Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.  He specializes in moral and political philosophy, African and African-American Studies, and issues of personal and political identity, multiculturalism and nationalism. His writings include books, essays and articles, along with reviews, short fiction, three novels, poetry, and an annotated collection of proverbs from his homeland, Asante, Ghana, on which he collaborated with his mother. With Amy Gutmann, he wrote Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, which won the Annual Book Award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association and the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights. His book In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture was honored by the African Studies Association, the Cleveland Foundation, and the Modern Language Association. Appiah also is co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience and the Encarta Africana CD-ROM. His most recent book is The Ethics of Identity (Princeton UP, 2005).

Ben Conisbee Baer is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.  He completed his Ph.D. in the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in 2005. His thesis, “How many are we?”: Literary Figures of the Peasant and the Autochthon, covers representations of the peasant and the aboriginal in Marxism, British Modernism, and early twentieth-century Bengali literature. Ben Baer also holds an M.A. in Critical Theory from the University of Nottingham, UK.

Eduardo Cadava is Professor of English at Princeton University.  He specializes in American literature and culture, literary and political theory, comparative literature, media technologies, and theory of translation. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997) and Emerson and the Climates of History (1997), and co-editor of Who Comes After the Subject? (1991), Cities Without Citizens (2004), and a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled And Justice for All?:  The Claims of Human Rights (2004).  He has published articles on, among others, Emerson, Benjamin, Kafka, and Celan, and on topics ranging from photography, architecture, democracy, and war, to memory, slavery, and the ethics of decision.  He also has translated several essays by Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Blanchot, and others.  He is currently finishing a collection of essays on the ethics and politics of mourning entitled Of Mourning and a small book on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing entitled Music on Bones.  He teaches regularly in the Programs in American Studies and European Cultural Studies, and he also is an Associate Member of the Departments of German and Comparative Literature and the School of Architecture.

Carolyn Cooper is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica.  She is the recently appointed Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies and long-time Coordinator of its Reggae Studies Unit, an academic project she initiated.  Cooper is the author of Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004).

Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones holds the Emory L. Ford Chair in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University.  He taught at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (1970-1982) before joining the Princeton faculty in 1983.  He also served as director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton for six years. He teaches Spanish-American literature, with special emphasis on 19th and 20th century intellectual and cultural history, including fiction, essay and poetry. Prof. Díaz-Quiñones has devoted many articles to the role of poets and intellectuals in Hispanic-Caribbean society, among others Luis Palés Matos, Antonio S. Pedreira, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña. He has edited works by Tomás Blanco, Cintio Vitier, and José Luis González. His publications include El almuerzo en la hierba (1982); an edition of El prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico, by Tomás Blanco (1985); an edition of works by Luis Lloréns Torres, Verso y prosa (1986); a study on the Cuban poet Cintio Vitier: La memoria integradora (1987); and a book of essays on Puerto Rican culture, La memoria rota: ensayos de cultura y política (1993). He has also edited the volume El Caribe entre imperios (1997), and written an introduction to the Alfaguara edition of Cuentos completos by José Luis González (1997). A book of essays, El arte de bregar, was published in 2000, as well as the Cátedra edition of La guaracha del Macho Camacho by Luis Rafael Sánchez.

Nadia Ellis is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Princeton University. She previously studied at the University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica) and at Oxford University, where her M.Phil. thesis was on Erna Brodber. She is currently researching her dissertation on Caribbean writers in Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Simon Gikandi is Professor of English at Princeton University. His major fields of research and teaching are the anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain, the “Black” Atlantic and the African Diaspora. He also has a special interest in the relationship between literature and the production of knowledge and the history of English as a field of study.  He has received awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.  He is the author of Reading the African Novel, Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.  He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature.  He is currently completing a book on the relation between slavery and the culture of taste.

Idara Hippolyte is an independent scholar. She was born in the Caribbean in 1975 and has lived in the UK for the last six years, where she studied English Literature on a Caribbean Commonwealth Rhodes scholarship.  Her essay on Jamaican dancehall and Caribbean literature appeared in the journal Interventions in 2004.

Briallen Hopper is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Princeton University and a 2005-2006 Fellow at Princeton's Center for the Study of Religion.  Her dissertation is on Uncle Tom's Cabin, anti-sentimentalism, and African American literature.

Sylvie Kandé teaches African studies at SUNY Old Westbury, as well as Caribbean history at the New School University.  She is a member of the PEN American Center, in the subcommittee Prison Writing.  She is the author of Terres, urbanisme et architecture 'créoles' en Sierra Leone, 18ème-19ème siècles (1998), based on her Ph.D. dissertation (Université de Paris VII), and editor of Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses. En quête d'Ariel (1999). Her book of poetic prose Lagon, lagunes was published by Gallimard in January 2000 and has been compared to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. She translated Heart of Spain: Photos of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa (Aperture, 2000) into French, and co-translated Alexis Wright's collection of short stories (an Australian Aboriginal writer), published by Actes Sud under the title Le Pacte du serpent arc-en-Ciel (2002). Her short stories and poems have been published in France in La Nouvelle Revue Française, as well as in Africa (Stephen Gray, editor, The Picador Book of African Short Stories, 2000) and the United States (in the journal Callaloo).  She has published numerous papers in scholarly journals on African, African American, and Caribbean literature and cinema, and is a contributor to The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (eds. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi, 2004) and the African American National Biography (forthcoming).  She taught African studies in the Africana Studies program, and Francophone African and Caribbean literatures in the French Department at New York University for six years. She also was a research assistant at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in the African arts division.

