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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.

Professor of Political Science. Professor Ansolabehere studies elections, democracy, and the mass media. He is coauthor (with Shanto Iyengar) of *The Media Game* (Macmillan, 1993) and of *Going Negative: How Political Advertising Alienates and Polarizes the American Electorate* (The Free Press, 1996). His articles have appeared in *The American Political Science Review*, *The British Journal of Politics*, *The Journal of Politics*, *Legislative Studies Quarterly*, *Public Opinion Quarterly*, *The Quill*, and *Chance*. His current research projects include campaign finance, congressional elections, and party politics.

Cullen Murphy was the managing editor of *The Atlantic Monthly* from 1985 to 2002 and the magazine's de facto editor-in-chief from 2002 to 2005. He is the author of *The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own* and *Are We Rome?* He is currently the editor-at-large of *Vanity Fair*.

Rishi Reddi is an American author. She was born in Hyderabad, India and grew up in the United Kingdom and the United States. Along with her writing career, Reddi has been an enforcement attorney for the state and federal environmental protection agencies, as well as a lawyer for the Massachusetts Secretary of Environment. Her book Karma and Other Stories received the 2007 LL Winship PEN New England Award. Rishi Reddi's work was chosen for Best American Short Stories 2005, featured on NPR's Selected Shorts program, and received an honorable mention for 2004 Pushcart Prize. She has been a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the recipient of an Individual Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She serves on the board of directors of South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow.

George Annas is the Edward R. Utley Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights of Boston University School of Public Health, and Professor in the Boston University School of Medicine, and School of Law. He is the cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, a transnational professional association of lawyers and physicians working together to promote human rights and health. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he clerked for Justice John V. Spalding of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and came to Boston University in 1972 as the Director of the Center for Law and Health Sciences at the law school. Professor Annas is the author or editor of sixteen books on health law and bioethics, including *American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries* (2005), *The Rights of Patients* (3d ed. 2004), *Some Choice: Law, Medicine, and the Market* (1999), *Standard of Care: The Law of American Bioethics* (1993), and *Judging Medicine* (1987), and a play, entitled *Shelley's Brain* that has been presented to bioethics audiences across the U.S. and in Australia. Professor Annas has been called "the father of patient rights," "the doyen of American medico-legal analysts," and a "national treasure." Professor Annas wrote a regular feature on "law and bioethics" for the Hastings Center Report from 1976 to 1991, and a regular feature on "Public Health and the Law" in the *American Journal of Public Health* from 1982 to 1992 and since 1991 has written a regular feature on "Legal Issues in Medicine" for the *New England Journal of Medicine*, now under the title "Health Law, Ethics, and Human Rights." He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Institute of Medicine, cochair of the American Bar Association's Committee on Health Rights and Bioethics (Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section) and a member of the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academies. He has also held a variety of government regulatory posts, including Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, Chair of the Massachusetts Health Facilities Appeals Board, and Chair of the Massachusetts Organ Transplant Task Force.

David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, contributing editor at *the Weekly Standard* and member of the National Council of the Arts. He's the author of several books and many technical articles; also essays on art criticism and fiction. The "Tuple Spaces" introduced in Carriero and Gelernter's *Linda System* (1983) are the basis of many computer-communication and distributed programming systems worldwide. *Mirror Worlds* (1991) "foresaw" the World Wide Web and was "one of the inspirations for Java"; the "Lifestream's" system (first implemented by Eric Freeman at Yale) is the basis for Mirror Worlds Technologies' software. He's the author of *The Muse in the Machine*, the novel *1939* (1995), *Machine Beauty* (1998) and other books; Mr. Gelernter is published in *Commentary*, *ArtNews*, * the Washington Post* and many others.

Jesper Juul is a video game researcher at the Singapore-MIT Game Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the author of numerous articles and reviews about video games. Born in 1970 in Denmark, he earned his PhD in information technology in 2004 from the University of Copenhagen.