Scott A. Akalis received his PhD in social psychology from Harvard University and his BA in psychology and multidisciplinary models of the mind from Northwestern University. He is currently a management consultant with McKinsey and Company. Akalis's diverse research interests include implicit attitude dynamics (the formation, change, and control of nonconscious biases), anthropomorphism/zoomorphism (why animals are sometimes viewed as if they were humans and vice versa), and the psychology of financial decision making. See http://www.scottakalis.com for more information about his work.
Mahzarin R. Banaji is Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She received her PhD from Ohio State University and taught from 1986 to 2001 at Yale University, where she was Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology. Banaji studies human thinking and feeling in social contexts, especially mental processes that operate outside conscious awareness and intention. See implicit.harvard.edu for her educational and research website, with Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, and http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji for details on her work.
Mitchell Brown is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Auburn University. Her research focuses on the empowerment of marginalized communities. She also serves as Research Director for the Institute for Community Peace in Washington, DC, where her work focuses on the development of a healthy, peaceful nation through community development and resident empowerment.
Anastasia Curwood is Assistant Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on African American history since 1619, including the history of African American women, gender, and sexuality; the Black family; and African American intellectual, political, and cultural history in the twentieth century. Her first book, Stormy Weather: New Negro Marriages between the Two World Wars, currently in the last stages of preparation, centers on the cultural and social contests over African American marriages in the early twentieth century. She is currently at work on a second book, A Catalyst for Change: The Life of Shirley Chisholm. Curwood is the recipient of several grants and honors, including a 2008–2009 Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a 2004–2005 Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Nancy A. Denton is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Albany, State University of New York, where she is Director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research and Associate Director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis. She received a PhD in demography from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on issues involving race, ethnicity, and urban society. She is the coauthor, with Douglas S. Massey, of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, as well as numerous articles. Her current research project compares the urban neighborhood environments immigrant parents from different countries of origin are able to provide for their children across metropolitan areas in the United States.
Stephen M. Kosslyn is John Lindsley Professor of Psychology and Dean of Social Science at Harvard University, and Associate Psychologist in the Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a BA from UCLA and a PhD from Stanford University, both in psychology. His research has focused primarily on the nature of visual mental imagery, visual perception, and visual communication. Kosslyn has received the American Psychological Association's Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award, the National Academy of Sciences Initiatives in Research Award, the Cattell Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Jean-Louis Signoret Prize (France), and an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Caen (France). He has been elected to Academia Rodinensis pro Remediatione (Switzerland), the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Rory Kramer is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include the process and effects of diversifying elite education, racial identity, and the effect of friendship patterns on adolescent behaviors. His dissertation focuses on racial identity, friendship patterns, success, and satisfaction in elite colleges for non-White students. Kramer received a BA in American studies from Williams College.
Rahsaan Maxwell is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. For the academic year 2008–2009, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, DC. He received his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008 and is currently preparing a book manuscript on the incorporation of ethnic minority migrants in Western Europe. His research has appeared in West European Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and several edited volumes.
Catherine M. Paden is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Simmons College in Boston. She received her PhD in political science from Northwestern University in 2006. Paden's research interests include how underrepresented groups gain representation in the United States, racial politics, interest groups, and social movements.
Robert E. Prasch is Associate Professor of Economics at Middlebury College where he specializes in the history of economic thought, American economic history, and monetary economics. He also held teaching positions at Vassar College, the University of Maine, and San Francisco State University. He has written more than eighty articles, book chapters, and reviews. Recent publications include How Markets Work: Supply, Demand and the “Real World” (2008) and two coedited books: Race, Liberalism and Economics (2004) and Thorstein Veblen and the Revival of Free Market Capitalism (2007). He received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Jason E. Shelton is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington. From 2006 to 2008, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life (CORRUL) at Rice University, where he developed research projects based on first-wave data from the Panel Study of American Religion and Ethnicity (PS-ARE). His primary research interests include the socioeconomic and cultural sources of attitudinal variation among African Americans, the debate over race and class in the post–civil rights era, and immigration/acculturation processes among various racial/ethnic and religious minority groups. He is currently writing a book on racial differences in religious sensibilities among Black and White Christians.
Jiannbin Lee Shiao is Associate Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and the University of Oregon. He holds an MA in demography and a PhD in sociology. His scholarship has been a friendly critique of racial formation theory through empirical studies of its gaps and tensions with other paradigms that emphasize immigrant assimilation and Black exceptionalism. He is the author of Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity: Race and Philanthropy in the Post–Civil Rights America (2005) and of articles published in American Journal of Sociology, Asian American Policy Review, and Race and Society. His current research examines the racial and ethnic identities of transnational Korean adoptees and the genomic challenge to the theory of race as a social construction.
Mia H. Tuan is Associate Professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon. She received her BA in sociology from University of California, Berkeley, and her MA and PhD in sociology from UCLA. Her research interests include racial and ethnic identity development (particularly among Asian Americans), Asian transracial adoption, and multicultural organizational development. In addition to being a faculty member, she is also the director of CoDaC, the Center on Diversity and Community at the University of Oregon, a learning organization committed to promoting research and best practices on issues of cultural diversity, equity, and access.
