program
panels

2007 speaker bios
(r-z)

speakers (h-q)



A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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Ramya Raghavan is an Associate Manager of Organizing and Outreach for Campus Progress. Prior to joining the Center for American Progress, she worked at Advocates for Children of New York, a nonprofit organization which provides resources and advocacy to students and parents in New York City public schools. Ramya received her B.A. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she helped build successful coalitions on campus that addressed important student issues like voter registration and affirmative action.

Uri Ram teaches sociology in Ben Gurion University, Israel, and is currently a Visiting Professor at The New School for Social Research. He is the author of The Time of the “Post”: Nationalism and the Politics of Knowledge in Israel (Resling, 2006) and The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem (Routledge, 2006; in Hebrew: Resling, 2005). He is an editor or co-editor of Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives (Breirot, 1993); The Power of Property: Israeli Society in Global Era (Van Leer & Kibbutz HaMeuchad, 2004); and In/Equality (Ben Gurion University Press, 2006).

Elizabeth Ramey is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is completing a dissertation on the political economy of U.S. agriculture.  She is currently a visiting instructor at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, and is the owner of a small farm in Missouri.

Gerardo Renique is an associate professor of history at City College, CUNY and has recently edited "The Reawakening of Revolution," a special issue of Socialism and Democracy. He has also co-produced, with Tami Gold, the video Land, Rain and Fire: Report from Oaxaca.

William C. Rhoden has been writing about sports for The New York Times since March 1983.

Rainer Rilling is a professor of sociology at the University of Marburg, and is a member of the Department of Policy Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin. He has published extensively in the fields of political communication, international relations and peace and conflict studies.

Martha Rodriguez, originally from the Dominican Republic, is part of the Center for Immigrant Families. In addition to organizing around public education and gentrification, Martha is also a jewelry designer and mother.

Alcena Madeline Davis Rogan is an Assistant Professor of English at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia. She has published three articles and a number of book reviews on science fiction. She is currently revising her dissertation, "The Future in Feminism: Reading Strategies for Feminist Theory and Science Fiction," into a book manuscript.

Heather Rogers is a journalist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Her book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New Press, 2005), looks at the history and politics of household garbage in the U.S. Her documentary film, also titled Gone Tomorrow (2002), has been screened in festivals around the globe. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Nation, Socialist Register, Utne Reader, In These Times, Z Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Architecture Magazine, and Punk Planet.

Judy Rohrer is a feminist scholar-activist. She has spent much of her adult life moving back and forth between the non-profit world and the academy. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawai’i’s Political Science Department in April 2005. She is currently serving as a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Syracuse University.

Joe Rollins completed his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently associate professor of political science at Queens College, CUNY. His first book, AIDS and the Sexuality of Law: Ironic Jurisprudence, was published by Palgrave/Macmillan in 2004. With the support of a Placek Award and a year as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Society at UC Berkeley, he is currently completing a second book, Legally Straight: A Jurisprudence of Sexuality After Lawrence and Goodridge which will be published by NYU Press in 2008.

Fred Rosen is a NACLA contributing editor based in Mexico City.

Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation who has written extensively on American policy toward Afghanistan and Iraq. He spent over two years reporting on the occupation and related aspects of postwar Iraqi society. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, Boston Review, Time, Mother Jones, and World Policy Journal. His research focused on the development of Islamist resistance, insurgency, and terrorist organizations. He’s written In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (Free Press, 2006).

Richard Rosen has a Ph.D. in Physics, Columbia University. With over twenty-seven years of experience in energy sector resource planning and management, and environmental compliance, his research also focuses on issues involving the economics and feasibility of restructuring the electricity utility industry. He helped organize the Tellus Institute in Boston, where he has recently been working on a corporate reform project including new regulatory mechanisms for reviewing corporate investment decisions.

