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Nancy Lusignan Schultz was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and completed her B.A. cum laude in English and French at the College of the Holy Cross. Following a semester of study at both McGill University in Montreal and at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, she entered the Ph.D. program in English at Boston College, where she was a university fellow, and received her doctorate in 1984. She was a visiting professor at Boston College from summer 1988-98. Schultz joined the faculty at Salem State College in Massachusetts in 1983, where she co-directed the College's Writing Center for fifteen years, and teaches writing and literature courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1999, she was appointed coordinator of the College's graduate programs in English. In Spring 2007, Dr. Schultz was elected English Department Chairperson and began this new position on July 1, 2007. Dr. Schultz was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship during AY 2003-04 and a Senior Fellowship at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, during AY 2002-03 for her current book project, a study of the 1824 Mattingly miracle in Washington D.C., under contract with Yale University Press.

Bruce Twickler is President of Docema, LLC, the film company that produced the ground-breaking documentary *Damrell's Fire* (2006) for PBS and is currently producing *Broadside, the Influence of Sea Power on History *(2009). Bruce graduated from MIT with a BS/MS in Electrical Engineering; was on the technical staffs of GenRad and MITRE Corp; and, he spent a dozen years in the consumer electronics industry, the last few as VP of Marketing for Pioneer Electronics. In the early personal computer market of the 1980s, he was President/CEO of Hayden Software and later, Shiva Corporation. In the late 1990s, his Internet company, Andover.Net, with over 50% of all Linux-related internet traffic, enjoyed one of the most successful initial public offerings of that era.

Joe Trippi, heralded on the cover of *The New Republic* as the man who reinvented campaigning, was born in California and began his political career working on Edward M. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1980. His work in presidential politics continued with the campaigns of Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean. As a campaign manager, Trippi has run presidential, Senate, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns. He was selected by former Vice President Walter Mondale to manage Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses in 1984 and later went on to run several key states for the Mondale for President campaign. In 1988, Trippi was the Deputy National Campaign Manager for Richard Gephardt's presidential campaign. In 2004, he was National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, pioneering the use of online technology to organize what became the largest grassroots movement in presidential politics. Through Trippi's innovative use of the internet for small-donor fundraising, Dean for America ended up raising more money than any Democratic presidential campaign in history, all with donations averaging less than $100 each. Trippi's innovations have brought fundamental change to the electoral system and will be the model for how all future political campaigns are run. Joe Trippi has been profiled in *GQ*, *Wired*, *Fast Company*, *The New Republic* and *The New York Times Magazine*. He is an MSNBC political analyst and former Harvard University fellow. He currently heads the Washington, DC political consultancy, Trippi & Associates. In addition Trippi is the author of, *The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything*, the story of how his revolutionary use of the Internet and an impassioned, contagious desire to overthrow politics as usual grew into a national grassroots movement and changed the face of politics, and indeed many aspects of American life, forever.

Robert V. Ward, a Boston educator and administrator, was recently named Dean of the Southern New England School of Law. Dean Ward replaces Dean David M. Prentiss, who filled the position on an interim basis until a permanent dean was found and now returns to his role as associate dean and member of the faculty. Dean Ward has served as professor of law at New England School of Law since 1982 and was the director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Enrichment program, an academic achievement program designed to increase the number of people practicing minority law. He serves on the executive committee of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Academic Support Programs and is a member of the faculty of the American Academy for Judicial Education.

Carmen Fields has been a fixture in Bostons journalism community for over 25 years. Her experience includes both print and broadcast journalism; journalism education and media relations. For many Boston-area residents, Carmens comments on the news of the day, in her *Boston Globe* column and as a television reporter and anchor for Channels 7 and 4 and Channel 2s *Ten OClock News with Christopher Lydon* were part of daily life. A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Carmen earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Lincoln University in Missouri and a Master of Science degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University. She was a part of the *Boston Globe* team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Bostons school desegregation. After work at the Boston Globe as a reporter, assistant city editor and later as a columnist, Fields became a television journalist. She was also an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

Abigail Thernstrom a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York and the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She also serves on the board of advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and was a member of the Massachusetts state Board of Education for eleven years. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government, Harvard University, in 1975. She is also a recipient of the prestigious 2007 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. She is currently completing a new book: *Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections* (2009). She serves on several boards: the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Institute for Justice, among others. From 1992 to 1997 was a member of the Aspen Institute's Domestic Strategy Group. President Clinton chose her as one of three authors to participate in his first "town meeting" on race in Akron, Ohio, on December 3, 1997, and she was part of a small group that met with the President again in the Oval Office on December 19th.

Stephan Thernstrom is the Winthrop Research Professor of History at Harvard University where he teaches American social history. He was born in Port Huron, Michigan and educated in the public schools of Port Huron and Battle Creek. He graduated with highest honors from Northwestern University in 1956, and was awarded the Ph.D. by Harvard in 1962. He has held appointments as assistant professor at Harvard, associate professor at Brandeis University, and professor at UCLA before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1973. In 1978-1979 he was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and Professorial Fellow at Trinity College. His most recent book, co-authored with Abigail Thernstrom, is *No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning* (2003), was the winner of the 2007 Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship. He is also the editor of *the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups*, and the author of *Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City*; *Poverty, Politics, and Planning in the New Boston*; *The Origins of ABCD*; *The Other Bostonians*; *Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970*; and a two-volume survey, *A History of the American People*.