Gary Armstrong is Reader in the School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, London. His research into sports-related matters has produced Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score, (Berg, 1998) and Blade Runners: Lives in Football, (Hallamshire Press, 1999). He also co-edited, alongside Richard Giulianotti, Entering the Field, New Perspectives in World Football (Berg, 1997), Football Cultures and Identities (Palgrave, 2000), Fear and Loathing in World Football (Berg, 2001) and Football in Africa: Conflict, Conciliation and Community (Palgrave, 2003). From 1998 to the present he has researched the possibilities that football can offer to various demographics in the reconstruction of post-conflict Liberia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Other long-term research has examined the role that football has played in the politics of Malta. The latter study produced a 2008 book co-authored with Jon Mitchell, titled Local and Global Football (Routledge). A book co-authored with Alberto Testa titled Fascism, Football and Fandom (A&C Black, Bloomsbury) will appear in the Fall of 2010.
Ngina Chiteji is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Skidmore College. Dr. Chiteji's research areas include the distribution of household wealth, asset-ownership patterns in the United States, and intergenerational connections in health and economic outcomes. Professor Chiteji is co-editor of Wealth Accumulation and Communities of Color in the United States, and she has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of African American Studies, the Review of Black Political Economy, the Journal of International Development, Labour Economics, and the American Economic Review's Papers and Proceedings. Dr. Chiteji has worked as a Visiting Assistant Research Scientist with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics group at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and also has served as a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland's Democracy Collaborative and at Howard University's Center for Research on Race and Wealth.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An influential scholar in the field of African American Studies, he is the author of fourteen books and has hosted and produced eleven documentaries, including the acclaimed PBS series “Faces of America” and “African American Lives.” Professor Gates is co-editor, with Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, of the African American National Biography (an eight-volume biographical dictionary published by Oxford University Press in 2008), and his recent work has been instrumental in popularizing African American genealogical research and DNA testing. His book, In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, won an NAACP Image Award in 2010. He is the recipient of 51 honorary degrees and many awards, including the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and the National Humanities Medal, and was named to Time magazine's “25 Most Influential Americans” list in 1997, and to Ebony magazine's “100 Most Influential Black Americans” list in 2005 and its “Power 150” list in 2009.
John Gennari is Associate Professor of English and the director of the U.S. Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and of many articles on jazz and American culture. In addition to jazz studies, his recent research and writing interests include Italian American cultural studies, visual culture, and sports. Gennari has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He is currently working on two book projects tentatively titled “The Jazz Salon: Lenox, Music Inn, and 1950s America,” and “Passing for Italian.”
Travis A. Jackson is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Blowing the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (University of California Press, forthcoming) as well as articles on jazz's place in the African Diaspora, jazz and poetry's intersections, and the interpretation of meaning in rock. His writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, edited volumes, and the popular press. Among his current projects are a book on British post-punk music, graphic design, and racial/imperial anxiety from 1977 to 1984; articles focused on Marvin Gaye's What's Going On as an exemplary concept album, addressing the contradictory position of Blacks vis-à-vis the recording industry and music critics; and exploring the roles played by graphic designers in shaping the identities of artists and record labels. He is a guitarist and amateur recordist and songwriter.
Michael P. Jeffries is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College, where he teaches courses in racial and ethnic studies and American popular culture. He is the author of Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop (2010), forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. Previous publications include articles and essays in Du Bois Review, Women and Language, and the hip-hop feminist anthology, Home Girls Make Some Noise! (2007).
Karen M. Kaufmann is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Programs of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in political science from UCLA. Her research focuses on urban politics and political behavior. She is the author of The Urban Voter: Group Conflict and Voting Behavior in American Cities (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and Unconventional Wisdom: Facts and Myths about American Voters (with John R. Petrocik and Daron Shaw, Oxford University Press, 2008). Her research appears in top political science journals including: American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, Urban Affairs Review, Du Bois Review, and Polity. She is currently working on an National Science Foundation-funded project concerning the contextual influences on intergroup relations and political behavior in urban settings.
Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of African American music at Harvard University, where she holds a joint appointment in the departments of Music and African and African American Studies. She is author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and edited The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (Garland/Routledge, 2000). Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Critical Inquiry, The Black Music Research Journal, and Women Music. She is currently working on a book about Malian balafonist Neba Solo. She began her career as a trumpet player and has recently been studying contemporary Senufo balafon.
Mignon R. Moore is Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American studies at UCLA and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of several honors including a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar position and a national award from the Human Rights Campaign for her professional work on LGBT communities of color. Her forthcoming book Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (University of California Press) analyzes the ways gay women of color form and raise families and experience their lesbian identities while retaining connections to their racial communities. Her work also explores the social histories and current health of older Black lesbians and gay men in a new study funded by the National Institute of Health.
Shayla C. Nunnally is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from Duke University. She received her B.A. in political science in 1998 from North Carolina Central University. During 2004–2005, she was an Erskine A. Peters Dissertation Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on American politics, African American politics, and public opinion. Her book, In Whom Do We Trust? Black Americans, (Dis)Trust, and the Vestiges of Race, is forthcoming with New York University Press.
James Rosbrook-Thompson is Visiting Lecturer in Sport and Development, School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, London, and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His Ph.D. thesis focuses on the role of raciology in British sport and, more specifically, examines how the raciological idea of the ‘impulsive’ Black sportsman—and the ‘impulsive’ Black male more generally—came into being and picked up momentum throughout the course of British history. His other research interests include the political category of the ‘denizen’ and the relationship between denizenship and notions of human difference.
Bryant Simon is Professor of History and the Director of American Studies at Temple University. His many books, articles, and reviews have explored race and politics, popular culture and power, and public spaces and the built environments of urban places in the United States, Spain, and Singapore. He is the editor along with Jane Dailey and Glenda Gilmore of Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights. He is author most recently of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of America (2005), and Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (2009). His work on Atlantic City received awards from the New Jersey Historical Council, the Urban History Association, and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). He currently serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the OAH.
Clovis L. White is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. He holds a masters degree in African and African American Studies from State University of New York at Albany and a masters and Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University. His research and teaching interests focus on racial and ethnic identity, African American Studies, and social psychology in the United States and South Africa. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores racial identification among African Americans and Black South Africans.
Isabel Wilkerson is Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. In 1994, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first Black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. Wilkerson also won a George Polk Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration, and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. Her recent book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration was published in 2010 by Random House.