Delsa Rosso is a Dominican-born woman who lives in New York City. She is a collective member of the Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) and a leader in CIF's Project to Challenge Segregation in our Public Schools. She is the mother of two children and an early childhood educator. CIF is a collectively-run, popular education-based community organizing center for low-income adult immigrant women of color in uptown Manhattan. It address, in a holistic way, the inter-connected challenges facing immigrant women by linking our personal well-being, health, and development to concrete and sustained organizing that is focused on the root causes of the challenges we face.

Chris Rude is an independent writer and researcher who lives and works in New York City.

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Najla Said is a founding member of NIbras Arab-American Theatre Collective, and served as the company's artistic driector from 2005-2006. An actress, writer, and comedienne, Najla grew in New York City, the daughter of a Lebanese mother and the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. A graduate of Princeton University. she trained at The Shakespeare Lab at the Public Theatre/NYSF and The Actors Center Conservatory. Recent acting credits include "Iraq:Speaking of War," "Nine Parts of Desire," and the debut of her two plays "Palestine" and "Lebanon.

Roger Salerno is the Chair of the Sociology/Anthropology Department of Pace University, where he serves as an advisor to Students for a Democratic Society. His book, Landscapes of Abandonment, deals with the destructive nature of capitalistic culture on the modern psyche.

Ajamu K. Sankofa, Esq, is a national organizer for Healthcare-Now. He is a human rights and public policy specialist with over thirty years experience organizing and supporting the organizing of working class, people of color, and marginalized communities to expand and defend their human rights. He is also the strategic planning consultant for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), Legal Defense, Research, and Education Fund. He is a former staff lawyer and the Director of the AIDS Project of the National Prison Project of the ACLU Foundation, Inc. He currently resides in Brooklyn.

William H. Schaap is a New York attorney and co-founder of the magazine Covert Action Quarterly. He has worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and has testified as an expert witness on the CIA and intelligence matters in Congressional and UN hearings, as well as federal, state and foreign courts.He is the co-editor, with Ellen Ray, of Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism and Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way.

Abby Scher, Ph.D is a longtime independent print journalist and editor. She is founder of the Independent Press Association-New York, a network of immigrant, African American and other community press. She is currently editor of The Public Eye, a quarterly analyzing the Christian and secular Right, and its companion website.

Janelle Scot is an assistant professor of Educational Policy at NYU where she studies the politics of urban education with an emphasis on issues of race, class, and equity. Research areas include charter schools, educational privatization, and the impact of school choice reforms on high poverty communities of color. Her recent book is School Choice and Student Diversity: Examining the Evidence (Teachers College Press).

Stephen R. Shalom teaches political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Among his books are Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics and Socialist Visions. He writes for ZNet and is on the editorial board of New Politics.

Lucas Shapiro is the former National Organizer for the Young Democratic Socialists (YDS), the youth section of the Democratic Socialists of America. He has worked with various activist and community organizations promoting LGBT rights, prisoner education, student labor solidarity, progressive strategic campaigning, peace and global justice.  He spent most of last year working with social movement organizations in Spain.

Ahmed Shawki is an Arab-American socialist, writer and activist. He is the editor of International Socialist Review (isreview.org) and author of Black Liberation and Socialism published by Haymarket Books. He has written and spoken extensively on US imperialism and the Middle East. He also serves on the steering committee of the National Council of Arab-Americans.

Uruj Sheikh is a junior at Pace University where she is studying Sociology/Anthropology and English. As a member of Students for a Democratic Society, Sheikh is an organizer with special interest in race, gender, and education, both internally within SDS and externally. She hopes to be a professor of sociology.

Gregory Sholette is a NYC based artist, writer and a co-founder of the artist collectives REPOhistory (1989-2000) and Political Art Documentation and Distribution (1980-1986). His work has appeared at the MoMA, Dia Art Foundation, and Exit Art. Sholette is co-editor with Nato Thompson of The Interventionists: A User Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MIT, 2004 & 2005); and Collectivism After Modernism co-edited with Blake Stimson (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). He teaches classes in critical theory at New York University.

