Charles J. Henry is President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the management of information for research, teaching, and learning. He is also publisher of the Rice University Press, which was recently reborn as the nation’s first all-digital university press. He serves on the advisory board of Stanford University Libraries and on the boards of NITLE and the Center for Research Libraries, and is currently a director/trustee of Tan Tao University in Vietnam. Previously, Dr. Henry was vice provost and university librarian at Rice University. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University.

Hermann Herlinghaus is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Renarración y Descentramiento: Mapas Alternativos de la Imaginación en América Latina (Iberoamericana–Vervuert, 2004), Narraciones Anacrónicas de la Modernidad: Melodrama e Intermedialidad en América Latina (Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2002), Modernidad Heterogénea (Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2000) and Alejo Carpentier (Text+Kritik, 1991). He is currently completing a book project called A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety.

Caroline Levander is the Carlson Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is currently writing Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S. Mexico Border (under contract, Oxford University Press) and Where Is American Literature? (for Wiley-Blackwell’s Manifesto Series), and co-editing Teaching and Studying the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan) and A Companion to American Literary Studies (Blackwell). She is author of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke University Press, 2006) and Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge University Press 1998, paperback reprint 2009), as well as co-editor of Hemispheric American Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2008) and The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers University Press, 2003).

Aniruddh D. Patel received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. He joined The Neurosciences Institute in 1997, where he is now the Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow. His research focuses on how the brain processes music and language, a topic he has pursued with a variety of techniques, including neuroimaging, theoretical analyses, acoustic research, and comparative studies of nonhuman animals. He has published over forty research articles and a scholarly book, Music, Language, and the Brain (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), which won the 2008 ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. In 2009 he was awarded the Music Has Power award from the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in New York City. He is president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (2009-2011), and is interested in promoting student involvement in the field of music cognition.

Mary Poovey is Samuel Rudin University Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at New York University. She has published on topics as diverse as the history of medicine, feminist theory, nineteenth-century British government reform, and the history of accounting. Her two most recent books, A History of the Modern Fact and Genres of the Credit Economy, form the first two parts of a trilogy of investigations into the origins of contemporary ways of understanding the economy. With Kevin Brine, she is currently working on the third volume, which is tentatively entitled The Present Value of the Future: A History of American Finance Capitalism.

Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on European intellectual history, visual culture, and digital humanities. He is the author of two books: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007) and Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007). He is also the director of “HyperCities” (http://www.hypercities.com), a collaborative mapping project, which was awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes from the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008.

Pamela Sheingorn received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1974 and is Professor Emerita of History at Baruch College, City University of New York and of History, Theatre, and Medieval Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has been a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America since 2002. She is co-author of Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (2003), as well as co-editor of Same-Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages (2001), and a former co-editor of the annual Studies in Iconography. With Robert L.A. Clark, she has published a series of articles that center on the performative reading of illustrated French manuscripts. Her current project, which has produced several articles and will eventuate in a book, is a cultural biography of Joseph of Nazareth.

Daniel Lord Smail is a Professor of History at Harvard University with special interests in medieval European history and the natural history of humankind. Much of his past research has concentrated on the social and cultural history of the city of Marseille in the later middle ages, on subjects ranging from women, Jews, and demography to law, violence, and space. His book, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), tackled some of the philosophical or methodological issues associated with the writing of deep history. He is finishing up a collaborative project with Andrew Shryock (University of Michigan), tentatively entitled Before the Beginning: Human History and Deep Time.