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Professor Baldwin has taught a range of courses on the African American experience and the history of modern thought. His research interests include intellectual and mass culture, Black radical thought and transnational social movements, race, space, and urban culture, competing conceptions of modernity, political economy and heritage tourism. Baldwin has been the recipient of the Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame (2000-2001) and the Carter G. Woodson Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Virginia (2003-2004). He is currently at work on two manuscript projects: *Black Belts and Ivory Towers: The Racial Foundations of U.S. Social Thought* and *UniverCities: How Knowledge Institutions are Re-Structuring the Urban Landscape.*

Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and raised in Nashville. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, *The Patron Saint of Liars*. It was named a *New York Times* Notable Book for 1992. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingrahm Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, *Taft*, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction. Her third novel, *The Magician's Assistant*, was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Joseph Bottum is Books & Arts editor of *The Weekly Standard*. A native of South Dakota, he is a graduate of Georgetown University, with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College. His essays, reviews, and poetry have appeared in the *Wall Street Journal*, the *Atlantic Monthly*, *Nineteenth-Century Literature*, *First Things*, *Commentary, National Review*, *Philosophy & Literature*, and elsewhere. In addition to duties at *The Weekly Standard*, he is poetry editor of *First Things*, and host of *Book Talk*, a nationally syndicated radio program.

Before coming at Boston College in 2000 as a tenured professor, Jorge Garcia taught at Rutgers University, Georgetown University, and at the University of Notre Dame. His research has focused on normative moral theory, including the concepts of goodness, desert, and virtue, and on articulating and defending a "virtues-based, role-centered, and patient-focused" moral theory, while critiquing consequentialist and other alternatives. In the last decade, Professor Garcia have written an influential series of articles philosophically developing what he calls a "volitional" conception of racism, and is currently arguing for a deflationary approach to race and ethnicity, and for narrow limits to what can be socially constructed.

David Bethea is a Vilas Professor of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Kansas. His research interests include: Pushkin and his era, modern Russian poetry, Russian religious thought and cultural mythology, Russian emigre literature, Anglo-American vs. Russian modernism, 20th century Russian/Slavic literary theory. Professor Bethea has also written several books including: *Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile* (1994), and *Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet* (1998).

Jonathan Haidt is associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the psychological bases of morality across different cultures and political ideology. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001. His book *The Happiness Hypothesis* examines ten "great ideas" dating from antiquity and their continued relevance to the happy life. A certain portion of his research has been focused on the emotion of elevation. Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals tended to value care and fairness higher than loyalty, respect, and purity. Self-identified conservative Americans valued care and fairness less, and the remaining three values more. Both groups gave care the highest over-all weighting, but conservatives valued fairness the lowest, whereas liberals valued purity the lowest.

Joseph's grandparents were among the first Arab Americans to emigrate to Detroit, where both Joseph's parents were born. He attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School, the University of Michigan (B.A, 1970), Magdalene College, Cambridge University (B..A 1972, M.A. 1976), and the University of Michigan Law School (J. D. 1975). Joseph, perhaps best known as a poet, won the 1983 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the Pitt Poetry Series for his first book, *Shouting at No One*. His second book of poems, *Curriculum Vitae*, was published in 1988. Joseph is also the author of *Lawyerland*, a book of prose, published in 1997. Lawyerland has been optioned for a film by John Malkovich, Lianne Helfon and Russell Smith's Mr. Mudd Productions. Joseph's essays and criticism have appeared in magazines and newspapers, and in collections of essays, both in the United States and internationally. His essay on Motown music and Rhythm and Blues, "The Music Is," which originally appeared in *Tin House*, was included in *Da Capo Best Music Writing* 2003, chosen by Guest Editor Matt Groening.