Ira Shor is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His nine published books include a 3-volume set in honor of the late Paulo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator who was his friend and mentor. With Freire, he co-authored A Pedagogy for Liberation in 1986. Shor also authored the widely used Empowering Education (1992), When Students Have Power (1996), and Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1980). He lectures widely, consults on curriculum design at various colleges, and offers faculty development workshops in critical literacy across the curriculum.

Ruth Sidel is professor of sociology at Hunter College and is associated with the New York Progressive Network. Her research interests center on poverty, particularly its impact on women and children, and the need to develop a comprehensive, universal family policy in the United States. Sidel is the author of a number of works, including Unsung Heroines: Single Mothers and the American Dream (University of California Press, 2006).

Evan Siegel teaches math at New Jersey City University. He has a substantial record of publication and presentation of scholarly papers on Iranian and Azerbaijani history. Among his works is a study of the Palestinian response to the Iranian revolution and numerous works on the Iranian constitutional period.

Marina Sitrin is a dreamer, teacher, student, and militant. She is the editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, an oral history of the autonomous social movements in Argentina (Chilavert, 2005; AK Press, 2006). Marina has traveled extensively in Latin America, spending time with the various new social movements. She is currently completing a book entitled: Insurgent Democracies: Latin America’s New Powers (City Lights Press, 2007). Marina teaches part time at the Gallatin School of New York University, holds a Doctorate of Law from the CUNY School of Law, and is finishing her Ph.D. at SUNY Stony Brook.

Deborah Peterson Small is a native New Yorker. As Executive Director of Break the Chains: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs, she continues the work she began as public policy director of the Drug Policy Alliance, helping to build a movement in communities of color in support of drug policy reform. Deborah became an ardent advocate for drug policy reform as she became increasingly aware of the grossly disproportionate number of people of color incarcerated for drug offenses. She speaks regularly about issues relating to the government’s failed drug policies.

Andrea Smith is a co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and the Boarding School Healing Project. She is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, and the editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (South End Press).

David Smith holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and, since 1990, has taught sociology at the University of Kansas. He has published widely on Marx, critical theory, sociological theory, genocide, prejudice, and authoritarianism.

Michael Steven Smith is an attorney practicing injury litigation in New York City. He is the co-host of the WBAI radio program Law and Disorder. He is on the boards of The Center for Constitutional Rights, The Left Forum, and The Brecht Forum. He has written Notebook of a Sixties Lawyer and Lawyers You'll Like, and most recently edited two books by William Kunstler.

Richard Smith has held post-docs at the East-West Center, Honolulu, and taught at Rutgers University. He has written on the transition to capitalism in China, on capitalist development and China’s environment, on capitalism and eco-collapse, and related issues for New Left Review, The Ecologist, Monthly Review, Journal of Ecological Economics, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Against the Current and other publications.

Ann Snitow has been a feminist activist since 1969 when she was a founding member of New York Radical Feminists. She was among the founders of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, of the action group No More Nice Girls, and of the Network of East-West Women (concerned with women’s changing situation in East and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union). A writer of germinal essays about feminism, she co-edited Powers of Desire and, with Rachel Du Plessis, The Feminist Memoir Project. She is professor of gender studies and literature at The New School for Social Research.

Chris Spannos is an alternative media, anti-war and anti-capitalist organizer and activist. A former social service worker in Vancouver's Down Town East Side, he is now full time staff with Z, primarily with ZNet. He is editing two forthcoming titles from AK Press, ParEcon & the Good Society (2008) and Hope, Reason & Revolution (2009).

Christoph Spehr is a political theorist, editor, author and organizer. His essay “Free Cooperation” appears in The Art of Free Cooperation (Autonomedia, 2007). Collaborative video work with Jörg Windszus includes On Rules and Monsters (2004), On Blood and Wings (2006), and others. Spehr is the organizer of the conference series Out of this World - Science-Fiction, Politics, Utopia. He is a member of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Future Commission and contributes to the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism. Currently, he works for the German Left Party.

