Elisabetta Bini is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She received her Ph.D. in Modern European History from New York University in 2011, with a thesis titled Fueling the Cold War: Oil, Economic Development, and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy and the Mediterranean, 1945–1969. Her publications include: “The Origins and Early Developments of Public Relations in Italy, 1945–1960,” Journal of Communication Management, 15, no.3 (2011): 210–222 (with Ferdinando Fasce and Toni Muzi Falconi); “Consumer Democracies between Italy and the United States: Gender, Citizenship, and Mass Motorization in Postwar Italy,” in Stefano Cavazza and Emanuela Scarpellini, eds. La rivoluzione dei consumi. Società di massa e benessere in Europa, 1945–2000 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010): 183–219 [in Italian].

Amanda Ciafone is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Macalester College.  She is currently at work on a book about The Coca-Cola Company and the politics, cultural representations, and social movements around the multinational corporation.

Miriam Glucksmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. She has longstanding interests in work, employment and gender, especially restructuring, and connections between different forms of labour. Her first book was Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (1974). Since then she has published widely in the fields of gender and work, including Women on the Line (1982, 2009), Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain (1990), Cotton and Casuals; the gendered organisation of labour in time and space (2000), and the jointly edited A New Sociology of Work? (2005). She recently completed an extensive research programme on ‘Transformations of Work: New Frontiers, Shifting Boundaries, Changing Temporalities’ as an ESRC Professorial Fellow, and is currently funded by the European Research Council to research ‘Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour’. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Doctor of Stockholm University.

Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Her book The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT Press, new edition 2009) received awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology. Her new monograph, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press and Wits University Press, 2012) examines the colonial, transnational, and postcolonial history of uranium production, focusing on matters of trade, labor, and occupational health in South Africa, Namibia, Gabon, Madagascar, and Niger.

Nelson Lichtenstein is MacArthur Foundation Chair in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He is the editor, most recently, of American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (2006); and with Elizabeth Shermer, The Right and American Labor: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (2012). He is the author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009).

Dawn Lyon is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, UK. After completing her PhD at the European University Institute in 2003, she held a research post at the University of Essex from 2004–06 working with Miriam Glucksmann on her ESRC-funded ‘Transformations of Work’ research program. She has published in the field of gender and work and is co-editor of Women Migrants from East to West: Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). She has a strong interest in visual sociology, explored in the website she runs with Lynne Pettinger (Essex): http://nowaytomakealiving.net. She has two current research projects: a mobile ethnography of working with fish from sea to table (funded by the British Academy); and a partial restudy with Graham Crow (Southampton) and Peter Hatton (Kent) of the Isle of Sheppey (funded by the South East Coastal Communities Program).

Tracy McDonald is an associate professor of history at McMaster University. She is the author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule, 1921–1930 (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and a co-editor of Riazanskaia derevnia v 1929–1930 gg.: khronika golovokruzheniia (The Riazan Countryside, 1929–1930: A Chronicle of Spinning Heads) (Moscow, Rosspen, 1998) with Lynne Viola, Sergei Zhuravlev and Andrei Mel'nik.

April Merleaux is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University. Her research interests include food, migration, and empire in the United States and commodity cultures writ large. She is currently revising a book manuscript tentatively titled Sugar and Civilization: Race, Empire, and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness, 1898–1939. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 from Yale University's American Studies program.

Anna Pollert is Emerita Professor of the Sociology of Work at the Centre for Employment Studies Research at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She has published widely in the areas of class, gender, workplace relations, worker representation and the transformation of the former ‘communist’ countries of Central Eastern Europe to capitalism. She has contributed to critiques of neo-liberal policy and discourse, including that of the ‘flexible’ worker, and has recently focused on the experience of non-unionised, low paid workers with problems at work, and their attempts to resolve them. Her work includes Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (Macmillan, 1981), Farewell to Flexibility? (editor, Blackwell, 1991), Transformation at Work in the New Market Economies of Central Eastern Europe (Sage, 1999) and The Unorganised Vulnerable Worker: The Case for Union Organising (London: Institute of Employment Rights, 2007).

Pun Ngai is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her current research interests include labor, gender, socialist theory, social economies and globalization. Her key publication to date is Made in China: Factory Women Workers in a Global Workplace (2005).

Augustine Sedgewick earned his Ph.D. in American studies at Harvard in 2011. He is completing a book that uses coffee to show how the New Deal harnessed mass consumption to neoimperialism.

Andy Urban is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the American Studies and History departments at Rutgers University. In 2009–10, he worked as a Research Fellow at Emory University, where he conducted research on the relationship between colleges in the post-Civil War South and missionary work in Asia. His current project, The Empire of the Home: Race, Domestic Labor, and the Political Economy of Servitude in the United States, 1850–1920, examines how the nineteenth-century “servant problem” reflected anxieties about the maintenance of social order as the United States expanded nationally, ended slavery, and encountered new sources of labor through immigration.

Carol Wolkowitz is Reader in Sociology at the University of Warwick. She is the author or editor of a number of publications on the body and embodiment in employment, including Bodies at Work (Sage, 2006) and (with C. Warhurst) an article in P. Thomson and C. Smith (eds) Working Life: Renewing Labour Process Analysis (Palgrave, 2011). She co-edited Body Work in Health and Social Care (Wiley/Blackwell 2011) and contributed an autobiographical perspective on recent developments in the sociology of work for a special issue of the journal Sociology (2009). She is currently co-editing a special issue of Sociological Research Online on ‘Visualising the Changing Landscape of Work and Labour’ and is a co-organiser of the tri-annual Work, Employment and Society conference, to be held at the University of Warwick in September 2013.