Andy Baker is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University. His publications on comparative political behavior and international political economy have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science and World Politics. Baker is currently completing a book manuscript on mass support for market reforms in Latin America.

Michael K. Brown is Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has written numerous articles and reviews on race, social policy and welfare reform, and politics in the United States. He is the author of Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (1999), and co-author of Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color Blind Society (2003). Brown is currently working on a study of political culture and equality in the United States focusing on the Freedmen's Bureau, the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

Corey Cook is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. His current research projects include a longitudinal study of the impact of urban electoral reform on equality of voice and perceptions of legitimacy, the construction and political representation of White racialized interests, and the impact of redevelopment on suburbanization and central city revitalization.

Kesha Fikes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is currently completing a manuscript, Managing African Portugal, which examines the Portuguese state's regulation of colonial and contemporary Cape Verdean citizenship and migrant labor practices in Portugal. Her primary research focus in this study is the paradoxical relationship between the acquisition of national sovereignty and the bureaucratic constraints that were placed upon the migrating African subject after Cape Verdean independence.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of African-American Studies and Sociology, and Director of the African American Studies Program at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. She holds degrees in sociology from Northeastern University (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) and has pursued graduate theological studies at Boston University's School of Theology. Her research, teaching, and writing have focused on the role of African American women in generating social change and on the diverse roles of Black Christian women in the twentieth century. Some of her essays and articles are gathered in her recent book, If It Wasn't for the Women: Black Women's Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (2001). Several of her journal articles have been reprinted, most recently in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (2004), edited by Cornel West and Eddie Glaude. An ordained Baptist minister, Gilkes's published sermons have appeared in The African American Pulpit.

Dwonna Naomi Goldstone is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, where she teaches African American Literature. Her new book, Integrating the Forty Acres: The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at the University of Texas, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2006.

Jennifer Lee is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and holds B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. Lee is the author of Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (2002) and co-editor, with Min Zhou, of Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (2004). In 2003, she was awarded the Robert E. Park Best Scholarly Article Award from the American Sociological Association's Community and Urban Sociology Section, in addition to Honorable Mention for the Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award from the International Migration Section. Lee was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2003. She is currently working on two research projects that stem from her theoretical interests in the intersection of race, ethnicity, and immigration. The first examines how immigration and racial/ethnic diversity affect multiracial identification. Using data from the 2000 Census combined with in-depth interviews, she and Frank D. Bean are studying the way in which interracial couples identify their children and multiracial adults negotiate their identities. Lee is also working with a team of researchers at UC Irvine and UCLA on a study of immigrant and intergenerational mobility in Los Angeles.

John M. Mugane is Senior Preceptor and Director of the African Language Program in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His most recent publications include: Linguistic Description, Typology, and Representation of African Languages, in Trends in African Linguistics, Vol. 5 (2003); African Languages and Linguistics in Broad Perspective, co-edited with John Hutchison and Dee Worman (2006), and A Paradigmatic Grammar of Gikuyu, in Stanford Monographs on African Languages (1997). Mugane is founding editor of the newly established W. E. B. Du Bois African Language Grammar Series, and he served as guest editor for the Journal of African Language Teachers Association (JALTA) in 2004. Mugane is also the author of numerous internet-based language courses and linguistic databases for African languages (see 〈http://www.aramati.com〉).

Dianne Pinderhughes is Professor of Political Science and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She studies issues of racial and ethnic inequality in American urban and national politics, the intersection of race and gender in American electoral politics, and the comparative development of civil society in the Americas. Pinderhughes is the author of Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory (1987), and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is currently writing a new book, The Evolution of Civil Rights Organizations in the Twentieth Century: African American Politics and Voting Rights. Pinderhughes has served in leadership positions in the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, the American Political Science Association, and the Midwest Political Science Association.

Carlos Vargas-Ramos is Researcher in Public Policy at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College-CUNY. A political scientist by training, his most recent publications are “El género y la participación política en Puerto Rico,” in Caribbean Studies (2005); and “The political participation of Puerto Ricans in New York City,” in CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (2003). Vargas-Ramos is co-author of “Paradigms of minority and immigrant political participation in the United States,” in Research in Micropolitics: Political Decision-making, Deliberation and Participation (2002), edited by Delli Carpini, Huddy, and Shapiro. He is also the author of a public policy paper series that explores housing conditions of Latinos in the United States, as well as settlement patterns and residential segregation of Puerto Ricans in the United States.

David Wellman is Professor of Community Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is Director of Graduate Studies in Social Documentation. He is co-author of Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Colorblind Society (2003), which received the Benjamin L. Hooks award, the Gustav Myers award, and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills award. He is also the author of Portraits of White Racism (2ed., 1993), and The Union Makes Us Strong: Radical Unionism on the San Francisco Waterfront (1995). Wellman has testified as an expert witness in Federal District Court and California Superior Court on White racism in a number of successful antidiscrimination lawsuits. He has also served as a member of the American Sociological Association's Task Force on a Statement on Race.