Irwin Sperber is Associate Professor of Sociology, SUNY New Paltz. He does research on the political economy of environmental organizations and is a member of the New York editorial collective of Capital Nature Socialism.

Michael Spies is the program associate for the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy. He is co-editor of the forthcoming report, "Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security? U.S. Weapons of Terror, the Global Proliferation Crisis, and Paths to Peace," and recently authored the forthcoming article, “Iran and the Limitations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime,” American University International Law Review. Prior to joining LCNP, he worked for the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, a non-profit that monitors the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.

Peter Staudenmaier has been active in the anarchist and ecological movements since the 1980s. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany, conducting research for his dissertation on the Nazi era. Much of his historical work focuses on the crossover between left and right thought, including the role of conspiracy theory in alternative social movements.

Karsten J. Struhl teaches political and cross-cultural philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) and the New School. He has co-edited Philosophy Now, Ethics in Perspective, and, most recently, The Philosophical Quest: A Cross-Cultural Reader. His articles have appeared in a variety of journals and books on such topics as socialist ethics, ideology, human nature, war and terrorism, and global ethics.

Ida Susser is a professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and adjunct–professor of Socio-Medical Sciences and the HIV Center, Columbia University. She is a member of the steering committee of Athena: Advancing Gender Equity and Human Rights in the Global Response to AIDS. Among her many books are Medical Anthropology in the World System (co-author) and The Anthropology of AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean (co-editor). Her current research, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institute of Health examines global policies and women's mobilization concerning HIV/AIDS in southern Africa.

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William K. Tabb taught economics at Queens College for many years, and economics, political science, and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2004), Unequal Partners: A Primer on Globalization (New Press, 2002), and The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2001).

Eric Tang took his doctorate from the American Studies Program at NYU in May 2006. From 1996-2004 he was Associate Director at CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, serving as a community organizer in the refugee neighborhoods of the Bronx, New York. The author of numerous essays and articles on Southeast Asian refugee politics, community activism, and social movement theory, Tang recently received an award from New America Media (Best Katrina Reporting) for his coverage of the Vietnamese Americans of post-Katrina New Orleans. He teaches at the Worker Education Center of CUNY.

Meredith Tax is the president of Women's WORLD. She is the author of The Rising of Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917, as well as the novels Rivington Street and Union Square. Tax co-founded both the PEN American Center Women's Committee and the International PEN Women Writers Committee.

Sheree R. Thomas is a poet, short-story writer, editor, publisher and visual artist whose groundbreaking and award-winning Dark Matter series collected the works of some of the best African American Science-Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy writers. She is the publisher of Wanganegresse Press and the editor of Anansi: Fiction of the African Diaspora. Her fiction and poetry have been anthologized in Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and others. She teaches creative writing at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center. See her blog Black Mojo.

Sinclair Thomson is associate professor of history at New York University and author of We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency and co-author with Forrest Hylton of the forthcoming Revolutionary Horizons: Popular Struggle in Bolivia.

Hillel Ticktin is Editor of the journal Critique-Journal of Socialist Theory and Emeritus Professor of Marxist Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Author of books and articles on Marxist Political Economy, particularly on the USSR, FSU, South Africa, finance capital and the nature of capitalist decline.

Jaime R. Torres was born and raised in Ciales, Puerto Rico and came to New York in 1976 to attend Fordham. He completed a Surgical Residency at Coney Island Hospital, earned a Master of Science degree from Long Island University in 2000, and was selected to the Advisory Board of the National Hispanic Medical Association. In 2005 he founded, and is national coordinator of Latinos for National Health Insurance. This coalition advocates for a single payer national health insurance program that would cover everyone, regardless of immigration status.

