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Charles Mann is a correspondent for *The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired*, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including *BioScience*, *The Boston Globe*, *Fortune*, *Geo* (Germany), *The New York Times* (magazine, op-ed, book review), *Panorama* (Italy), *Paris-Match* (France), *Quark* (Japan), *Smithsonian*, *Der Stern* (Germany), *Technology Review*, *Vanity Fair* and *The Washington Post* (magazine, op-ed, book review). Mann's most recent book, *1491*, won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Keck award for the best book of the year. In addition to *1491*, he has co-written four other books: *The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics* (1986; rev. ed., 1995); *The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition* (1991), *Noahs Choice: The Future of Endangered Species* (1995), and *At Large: The Strange Case of the Internets Biggest Invasion* (1998). He has also written for CD-ROMs, HBO, and the television show *Law and Order*, and was the text editorial coordinator for the internationally best-selling photographic projects *Material World* (1994), *Women in the Material World* (1996), and *Hungry Planet* (2005). A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has received writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Margaret Sanger Foundation and the Lannan Foundation (a 2006 Literary Fellowship). He is now working on a companion volume to *1491*; an early excerpt appeared in *National Geographic* in May 2007.

B.A., Harvard University; Ph.D., Yale University. Professor Mehlman is a literary critic and a historian of ideas. Over a number of years, he has been writing an implicit history of speculative interpretation in France in the form of a series of readings of canonical literary works. His books include A Structural Study of Autobiography (1974), Revolution and Repetition (1977), Cataract: A Study in Diderot (1979), Legacies: Of Anti-Semitism in France (1983), Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (1993), Genealogies of the Text (1995) and

Alex Beam burst on the Boston scene in 1988 with TGIF, a Boston Globe column on business news and commentary. Beam was born in 1954 and graduated from Yale University. He spent some formative years in Moscow, started his journalism career as a researcher for Newsweek magazine, then shifted to Business Week where he reported from Los Angeles and Moscow. His second novel, The Americans are Coming!, is available through St. Martin's Press.

Adeline Sire produces feature and news stories for *The World*. Focusing on cultural aspects, she looks for people with compelling stories that give the news a fresh and quirky slant. Her work goes from researching story ideas, to reporting and producing segments for the program. Before joining the staff at *The World*, Adeline produced freelance arts features for PRI's radio program *Beyond Computers*, and Boston station WBUR's *Morning Edition* and *Here and Now*, where she trained. She also worked several years in a publishing department of the United Nations headquarters in New York. A native of France, Adeline says, "some of the most exhilarating experiences of working at *The World*, are talking to people in different countries, exploring different cultures, and tackling new issues every day. I love the challenge." Adeline is also a musician and a baroque music freak, but that's neither here nor there.

Joe Blatt is interested in the effects of media content and technology on development, learning, and civic behavior. His courses span both formal and informal settings. Blatt has created television series and Web sites for many kinds of learning environments, and he is now helping to renew the historic relationship between HGSE and Sesame Workshop, as recently documented in *the Harvard Gazette*. Blatt is also co-project director of the Usable Knowledge Web site, which makes HGSE faculty research available and accessible to practitioners. Blatt's production company, RiverRun Media, creates series and specials for national public television. He began in children's programming and created a number of educational series (*For All Practical Purposes*, *Against All Odds*). In recent years, Blatt has concentrated on science television, most visibly as an executive producer of Scientific American Frontiers and as a producer of several episodes of *NOVA*. He created *BreakThrough*, a series about the accomplishments of contemporary African American, Latino, and Native American scientists and engineers. Blatt recently completed *Surprises in Mind*, a primetime documentary about children's capacity for mathematical thinking.

Hinya Hirayam is an art historian and curator with a specialty in American art and Boston's cultural history of the nineteenth century. She received a B.A. from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in American and New England Studies from Boston University. She has worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Boston Athenum, where she has been a member of the Art Department since 1995. She has curated and organized a number of exhibitions and contributed to many publications including A Pleasing Novelty: Bunkio Matsuki and the Japan Craze in Victorian Salem (1993), Look Again: Essays on the Boston Athenum's Art Collections (2003), Acquired Tastes: 200 Years of Collecting for the Boston Athenum (2006), and The Boston Athenum: Bicentennial Essays (2009). [Source: http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/node/163]