DAVID HARVEY is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics. Professor Harvey is a leading theorist in the field of urban studies whom Library Journal called "one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century." He was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His reflections on the importance of space and place (and more recently "nature") have attracted considerable attention across the humanities and social sciences. His highly influential books include Social Justice and the City (1973); The Limits to Capital (1982); The Condition of Postmodernity (1989); Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1996); Spaces of Hope (2000); and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (2001); The New Imperialism (2003); and Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006). His most recent book is The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2010).

READINGS

LIZA FEATHERSTONE is a contributing writer to The Nation magazine. She also writes for Slate, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, among others, and is the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart, and co-author of Students Against Sweatshops. Featherstone has been a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University, and now teaches at City University of New York and New York University.

DOUG HENWOOD is editor and publisher of Left Business Observer, a newsletter which covers a wide range of economic and political topics, including income distribution and poverty, the globalization of finance and production, and the economics of energy. Henwood is a contributing editor of The Nation, and hosts a weekly radio program on WBAI (New York). He is the author of Wall Street, The State of the USA, and After the New Economy, and is in the early stages of a book on the current American ruling class.

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.