James Tracy is a long-time organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is active with the Community Housing Organizing Project and the SF Community Land Trust. His articles on social movements and urban studies have appeared in Race, Poverty and the Environment, Shelterforce, Dollars and Sense, Z, Processed World, and at www.jamesrtracy.wordpress.com. Tracy has edited two activist handbooks, the Civil Disobedience Handbook and the Military Draft Handbook, both on Manic D Press. He is currently co-authoring a book on community organizing in poor white neighborhoods during the sixties.

Robert Turner is a Doctoral Candidate in sociology at City University of New York, Graduate Center. His dissertation, “Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Life and the Mind of the NFL Athlete,” examines social reality from the perspective of the NFL athlete. After attending James Madison University on an athletic scholarship, Turner was drafted as a defensive back playing 4 seasons in the USFL, CFL and NFL. He is a two-year Harrison Fellow award winner at the Graduate Center.

Jarvis Tyner is a founding member of The Black Radical Congress (BRC), Executive Vice Chair of the Communist Party USA, and a member of the Coordinating Committee of the New York Chapter of the BRC.

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Juliet Ucelli, co-founder of Italian Americans for A Multicultural U.S. (IAMUS), a group dedicated to opposing Columbus Day celebration and a contributor to the forthcoming book The Cost of Privilege: Overcoming White Supremacy and Racism.

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Vamsi Vakulabharanam is an assistant professor in the economics department at Queens College, City University of New York. He has written on agricultural economics in India.

David Van Arsdale is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York's Tompkins Cortland Community College. He also serves as a research consultant for the office of Labor Education Research of the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University. Recently David has been researching and writing about low-wage and temporary work in the US. His forthcoming article, "Reconstituting Casual Blue-Collar Workers: Industrial Temporary Help Work's Relationship to the Casualization of the Working Class," will be published in Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas (Duke University Press).

Eleni Varikas is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Paris VIII.

Jose Vasquez is currently an Army Reservist and President of the NYC chapter, Iraq Vets Against the War.

Ramaa Vasudevan is currently teaching at Barnard College, New York, and has earlier taught in the Sustainable International Development Program at Brandeis University and at The New School. Her Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research focused on the political economy of international trade and finance. Before coming to the US to do her Ph.D. she taught for many years at PGDAV college in the University of Delhi and has been active in the civil rights and women’s movement in India.

Rima Vesely-Flad founded and directs the Interfaith Coalition of Advocates for Reentry and Employment (ICARE), a New York State advocacy project focused on changing reentry barriers encountered by people with criminal convictions. She holds master’s degrees from Union and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and is a doctoral student in Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. Her research and publications have explored the connections between Calvinist theology and criminal law, the Slave Codes and Black Codes of the nineteenth century, and the expansion of the prison-industrial complex. She taught religion at Sing Sing Prison from 2004-2006.

Doug Viehmeyer graduated from Hartwick College in 2005. As a sociology and anthropology undergrad, he organized on campus, mainly in the antiwar and Palestine solidarity movements. He joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in February 2006 and founded an SDS chapter in Bergen County, New Jersey.

Leonard Vogt is Professor Emeritus of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, where he has been faculty advisor for the Straight and Gay Alliance (SAGA) for the last 15 years. He also is on the editorial collective of Radical Teacher.

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Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper magazine, is a fellow of the Transnational Institute, the International Labour Studies Centre at University of Manchester, and the Centre for Global Governance at the London School of Economics. Her current work is focused on what happens to popular resistance in the face of corporate-driven globalization. Her books include Reclaim the State: Adventures in Popular Democracy, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free-Market Right, and Labour: A Tale of Two Parties.

Victor Wallis, the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy, teaches in the department of Liberal Arts at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. His writings on ecology and technology have appeared in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Organization & Environment, the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus [Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism], and Socialism and Democracy, and have been translated into seven languages.

Vincent Warren is the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Prior to that Mr. Warren spent seven years as national senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, where he led national constitutional and impact litigation to advance civil rights and civil liberties.

