Lawrie Balfour is Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Her teaching and research focuses on African American political thought, democratic theory, feminist theory, and politics and literature. Currently, she is working on a book on reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.
Cristina Beltrán is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A political theorist by training, her research focuses on modern and contemporary political theory, democratic theory, Latino and U.S. ethnic/racial politics, feminist and queer theory. She is the author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2010), which was the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Political Science Association’s Ralph Bunche Award and Cuba’s Casa de la Américas prize for the best book on Latinos in the United States. Currently, she is a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ where she is writing a book on Latino conservatives.
Camille Z. Charles is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Education, and Director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class, and Residence in Los Angeles (Russell Sage, 2006), and co-author of The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton University Press, 2003) and of Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton University Press, 2009).
Derrick Darby is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Rights, Race, and Recognition (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and the co-editor with Tommie Shelby of Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Open Court Publishing, 2005). He writes about rights, justice, inequality, and race, and has collaborated with scholars in economics, sociology, psychology, history, and law. The Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have supported his scholarship. He is currently writing a co-authored book on the racial achievement gap with a historian of education, and working on a voting rights project.
Kathryn T. Gines is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University and founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (www.cbwp.ktgphd.com). Her primary research and teaching interests lie in Continental philosophy, Africana philosophy, Black feminist philosophy, and critical philosophy of race. In addition to her book Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014), Gines has published articles on race, racism, and postracialism, assimilation, feminism, and intersectionality. She a founding co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Critical Philosophy of Race (Penn State University Press) and co-editor of an anthology titled Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010).
Robert Gooding-Williams is the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is also a member of the Core Faculty of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, 2001); Look, A Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (Routledge, 2005); and In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Harvard, 2009).
Sally Haslanger is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and has taught at UC Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan. Haslanger specializes in social/political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and feminist theory. Her recent collection of papers, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford, 2012) explores the concept of social construction as it applies to race, gender, family, and other purportedly natural categories. Other collections include Adoption Matters (with Charlotte Witt) and Theorizing Feminisms (with Elizabeth Hackett). She was awarded the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year in 2010 by the Society for Women in Philosophy; she gave the Carus Lectures at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Meetings in 2012; she served as President of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division in 2013-4; and she was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award at MIT in 2014.
Rory A. Kramer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Villanova University. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in racial segregation and spatial analysis. His previous research on social mobility and adolescents has been published in Sociology of Education, Sociological Perspectives, and Du Bois Review. His current research focuses on the level and impact of racial identity fluidity and the impact of the prison boom on racial equality in political representation.
Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, with a particular focus on race. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and five books: The Racial Contract (1997); Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998); From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003); Contract and Domination (with Carole Pateman) (2007); and Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class, and Social Domination (2010). He is currently working on a book collection of his recent articles.
Argun Saatcioglu is Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at the University of Kansas. He specializes in sociology of organizations and sociology of education. His research interests include racial/ethnic inequality in K-12 schooling and the evaluation of educational governance and policy initiatives. His recent work has appeared in Sociological Inquiry, American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record, and Social Science History. He is currently completing a study, funded by the NSF’s sociology program, on racial inequity in mild disability categorization in schools, which extends research on both educational stratification and organizational inequality.
Tommie Shelby is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Harvard, 2005). His research focuses on questions of racial and economic justice and on the history of black political thought, and his articles have appeared in such journals as Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, Political Theory, Critical Inquiry, and Daedalus. He is currently writing a book on race and urban poverty, tentatively entitled “Justice, Dissent, and the Dark Ghetto.” He is also coeditor of the magazine Transition.
Paul C. Taylor teaches philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, where he also serves as head of the Department of African American Studies. Professor Taylor received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Morehouse College and his PhD in philosophy from Rutgers University. He has provided commentary on race and politics for newspapers and radio shows on four continents, and has lectured at universities from Cape Town to Cornell. He is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction, and is currently working on a book entitled Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics.
