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Ellen Condliffe Lagemann began her tenure as dean on July 15, 2002. Prior to her appointment, Lagemann, a nationally known expert on the history of education and education research, had been the president of the Spencer Foundation. Previously, she taught at New York University where she served as chair of the Department of the Humanities and the Social Sciences and was director of the Center for the Study of American Culture and Education. She also taught at Teachers College, where she was also a member of the Department of History at Columbia.

P. Gabrielle Foreman is a literary historian and specialist on race and nineteenth-century reform movements. She is the author of dozens of articles and reviews, the editor or author of several books and has served on the editorial and consulting boards of some of the leading journals in American literature. Her most recent publications include *Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century* (forthcoming) and* Harriet Wilson's Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black* (Penguin Classics 2005) in which she and her co-editor "picked up one of the coldest trails in nineteenth-century African American studies" by uncovering the last forty years in the life of one of the most important early black women writers.

Reginald H. Pitts is a professional historical researcher and genealogist. Pitts performs primary source historical and genealogical research services for a host of international, national and local individual clients and institutions. He is co-editor of the Penguin 2005 edition of Our Nig by Harriet Wilson.

Secretary Ian Bowles oversees the Commonwealths six environmental, natural resource and energy regulatory agencies. Massachusetts is the first state in the nation to combine energy and environmental agencies under one Cabinet secretary. He also serves as Chairman of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and Chairman of the Energy Facilities Siting Board. He brings nearly 20 years of experience in the energy and environmental sectors. He was a Director or Advisor to three early stage clean energy technology companies and has broad leadership experience in environmental policy. Bowles served in the Clinton Administration as Associate Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and as Senior Director of the Global Environmental Affairs directorate at the National Security Council. Following his service in the Clinton Administration, Bowles held appointments as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvards Kennedy School of Government and as Senior Advisor at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a multi billion dollar charitable foundation established by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore. Bowles also served as President & CEO of MassINC, a Boston-based research institute, and as Publisher of *CommonWealth* magazine. He holds an A.B. in economics cum laude from Harvard College and a Masters degree from Oxford University, where he remains an adjunct member of the teaching faculty at the graduate school of the Environment and Geography. He has an honorary Doctorate from Emerson College. He lives in Charlestown with his wife Hannah and daughter Margaret.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and has held this position since 2006. She also served as Acting-Director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in the Spring 2008. Professor Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in American History, an M.A. from Howard University, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before coming to Harvard, she taught on the full-time faculties of Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and New York University. Higginbotham is the author of *Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920* (1993), which won numerous book prizes, most notably from the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Black Women Historians, and the Association for Research on Non-Profit and Voluntary Organizations. *Righteous Discontent* was also included among the New York Times Book Review's Notable Books of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Her writings span diverse fields--African American religious history, women's history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history. One of her most cited and reprinted articles is "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," winner of the best article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1993.

Paul Harrington, is an economist at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who specializes in the economics of education and career development. For the past several years, Paul often speaks on youth-related labor market issues to a variety of workforce and education-related audiences.

Marty Meehan is the second chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the fourteenth leader of the institution and its predecessor schools, founded in the 1890s. A UMass Lowell alumnus, Meehan graduated cum laude in 1978, having studied education and political science. He received a master's degree in public administration from Suffolk University in 1981 and a juris doctor from Suffolk University Law School in 1986. He holds honorary degrees from Suffolk and Green Mountain College in Vermont. Meehan served as an adjunct faculty member in political science at UMass Lowell in the late 1980s. A resident of Lowell, Meehan represented the fifth congressional district of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 2007. He served on the House Armed Services and Judiciary committees. Widely respected as a reformer, he established a national reputation for his legislative leadership in reforming campaign finance laws and protecting people against the health risks in tobacco use. Among his priorities were maintaining a balanced federal budget, preserving Medicare and Social Security, supporting and strengthening the military, and supporting economic growth that is worker- and environment-friendly. Meehan served as Massachusetts deputy secretary of state for securities and corporations from 1986 to 1990. The Boston Globe reported, "During Meehan's four years as deputy secretary, the Securities Division [went] from being a frequent embarrassment to gaining a national reputation as hard-hitting and activist." In the early 1990s, Meehan was the first assistant district attorney of Middlesex County, supervising more than 150 people, including 80 prosecutors, in an office admired for aggressive prosecution of child abuse, domestic violence and other violent crimes.