Cameron  McCarthy is Research Professor and University Scholar at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Focussing on the impact of racialized politics and culture in the U.S. McCarthy's  research interests include racial inequality and urban education, and debates over  multiculturalism and canon formation.  Drawing on postcolonial, multicultural and critical media theories he writes about the interplay between identity politics and conservative educational policies.  Two of McCarthy's recent publications are,  Race, Identity and Representation in Education (with Warren Crichlow), 1993 and The Uses of Culture:  Education and the Limits of Ethnic Affiliation, 1998.  Forthcoming (with Ram Mahalingham), is Social Epistemology and Multiculturalism.

    Stephen Cornell is director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and Professor of Sociology and of Public Administration and Policy at The University of Arizona. He is also co-director of the Project on American Indian Economic Development at Harvard University. A specialist in political economy and cultural sociology, Professor Cornell has written widely on Indian affairs, economic development, collective identity, and ethnic and race relations. His publications include The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (Oxford, 1988); What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in American Indian Economic Development (UCLA, 1992), co-edited with Joseph P. Kalt; and Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Pine Forge, 1998), co-authored with Douglas Hartmann. Professor Cornell has spent much of the last fifteen years working closely with Indian nations in the United States and Canada on self-governance, economic development, and tribal policy issues. Among his recent policy-related projects are a study of the on-and-off-reservation economic and social impacts of Indian gaming operations and an analysis of Native self-governance in Alaska.

    Professor David W. Garland, widely considered one of the world's leading sociologists of crime and punishment, joined the NYU Law faculty in 1997. He was previously on the faculty of Edinburgh University's Law School, where he had taught since 1979, being appointed to a personal chair in 1992. At NYU, he also holds a joint appointment as professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches graduate classes in social theory and an undergraduate course in criminology.

Garland has been associated with NYU since 1984, when he commuted from Princeton to attend Professor Jacobs' criminal law seminars in the Law School. He was a Visiting Professor at the School in 1992-93 and a member of the Global Law School faculty from 1995 to 1997.

Garland, who received his law degree with First Class Honors and a Ph.D. in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Edinburgh as well as a Masters in Criminology from the University of Sheffield, is noted for his distinctive sociological approach to the study of punishment and crime control, as well as for his work on the history of criminological ideas. He played a leading role in developing the sociology of punishment and was the founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Punishment & Society. He is the author of several prize-winning studies, including Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory, which won distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and Punishment and Welfare: The History of Penal Strategies which won the International Society of Criminology's prize for best study over a five-year period. His most recent book is The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, was published by University of Chicago Press in February 2001 and is already being translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. The Culture of Control charts contemporary trends in penal and social control, arguing that the crime policies which emerged in the US and the UK after 1975 are political and cultural adaptations to the new risks and problems created by 'late modern' ways of life.

Garland was a Visiting Reader at Leuven University, Belgium in 1983, a Davis Fellow in Princeton University's history department in 1984-85, and a Visiting Professor at Boalt Law School, U.C. Berkeley, in 1985 and 1988. In 1993 he was awarded the Sellin-Glueck prize by the American Society of Criminology for distinguished scholarly contributions to criminology by a non-American scholar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow-Designate of the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, CA.

David Laitin has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Chicago, and is currently Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He has written extensively on Africa and Eastern Europe, as well as on theory and method in the social sciences. He is best known for analyses of language politics in Somalia and the Baltic states, for his use of rational-choice theory to analyze cultural and linguistic identity and conflict, and for his spirited defense of formal modeling and methodological pluralism in the social sciences. Recent publications include Identity in Formation: the Russian-speaking Populations of the Near Abroad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), (w. James Fearon) “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review (2003), and “The Perestroikan Challenge to Social Science,” Politics and Society (2003).

Cynthia "Mil" Duncan returned to the University of New Hampshire in the spring of 2004 as founding director of the Carsey Institute. Widely recognized for her research on rural poverty and changing rural communities, Duncan was a sociologist at UNH for 11 years before leaving to become director of the Ford Foundation’s Community and Resource Development Unit in 2000. At the Ford Foundation she was responsible for a team of national and international leaders in the community development, youth, and environmental fields. Duncan was the associate director of the Rural Economic Policy Program at the Aspen Institute prior to her former work at the University.

In 1999, Duncan published Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America, which received the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best book in Community and Urban Sociology. Duncan is the author of numerous book chapters and refereed articles. She received her PhD from the University of Kentucky in sociology and is a recipient of the University of Kentucky Department of Sociology Thomas R. Ford Distinguished Alumni Award. Duncan has a BA from Stanford University.