Marie-Hélène Koffi-Tessio is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. Her research centers on African and Caribbean writers living in Europe and issues of identities involving both "Frenchness" and Blackness. She also works on depictions of Africa and Africans by  both French and African writers in the twentieth century. Her dissertation, entitled "Voyageurs français sur le continent africain,” focuses on writings by André Gide and René Maran on Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the question of defining and representing the "Other."

Ambroise Kom is the Eleanor Howard O'Leary Professor in Francophone Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.  His primary research interests are in francophonie, imperialism and African cultures; literary production and its institutions; and colonial education and creativity.  He is the author of La Malédiction francophone: Défis culturels et condition postcoloniale en Afrique (2000), Éducation et démocratie en Afrique, le temps des illusions (1996), Le Cas Chester Himes (1994), George Lamming et le destin des Caraïbes (1986), and Le Harlem de Chester Himes (1978), and the editor of Présence Francophone: Revue Internationale de langue et de littérature.

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is Associate Professor in the Departments of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.  Her teaching and research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals and society; and women writers. She is the author of L'oeuvre romanesque de Jacques-Stephen Alexis, une écriture poétique, un engagement politique (1992) and Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization (2002). She is the editor of Remembering Africa (2002).  Before coming to Stanford in 1995, Professor Boyi taught at universities in the Congo and Burundi, as well as Haverford College, the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Duke University.  In 2002-2003 Professor Boyi was the president of the African Literature Association. She is currently a member of the Executive Council (2003-2006) of the Modern Language Association, where she represents the field of French.

Gyan Prakash is Professor of History and Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.  His teaching and research interests are in the fields of modern Indian and South Asian history; comparative Third World histories; colonial and postcolonial studies; colonialism and science; and urban history.  He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999). He has also written several articles on South Asian colonial history and on the relationship between colonialism and history writing, and edited several volumes of essays, including After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995). He has also co-authored a book on world history, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (2002). His current research interest centers on the history of Bombay as a modern space. As a member of Subaltern Studies editorial collective, he continues to be actively involved in the publication and other intellectual activities of this group of scholars. A major part of his present professional responsibility is the directorship of Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Under him, the Davis Center has started a two-year program in 2003 on Cities: Space, Society, and History.

Sophie Saint-Just is a doctoral student in the Film Studies Certificate and the French Ph.D. programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. She has taught at Bennington College in the MATSL program in French and at various CUNY campuses.  She is currently teaching a class on Caribbean literatures at Lehman College and working on her dissertation.

Sara Salih is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto.  Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of Caribbean literature, eighteenth-century literature (especially early black writing and women’s prose fiction), and postcolonial theory and writing.  Her publications include: The History of Mary Prince (ed., Penguin, 2000), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (ed., Penguin 2005), Judith Butler (Routledge Critical Thinkers 2002), The Judith Butler Reader (ed., with Judith Butler,  Blackwell, 2004), Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its  Colonies, 1760-1838 (co-edited with Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis. Palgrave Macmillan,  2004), “The Silence of Miss Lambe: Fictions of ‘Race’ in the Abolition Era” (forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction), and “‘A Gallant Heart to the Empire’: Autoethnography and Imperial Identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures… in Many Lands” (forthcoming in Philological Quarterly).  She is currently working on a book about representations of “brown” women in England and Jamaica from the eighteenth century to the present day (to be published by Routledge), and guest-editing a special issue of the journal Wasafiri on queer and postcolonial studies (forthcoming, 2006).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.  Her fields of specialization are 19th- and 20th-century literature; Marxism; feminism; deconstruction; poststructuralism; and globalization.  Her publications include: Red Thread (forthcoming), Other Asias (2005), Death of a Discipline (2003), Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, 2002), Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999), Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Breast Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1997), The Spivak Reader (1995), Imaginary Maps (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1994), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990), Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1976), Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1974).

Hervé Tchumkam holds a DEA (Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies) in Comparative Literature from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III. He has published articles in Expressions Maghrébines, Annales du Patrimoine, Littérature Maghrébine et comparée, and has contributed to the volume entitled Figures de l’histoire et imaginaire au Cameroun. He is currently a Ph.D student at the University of Pennsylvania and his research interests include francophone and anglophone literatures, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies.
 
Keri Walsh is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Princeton University, and a Graduate Fellow at the University’s Center for Human Values.  She holds an M.A. from Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada) and an M.Phil in Modern British Literature from Corpus Christi College, Oxford.  Her dissertation, “Antigone in Modernism: Classicism, Feminism, and Theaters of Protest,” traces the twentieth-century fortunes of Sophocles’s eminently political heroine in such writers as Athol Fugard, Seamus Heaney, Virginia Woolf, and Simone Weil.

Tim Watson teaches postcolonial and British literature at Princeton University.  In January 2006, he will take up a new position in the English Department at the University of Miami (Coral Gables).

Keithley Woolward is a Ph.D. candidate in French at New York University, working on his dissertation entitled “Theater and a Poetics of Decolonization in the French Caribbean: Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant.”  His areas of research expertise are contemporary African and Caribbean theater; African and African Diaspora performance practices; Africa and the French stage; French colonial imaginary; and Black Paris.

 
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