein) has given lectures and workshops at many schools and colleges, and Graff's work has been the topic of three special sessions at Massachusetts Library Association conferences. Graff's career has culminated in his election as President of MLA in 2008.

Nocera received a B.S. degree in Chemistry (magna cum laude) from Rutgers University in 1979. He received a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, after working with Professor Harry B. Gray studying the spectroscopy, electrochemistry, and photochemistry of polynuclear metal-metal bonded complexes. He joined the faculty of Michigan State University in 1984 as assistant professor, and became a professor at MSU in 1990. He moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor of chemistry in 1997. He is presently the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and Professor of Chemistry at MIT. Nocera and his researchers received media attention beginning in 2007 when he declared that a better understanding of the photosynthesis process could lead to economical storage of solar energy as chemical fuel. He later announced that his group had developed a highly efficient anode electrocatalyst for use in electrolysis of water employing inexpensive materials. His work centers around the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry, particularly in the theory of proton coupled electron transfer. He is also the director of the Solar Revolution Project at MIT which seeks to create innovations towards the use of solar energy in large scale, mainstream applications.