DEEPA KUMAR is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East studies at Rutgers University. Her work is driven by an active engagement with the key issues that characterize our era - neoliberalism and imperialism. Her first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike, is about the power of collective struggle in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism. Her second book titled Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (forthcoming, 2012), examines how the “Muslim enemy” has been historically mobilized to suit the goals of empire. Her articles have appeared in scholarly journals as well as independent media such as MR Zine, Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, Islamophobia-Watch, Socialist Worker, ISR etc.

Readings, from Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (forthcoming):

MATTHEW SALGANIK is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. His interests include social networks, quantitative methods, and web-based social research. One main area of his research has focused on developing network-based statistical methods for studying populations most at risk for HIV/AIDS. A second main area of work has been using the World Wide Web to collect and analyze social data in innovative ways.  Salganik's research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik's research is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and Google.

SUJATHA FERNANDES is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso, 2011). Her other books are Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, 2006) and Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2010). Fernandes has written about social movements, global hip hop, and the politics of neoliberalism in both academic journals and popular forums, including The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, and Colorlines.

MICHAEL KAZIN is a Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University. He is an expert in U.S. politics and social movements, 19th and 20th centuries. He is the author of five books, including: A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan; America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (co-author, Maurice Isserman), now in its fourth edition; The Populist Persuasion: An American History; Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era; and most recently, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He is also co-editor of "Dissent," a leading magazine of the American left since 1954.

COSTAS LAPAVITSAS is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and member of Research on Money and Finance. He has worked on the political economy of money and finance, on the history of economic thought, on development economics and on the Japanese economy. He has published widely in several languages. He his the author of Political Economy of Money and Finance (Macmillan, 1999), Social Foundations of Money, Market and Credit (Routledge, 2003), and Financialised Capitalism: Expansion and Crisis (Maia Ediciones, 2009) His forthcoming publications include Financialisation in Crisis (Brill, 2012) and Financialised Capitalism (Palgrave, 2013). He has worked extensively on the global economic unrest that began in 2007, particularly on the Eurozone crisis.