Jerry Watts teaches English and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Bill Weinberg is editor of the online journal World War 4 Report (ww4report.com), a producer at WBAI Radio and author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000). He is currently at work on a book about Plan Colombia and indigenous movements in the Andes.

Lois Weiner is Professor of Elementary and Secondary Education at New Jersey City University and a member of the editorial board of New Politics.  She is co-editing with Mary Compton a reader for teachers on neoliberalism's assault on public education and teacher unions.

Peter Weiss is an international lawyer who has devoted a good part of his last twenty years to trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He is President of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and Vice-President (former President) of IALANA, the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms He was a principal author of the draft brief to the International Court of Justice, which held in 1996 that the threat and use of nukes is “generally illegal” under international law.

Seth Weiss is a cofounder of The New SPACE, a pluralistic anti-capitalist educational project in New York City (http://newspace.mahost.org). He is also a supporter of the National Organization for the Iraqi Freedom Struggles (http://no-ifs.org).

Suzi Weissman is Professor of Politics at Saint Mary's College of California. She sits on the editorial boards of Critique and Against the Current, and hosts a weekly drive-time radio program (Beneath the Surface) on KPFK in Los Angeles. She is the author of Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope (Verso, 2001) and has edited Victor Serge: Russia Twenty Years After (Humanities, 1996), and The Ideas of Victor Serge (Merlin Press, 1997).

Dale Jiajin Wen was born and raised in China, and worked in Silicon Valley before moving to non-profit work. She has published a booklet, “China Copes with Globalization: A Mixed Review” and travels frequently to China, where she maintains close ties with China’s emerging civil society.

Peter Werbe has worked with the Detroit-based anti-authoritarian magazine Fifth Estate for much of its 42-year history. Since 1970 he has also hosted Nightcall, a phone-in talk program on WRIF in Detroit. The FBI once described the Fifth Estate as "supporting the cause of revolution everywhere." So does Peter (www.peterwerbe.com).

Cornel West is Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University. The recipient of more than twenty honorary degrees and an American Book Award, he is one of America’s most important public intellectuals. He is author of many books, including Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Shaped Our Country (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), Race Matters, and Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism. He serves as an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and co-chair of The Tikkun Community.

Dominic Wetzel is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center, teaches at Hunter College, and is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. He is currently working on his dissertation "Resisting Secularism: Modernity, Catholic Charismatics, Everyday Life, and the Troubled Project of Enlightenment."

Cathy Wilkerson was active in the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society and later the Weather Underground. For the past twenty years she has focused on numeracy as a social justice issue, working as an educator in adult education, high school and middle school mathematics. She is currently collaborating with middle school mathematics teachers in the Bronx to strengthen students' understanding of mathematics. She believes that only a rich understanding of math and science can ensure democratic participation in today's critical decisions.

Hank Williams is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Africana Studies at the City University of New York and teaches at City College and NYU’s Gallatin School. He is a former board member of the Brecht Forum. He has been involved in political organizing for nearly a decade around police brutality and the criminalization of youth of color and open admissions in the CUNY system with the Student Liberation Action Movement. He is a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Nona Willis-Aronowitz is a freelance journalist. She has written about culture, politics, and women's issues for publications like Salon, the Village Voice, and the New York Observer. She lives in New York City.

Joseph Wilson is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Director of City University's Graduate Center for Worker Education.

Barbara Winslow is an Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Brooklyn College. She is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism, as well as several articles on the origins and legacy of the women's liberation movement. She was a founding member of Seattle Radical Women in 1967, and her activism has continued unabated. She is presently writing a history of the women's liberation movement, as well as compiling the Shirley Chisholm Archive of Brooklyn Women's Activism.

