Roderick A. Ferguson (Race and Critical Theory, American Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) he received the Modern Language Association's Crompton-Noll Award (2000) for "best essay in lesbian, gay, and queer studies in the modern languages" for his article "The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption." From 2007 to 2010, he was associate editor of American Quarterly: The Journal of the American Studies Association. He is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique and is completing a manuscript entitled The Reorder of Things: On the Institutionalization of Difference. 

Leti Volpp (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law) is a well-known scholar in law and the humanities. She writes about citizenship, migration, culture and identity. Her publications include the edited volume Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (2006); "The Culture of Citizenship" in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007); and "Disappearing Acts: On Gendered Violence, Pathological Cultures and Civil Society" in PMLA (2006). She is also the author of "Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship Through Marriage" in the UCLA Law Review (2005), "The Citizen and the Terrorist" in the UCLA Law Review (2002), "Feminism versus Multiculturalism" in the Columbia Law Review (2001), “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition,” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011); and “Engendering Culture: Citizenship, Identity and Belonging,” which appears in Citizenship, Borders, and Human Needs, edited by Rogers Smith(2011), among many other articles.

Priscilla Wald is a professor of English at Duke University, and the 2011-12 President of the American Studies Association.  Wald teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries.  The author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008), Wald is working on a series of essays that explore the impact of genomics on current thinking about categories of social, biological and political belonging and on the narrative of human history. Wald is also working on several essays on American literature and culture for essay collections and co-editing an Oxford University Press volume on the history of the American novel, 1870-1940. Included among her many publications is Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995), and she is editor of American Literature. She has a secondary appointment in Women's Studies, is on the Duke University steering committee of ISIS (Information Sciences + Information Studies) and is a member of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and an affiliate of the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities and the Institute for Global Health.

Anne McClintock is the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been the recipient of many awards, including two MacArthur-SSRC Fellowships. She is the author of Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Her work has also appeared in a wide range of prominent venues and journals, including Critical Inquiry, Transition, Social Text, New Formations, Feminist Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian (London), The Times Literary Supplement, The Village Voice, The Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is working on a new book called Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, which has been solicited for consideration by Yale University Press.

Jodi Melamed is associate professor of English and Africana studies at Marquette University. Her current research aims to provide an anti-racist critique of U.S.-led global capitalist developments since World War II, as well as an anti-capitalist critique of historically dominant U.S. antiracisms. She is the author of the forthcoming book Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and a contributor to two forthcoming volumes, Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, edited by Roderick Ferguson and Grace Hong (Duke University Press, 2011) and Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York University Press).

Eric Lott teaches American Studies at the University of Virginia.  He has written and lectured widely on the politics of U.S. cultural history, and his work has appeared in a range of periodicals including The Village Voice, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Transition, Social Text, African American Review, PMLA, Representations, American Literary History, and American Quarterly.  He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford UP, 1993) and of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006).  He is currently finishing a study of race and culture in the twentieth century entitled Tangled Up in Blue: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism.