TARIQ ALI was born in Lahore in 1943. He was educated at Oxford University, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union debating club and became involved in student politics, in particular with the movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Active in the New Left of the 1960s, he has long been associated with the New Left Review, of which he is currently a board member and editor. During the 1960s, he also owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso. Ali's fiction includes a series of historical novels about Islam: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (2000) and A Sultan in Palermo (2005). His non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s. A book of essays, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, was published in 2002. Tariq Ali's latest works include Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005), and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author. The Leopard and the Fox (2007) is the script of a three-part TV series commissioned by the BBC and later withdrawn, and includes the background to the story.

PAUL BUHLE is Senior Lecturer at Brown University and author/editor of nearly thirty books, including History and the New Left, Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-70, The Tragedy of Empire: William Appleman Williams, Images of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America's Favorite Movies, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, The Immigrant Left in the United States, The New Left Revisited, and From the Lower Eastside to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. A former member of Students for a Democratic Society, Buhle founded the journal Radical America. He is a regular contributor to TIKKUN and CNS (an environmental journal), as well as a wide variety of other publications.

TOM HAYDEN was co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society in 1961, and author of its visionary call, the Port Huron Statement. During the 1960s, Hayden was a Freedom Rider in the Deep South and a community organizer in Newark, and later a vigorous opponent of the Vietnam War. After helping lead street demonstrations against the war at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, where he was beaten, gassed and arrested twice, Hayden was indicted in 1969 with seven others on conspiracy and incitement charges. After five years of trials, appeals, and retrials, he was acquitted of all charges. Hayden was elected to the California state assembly in 1982, and the state senate ten years later, serving eighteen years in all. After forty years of activism, politics and writing, Hayden remains a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq, erasing sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through greater citizen participation.

BORIS KAGARLITSKY is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements in Moscow, Russia. Boris' latest books are Russia Under Yeltsin And Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy (TNI/Pluto 2002) and New Realism, New Barbarism: The Crisis of Capitalism (Pluto 1999). He won the Deutscher Memorial Prize for his book, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State (Verso 1988). He writes regularly for The Moscow Times and Eurasian Home. Previously, he was a student of art criticism and was imprisoned for two years for 'anti-Soviet' activities related to his editorship of a samizdat journal, Leviy Povorot. Boris was co-ordinator of the Moscow People's Front between '88 and '90, and also advised the Workers' Committee of Prokpievsk and Karaganda during this period. He was a deputy to the Moscow City Soviet between 1990-93, during which time he was a member of the executive of the Socialist Party of Russia, co-founder of the Party of Labour, and advisor to the Chairperson of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.

Ira Katznelson (Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1969) is an Americanist whose work has straddled comparative politics and political theory, as well a political and social history. He returned in the Fall 1994 to Columbia, where he had been an assistant and associate professor from 1969-1974. In the interim, he taught at the University of Chicago, chairing its department of political science from 1979 to 1982, and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he was Dean from 1983-1989. His most recent books are When Affirmative Action Was White (2005), and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (2003). Other books include Black Men, White Cities (1973), City Trenches (1981), Schooling for All (with Margaret Weir, 1985), Marxism and the City (1992), and Liberalism’s Crooked Circle (1996). He has co-edited Working Class Formation (with Aristide Zolberg, 1986), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (with Pierre Birnbaum, 1995), Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (with Martin Shefter, 2002), Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Centennial Edition (with Helen Milner, 2002), and Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection Between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (with Barry Weingast, 2005). Professor Katznelson is President of the American Political Science Association for 2005-2006. Previously, he served as President of the Politics and History Section of APSA, President of the Social Science History Association, and Chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Saul Escobar Toledo was trained as an economist at UNAM in Mexico City and became one of the founding members of the PRD in 1989. Since then he has served the party in various functions, including coordinator of political economy and fiscal reform, member of the national planning committee, and PRD representative to the Federal Electoral Institute. He has published essays on labor reform and effects of globalization in Mexico and taught economics and political science at UNAM, Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Azcapotzalco, and Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Mr. Escobar Toledo speaks fluent English.

Readings available upon request

Glenda E. Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and currently the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her new book Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights will appear in fall of 2007 from W. W. Norton & Company. Her book Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1986-1920 won Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and the Heyman Prize. She has appeared frequently on NPR and in PBS Documentaries. Gilmore has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Radcliffe at Harvard University.

Dr. Rose M. Brewer is Professor, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor, and past chair of the African American & African Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer also holds affiliated appointments in the Departments of Sociology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. She received her M.A and Ph.D degrees in Sociology from Indiana University, and did post-doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on black families, race, class and gender, and public policy, publishing over 40 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly essays in these areas. She is the editor with Lisa Albrecht of Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances. She is also co-editor of Is Academic Feminism Dead?: Theory in Practice (New York University Press, 2000), with the Social Justice Group, Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota. Her most recent co-authored book is The Color of Wealth (The New Press, 2006), which was selected as one of the top l0 books for 2006, receiving the Gustavus-Meyers Book Award for best books on bigotry and human rights.

Professor Brewer’s commitment to undergraduate education and her scholarly achievements have been widely recognized. She is one of ten University of Minnesota faculty recipients of the Morse-Alumni Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence and Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. She has also received the African American Learning Resources Center Award for Teaching Excellence, among numerous other awards. In 1999 she was inducted into the National Academy of Distinguished Teachers, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer has spent over a decade working on curriculum transformation and progressive pedagogy, and consults nationally on issues of race, class, and gender in the curriculum.

Rose Brewer defines herself as a scholar-activist. For over a decade, she has been a member of the board of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. She has also served on the board of United for a Fair Economy, and is a founding member of the Black Radical Congress.

Born in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan to proud members of the U.S. Communist Party, John Ross grew up in a lively cultural ambiance informed by jazz, abstract expressionist painting, radical politics, and Beat poetry – Ross was a younger member of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles Mingus.

At 19, Ross set out on the road, following the Beat trail that Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg had blazed to Mexico City. Soon he had separated from this U.S.-based literary movement taking up residence in an indigenous community in the Meseta Purepcha of the state of Michoacan

Six years later when John Ross returned to the United States, he was incarcerated by the FBI at Terminal Island federal penitentiary in San Pedro California for refusal to report for induction in the U.S. Army and became the first resister to be jailed for refusing service in Vietnam. In 2005, Ross returned to San Pedro to receive the American Civil Liberties Union's annual "Uppie" (for Upton Sinclair) award for his penultimate cult classic "Murdered by Capitalism – A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left.

Following the terrible September 1985 8.2 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross returned to the city he first knew as a young Beat and took up residence in the old quarter or "Centro Historico", the ancient Aztec island of Tenochtitlan, where he lives still. Now the dean of foreign correspondents in Mexico, Ross continues to report for Noticias Aliadas (Peru), the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Texas Observer, and is a regular contributor to U.S. monthlies like the Progressive, the Nation, and Counterpunch (on line), in addition to the Mexican Left daily La Jornada. His investigations into electoral fraud and human rights abuses in Mexico, environmental carnage, and the struggles of Indians and farmers have won various awards down the years.

Since its earliest hour 12 years ago, Ross has accompanied the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, breaking the story of the impending uprising in a small northern California weekly weeks before it occurred, and writing three volumes chronicling this unique indigenous movement - "Rebellion  From the Roots" (American Book Award winner 1995), "The Annexation of Mexico" (1998), and "The War Against Oblivion" (200.) His fourth volume ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006" is to be published by Nation Books this October