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Composer, educator, author, and Jazz guitarist Dr. Bill Banfield is Professor Emeritus founding director of Black Music Culture Studies at Berklee College of Music, and is Senior Scholar in Residence, Longy Conservatory of Bard College. He is founder/director of JazzUrbane, a contemporary jazz art recording label, dedicated to producing creative new artists. Since its founding in 2014, the label has already produced and released 15 albums now heard internationally. Serving now as Harvard’s Mentor-in-Residence, Dr. Banfield uses his wide-reaching experience and creativity to inspire these radio programs to view jazz in its entirety, from its cultures, history, experience, and beyond.

After a bone-marrow transplant and months of recovery, Marjorie Clapprood is returning to a sense of normalcy in her life, and is back in a familiar spot: behind the microphone at WRKO radio.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Ali S. Asani is Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures at Harvard University. After completing his high school education in Kenya, he attended Harvard College, with a concentration in the Comparative Study of Religion, graduating summa cum laude in 1977. He received his Ph.D. in 1984. Prof. Asani holds a joint appointment between NELC and the Study of Religion. He has taught at Harvard since 1983, offering instruction in a variety of languages such as Urdu/Hindi, Sindhi, Gujarati and Swahili as well as courses on various aspects of the Islamic tradition. His books include The Bujh Niranjan: An Ismaili Mystical Poem, The Harvard Collection of Ismaili Literature in Indic Literatures: A Descriptive Catalog and Finding Aid, Celebrating Muhammad: Images of the Prophet in Muslim Devotional Poetry (co-author), Al-Ummah: A Handbook for an Identity Development Program for North American Muslim Youth, Ecstasy and Enlightenment: The Ismaili Devotional Literature of South Asia, and Let's Study Urdu: An Introduction to the Urdu Script and Let's Study Urdu.

Benjamin Hirsch was born in September, 1932, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, just 5 months before Hitler came to power. He was the fifth of seven children of Dr. Hermann Hirsch, a dentist, and Mathilda Auerbach Hirsch. The mistreatment of Jews in Germany started long before Ben was born. He was still an infant when Hitler's first anti-Jewish laws went into effect in April, 1933, and was barely 3 years old when the Nuremberg Laws took away all the civil rights of German Jews. As a young boy, he felt the effects of this state-sponsored antisemitism. In fact, before he escaped Europe in 1941, he had never experienced life without prejudice and discrimination.

Ambassador John Kelly is President of John Kelly Consulting, Inc., an international consulting firm that has assisted international firms with overseas marketing strategies and partnering arrangements since 1994. He is also Ambassador-in-Residence at the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Kelly was Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and South Asia from 1989 to 1991, during the Gulf War and up to the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference. He was American Ambassador in Beirut from 1986 to 1988 during the war years and was U.S. Ambassador in Helsinki, Finland from 1991 to 1994. A career diplomat, John Kelly was four times a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, including service as Principal Deputy for European and Canadian Affairs, as Principal Deputy for Policy Planning, as Senior Deputy for Public Affairs and Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department of State. He is a graduate of Emory University, the Armed Forces Staff College, and received a certificate in advanced international studies from the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. He speaks French and Thai fluently and Turkish, Spanish and Finnish with less command.

Patricia Campbell Warner was born and educated in Toronto, Canada, receiving her B.A. in Art and Archaeology at the University of Toronto. Her M.A. and Ph.D. in design and the history of design were completed at the University of Minnesota almost thirty years later. She retired in June 2007 after being a historian of dress at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1988, latterly as Professor in the Theater Department, where she neither designed, draped nor built. She has published widely in various scholarly journals and books on various aspects of the history of dress, including jewelry, slave clothing and the movies, but her major focus has been the subject of her book, *When the Girls Came Out to Play* (2006), on women's clothing for sports and the birth of American sportswear. She is a Fellow of the Costume Society of America.