Frieder Otto Wolf, Dr. phil., Honorary Professor for Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. Born at Kiel in 1943, he studied philosophy and political science (at Kiel, Paris, and Edinburgh). Teaching and research at the University of the Sarre, Saarbrücken, at the Free University of Berlin, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and at the Science Centre Berlin. 1984-99: Active in the European Parliament for the German Greens; 1994-99 Member of the EP. English contributions in New Left Review; Socialist Register; Capitalism, Nature Socialism. website: www.friederottowolf.de

Max Fraad Wolff is a doctoral candidate in economics at The University of Massachusetts. He is also an instructor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University and a freelance writer and researcher in the areas of Finance and Foreign Policy.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His latest books with co-author Stephen Resnick are Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (2002) and New Departures in Marxian Theory (2006), both published by Routledge. He teaches at the Brecht Forum and serves on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism.

Mark P. Worrell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, teaches political sociology and theory at SUNY Cortland. His current research focuses on unexplored aspects of the Frankfurt School's wartime exile in the United States. Worrell is currently working on a book-length manuscript, Dialectic of Solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School that is based on his 2003 Ph.D. dissertation.

JoAnn Wypijewski is an independent journalist based in New York City. Her wrtings have appeared in The Nation, Harper’s, CounterPunch, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, New Left Review and other publications. She is the editor of several books including Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art and The Thirty Years Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, the collected work of Andrew Kopkind. She has also been active in New York for tenants’ rights and preservation of the Lower East Side since 1980.

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Hisila Yami, aka Parvati is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and of its International Department, former head of the All Nepal Women's Association (Revolutionary), and currently co-incharge of the CPN(M) Kathmandu Valley Bureau and a memberof the interim parliament of Nepal. She has written extensively on the roles of women and dalits in the Nepali Maoist movement. Her English publications include "People's Power in Nepal,” http://www.monthlyreview.org/1105parvati.htm. She will participate via telephone.

Yang Jinhai, Ph.D., is professor and deputy secretary-general for Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Communist Party of China. He graduated from Peking University in 1994. He is currently a lead scholar working on The Project of Marxist Theoretical Research and Development in China, the secretary-general for the Chinese Society of Marx and Engels, and a visiting professor at Peking University. His main research area include the history of the development of Marxism, philosophy, and humanology. His books include Ontology of Human Beings (1995), Methodology of Philosophy (1992), System Philosophy (1992), and Rereading ‘Communist Manifesto’ (1998).


Gary Younge is a columnist and correspondent for The Guardian and the Alfred Knobler fellow for The Nation. He has written extensively from southern Africa and throughout Europe, and is author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (1999), and, most recently, of Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (2006). He has presented two television documentaries for the BBC, was awarded newspaper journalist of the year for the Ethnic Minority Media Awards for three straight years (2002 – 2004), and has been nominated for foreign journalist of the year for his reporting from Zimbabwe.

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Ivan Zatz is professor of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. His current work concerns the film, television and computer screen as a production of space.

Zhuang Junju is an assistant professor of political science at the Institute of World Socialism of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Communist Party of China. He is also a doctoral candidate in the School of International Studies at Peking University. He is the author of The Dialogue of Neoliberalism Research and The Study of the Beijing Consensus and the China Model.

Dave Zirin, Press Action’s 2005 and 2006 Sportswriter of the Year, is a columnist for both SLAM Magazine and thenation.com. He is the author of "What’s My Name, Fool?” Sports and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books). This spring, Zirin will be releasing The Muhammad Ali Handbook (MQ Publications) and this summer, Welcome to the Terrordome (Haymarket Books, foreword by Chuck D). Zirin is also writing A People’s History of Sports (New Press). Read him at www.edgeofsports.com.

Kristal Brent Zook is associate adjunct professor at the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of Color By Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Black Women’s Lives (Nation Books, 2006). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Essence, Village Voice, Vibe, and many other publications. She has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, MTV, BET,and TV-One.

Michael Zweig teaches economics and is director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (Cornell University Press, 2000) and editor of What’s Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-first Century (Cornell University Press, 2004).

 

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