CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches courses on Asian American history, Filipino American Studies, and contemporary U.S. immigration. She is the author of the award-winning book, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History, published by Duke University Press and co-published by Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2003. Empire of Care explored how and why the Philippines became the world’s leading exporter of professional nurses. Professor Choy is completing a second book project on the history of Asian international adoption in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in History from UCLA.
MARIAN FELDMAN is associate professor of the History of Art and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been teaching at Berkeley since she received her PhD in Art History in 1998 from Harvard University. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Turkey and Syria and has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. She is the author of the book, Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an “International Style” in the Near East, 1400-1200 BCE (2006), the co-editor of two volumes, Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by her Students (with J. Cheng, 2007) andRepresentations of Power: Case Histories from Times of Change and Dissolving Order in the Ancient Near East (with M. Heinz, 2007) and has published numerous articles on the arts of the second and first millennium.
FABIO LOPEZ-LAZARO. Trained in medieval and early modern political, social, and legal history, Fabio López Lázaro has taught at Stanford and Arizona State Universities, as well as at several Canadian institutions. He is currently an Associate Professor of History at Santa Clara University in California. His research publications focus on legal and maritime history between 1300 and 1800 and on the cultural and political interaction between Western European empires, the Americas, and the Islamic World. In addition to survey courses on European history, he currently teach classes on the history of piracy, ethnobotany, and sexuality, concentrating on the European and Islamic Mediterranean and the "New World" influenced by Iberian societies. His most recent research interests have led to publications investigating the impact of pre-Columbian Native American science on the development of sixteenth-century European botany, the odd and disastrous naval alliance pursued by Spain's Catholic monarchy with Protestant England and Holland in the seventeenth century, and a fascinating case study of Spanish imperial entanglement with worldwide piracy in the 1690s.
JOSEPH LOUGH teaches world history, scope and methods of research in IAS, intermediate macroeconomics, and classical and contemporary theories of political economy, in the International and Area Studies Teaching Program. His research interests are in modern European intellectual and cultural history, classical Greek theories of politics and economy, and the history of social theory. He is the author of Weber and the Persistence of Religion: Social Theory, Capitalism, and the Sublime (2006). He has written extensively on the relationship between mature capitalism, contemporary religion and officially sanctioned mass death. He is currently working on a study exploring the use and abuse of Aristotle's categories in American political theory and practice.
ERIKA MONAHAN joined the UNM History department in 2008 as assistant professor of Russian history. She teaches courses on early modern Russia, Imperial Russia, and Soviet Union/modern Russia. Her work for a small company in Russia during the 1990s sparked her interest in the history of enterprise in Russia. This, coupled with her interest in borderlands and frontiers, led her to write a dissertation that examines merchants and their practices in Siberia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. She is currently revising this dissertation into a book manuscript about commerce in early modern Eurasia.
THOMAS R. METCALF is professor emeritus of history at UC Berkeley, where he taught South Asian and British Imperial history for forty years. From 2000 to 2003 he was also chair of the Center for South Asian Studies. Among his most recent publications are Ideologies of the Raj (1997 paperback), Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena (2007), and, with Barbara D. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India (2nd. ed. 2006).
ADRIAN MCINTYRE, Ph. D., is a cultural anthropologist, journalist and humanitarian aid worker. He has lived and worked in over 30 countries and has over 12 years professional experience in Africa and the Middle East. Adrian co-edited September 11: Contexts and Consequences (with Misha Klein, 2001), a 600-page anthology of essential readings on Islam, terrorism and global politics. He reported forNewsweek during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then traveled to Baghdad as a member of the crisis response teams for Mercy Corps and Oxfam GB. He researched and wrote the Iraq Country Handbook (2003), an overview of the political and legal context for humanitarian agencies in Iraq with practical information about living and working in Baghdad. Adrian moved to Sudan in 2004 to work for 14 months as Oxfam’s field-based spokesperson on the crisis in Darfur. His hundreds of media appearances reached millions of people around the world via major news outlets such as the BBC, CNN, National Public Radio, and the New York Times, as well as regional newspapers and radio stations throughout Europe and the United States. Adrian provides consulting expertise in cross-cultural communication, leadership and humanitarian advocacy and media to NGOs, private companies, United Nations agencies, and the United States Agency for International Development.
