Ursula Apitzsch is Professor of Political Science and Sociology in the field of "Culture and Development" at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main. She is Director of the Cornelia Goethe Centre for Women's and Gender Studies (CGC). In 2007, she was elected as a member of the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association (ESA). She has published broadly in the fields of biography and the history of ideas, with special regard to... » READ MORE

Joseph A. Buttigieg is the Kenan Professor of English and co-director of Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he also directs the Ph.D. in Literature Program. His main interests are modernism, literary theory, and the relationship between culture and politics. In addition to numerous articles, Buttigieg has authored a book on James Joyce's aesthetics, A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective. He is also the editor and translator of the multi-volume complete... » READ MORE

Elisabeth Ellis is associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University. She holds a B.A. in Germanic Languages and Literature from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. In her first book, Kant's Politics (Yale, 2005), she interprets Kant's concept of provisional right as the basis for a dynamic theory of politics that is both broadly ethical and deeply responsive to historical and geographic particulars. In Provisional Politics... » READ MORE

David Freedberg is best known for his work on psychological responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship (see, inter alia, Iconoclasts and their Motives, 1984, and The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, 1989). His more traditional art historical writing originally centered on the fields of Dutch and Flemish art. Within these fields he specialized in the history of Dutch printmaking (see Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth... » READ MORE

Mika LaVaque-Manty is Associate Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Trained as a philosopher, his primary research areas are modern and contemporary political theory, with a focus on eighteenth-century Continental thinkers, particularly Kant, and conceptions of political action and autonomy. His most recent book, The Playing Fields of Eton: Equality and Excellence in Modern Meritocracy (2009), explored the... » READ MORE

Luca Maria Scarantino has been working on 20th century Italian philosophy, with a particular focus on "critical rationalism" and, on the political side, on the liberal socialist movement. His work has eventually developed into a reflection on some basic mechanisms of intersubjectivity as violence, persuasion, trust, resentment, identity, and charity, which he considers from what he calls an epistemic point of view. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 publications. PhD from the EHESS... » READ MORE

Sven Trakulhun is Assistant Professor for Modern Asian History at the University of Zurich. He is the author of Siam und Europa. Das Königreich Ayutthaya in westlichen Berichten (Siam and Europe. The Kingdom of Ayutthaya in Western Accounts; 2006) and of Asian Revolutions. Western Concepts of Political Change in the Orient, 1644-1818 (forthcoming in 2012).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. B.A. English (First Class Honors), Presidency College, Calcutta, 1959. Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 1967. D. Litt, University of Toronto, 1999; D. Litt, University of London, 2003; D. Hum, Oberlin College, 2008. Fields: feminism, marxism, deconstruction, globalization. Books: Myself Must... » READ MORE

Nadia Urbinati (Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence, 1989) is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and teaches also at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa. She is the authors of several essays on Italian political thought and Antonio Gramsci's in particular. Her most recent books are Liberi e uguali: Contro l'ideologia individualista (Laterza 2011) and Representative... » READ MORE