CARLOS NOREÑA is an assistant professor in the department of History at University of California, Berkeley. He field is the history of the Roman Empire (200 BC-AD 400), especially the political and cultural history of the first two centuries AD. His current book project,The Circulation of Imperial Ideals in the Roman West, analyzes the figure of the emperor as a unifying symbol for the western empire. Other interests include the topography and urban history of Rome; the literature and culture of the Roman Empire; and comparative empires.
MICHAEL NYLAN is Professor of Chinese History at UCB. Her specialty is Early China: seven centuries of Warring States through Eastern Han (475 BC-AD 220), with an emphasis on the sociopolitical context; aesthetic theories and material culture; and belief. Her many publications include Lives of Confucius: Civilization's Greatest Sage Through the Ages (with Thomas Wilson); China's Early Empires, supplement to The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, Ch'in and Han, ed. with Michael Loewe. In progress, she is working with Chinese archeologists on an interactive Web site devoted to the ancient Chinese capitol of Chang’an.
ALEX SARAGOZA is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His current research investigates the privatization of the Mexican economy in general in light of its relationship to that of the U.S., and that of the tourism industry in particular. He formerly served as the Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies and was subsequently Director of the UC Study Center in Mexico.
MARTHA SAAVEDRA has been with the Center for African Studies since 1993. Trained as a Political Scientist, she has taught at St. Mary’s College of California, UC Berkeley and Ohio University. Her research has ranged from agrarian politics, development and ethnic conflict in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan to gender and sport in Africa to a new collaborative project on representations of Africa in Chinese popular culture. At the Center, she co-coordinates the UnderstandingSudan.org curriculum project, oversees public programs and fellowships, and works closely with the African languages program among other things. She is on the editorial boards of Soccer and Society; Sport in Society; and Impumelelo: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Sports in Africa. A veteran of Title IX battles, she has played soccer for over 30 years and has been a coach of boys’ teams for 7 years.
ERIK R. SCOTT is a Ph.D. candidate in Russian and Soviet history at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is completing his dissertation, entitled "Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora in the Soviet Union." Drawing on years of fieldwork, and Georgian as well as Russian-language sources, his project broadly engages the issues of migration, diaspora, and empire in Eurasia. He has worked in the Caucasus since 2001, and in 2008 received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to conduct archival research and interviews in Moscow, Russia and Tbilisi, Georgia. In addition to his historical research, he has published several articles and book chapters on contemporary organized crime and corruption in Georgia. He received his B.A. from Brown University in History and Russian Studies.
NICK TACKETT is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at U. C. Berkeley where he teaches courses on pre-modern China. His research focuses on Chinese elite society in the 9th to 11th century.
MALISSA TAYLOR is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at U.C. Berkeley. Prior to this, she completed her undergraduate degree at Princeton University and her Masters in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Fluent in Arabic and Turkish, she has spent some time in the Middle East studying language and conducting research in primary Arabic and Turkish sources. She has contributed a chapter titled “Anxiety of Sanctity” in an edited volume published by the Islamic studies Center of Istanbul, Turkey. She is the recipient of several prestigious grants and awards including the Fulbright, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and she was also a National Merit Scholar.
TENZIN N. TETHONG is the founder of key Tibet initiatives in the United States, including the Tibet Fund, Tibet House-New York, and the International Campaign for Tibet. He is a former Representative of H.H. the Dalai Lama in New York and Washington, D.C., and former Chairman of the Kashag, the Tibetan Cabinet. Mr. Tethong currently serves as Chairman of the Committee of 100 for Tibet and is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford University where he is also involved in CCARE (Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education) in the Medical School. He is President of the Dalai Lama Foundation and a proponent of secular universal ethics.
JOANNA WILLIAMS’ career spans forty-years (1967-2010) of teaching at UC Berkeley and a distinguished career in researching and writing on South and Southeast Asian art. Her publications include Indian sculpture and architecture in the 4-5th century (The Art of Gupta India, Empire and Province. Princeton: 1982); pictorial arts of Orissa (The Two-Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa, Berkeley, 1996); andthe court and rural paintings of Rajasthan (Kingdom of the Sun: the Arts of Mewar. San Francisco, 2007).
SARAH ZIMMERMAN is currently finishing her dissertation which historicizes the social experiences West African colonial soldiers, who were recruited and deployed by the French in other regions of French empire—including North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Near East—during the twentieth century. Sarah is a graduate student in history at the University of California, Berkeley, and has conducted archival and oral research in Senegal, Guinea, Morocco, Algeria, and France with the assistance of a Fulbright-Hayes Grant, the UC History Department, and the UC Center for African Studies.