Frank Biess, Associate Professor of History, University of California – San Diego
Frank Biess is an historian of Modern Germany, and teaches in the Department of History at the University of California-San Diego. His first book Homecomings. Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, 2006) explored how Germans in East and West confronted defeat during the last years of the Nazi dictatorship and in the post-1945 period. His current project draws on a newly conceptualized history of emotions to write the history of fear and anxiety in West Germany from the 1940s to the present.
Laura Brandon, Canadian War Museum
Laura Brandon works as the Art and War historian for the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. In this role, she has organized a number of touring exhibitions including Paragraphs in Paint: The Second World War Art of Pegi Nicol MacLeod (1998, solo exhibition) and Canvas of War – Masterpieces from the Canadian War Museum (2000). Her work and research was featured in the Michael Ostroff’s film Pegi Nicol: Something Dancing About Her (N.F.B., 2005). Her research focuses on war art and artists as well as the context in which these works were produced. She lectures and publishes internationally on these topics. Her publications include Art and War. I.B. Tauris, 2007 Art or Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada’s War Art. University of Calgary Press, 2006 Pegi by Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Canadian Artist . McGill-Queen’s, 2005 which received the Alison Prentice Award
Bruce Curtis, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University
Bruce Curtis did his doctoral work at the University of Toronto and taught at McMaster, OISE/UT, Université de Montréal and Wilfrid Laurier University before coming to Carleton in 1994. His book projects have focussed on education and state formation, the development of the governmental instrument of inspection, and the politics and practices of census-making. His Ruling by Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality is due out in the spring of 2012. In addition to research related to pastoral power in Quebec and to debates over priority in scientific discovery, his current work centers on the historical sociology of blues music in the period to about 1940.
William Ian Miller, Thomas G. Long Professor of Law, University of Michigan
Cutting his academic teeth on the sagas of medieval Iceland, William Ian Miller is currently the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, where he teaches and writes on everything from medieval blood feuds to modern experiences of emotion. Not only has he linked classical, medieval and early modern experiences of humiliation to the modern practice of hosting a dinner party or to basketball etiquette, he has written a number of books looking at the experience of courage and cowardice, revenge and disgust across the history of the Western world. His books include: Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (1990), The Mystery of Courage (2000), The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), Humiliation (1993) and Faking It (2003). In Eye for an Eye (2006), Professor Miller sums up his longstanding work on the social and cultural world of revenge, retribution and justice. He has also been a visiting professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Bergen, the University of Tel Aviv, and Harvard, and was the Carnegie Centenary Trust Professor at the University of St. Andrews in 2008.
Keith Oatley, Professor Emeritus of Applied Psychology, University of Toronto
Keith Oatley is currently Professor Emeritus of Applied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Toronto, as well as continuing a successful career as a science journalist, blogger and novelist. Over the last two decades his principal research has been on human emotions and the influence of adversity on emotional disorders such as depression. He has also conducted research on the cognitive and emotional processes of reading and writing fiction, about which he will be speaking for the Shannon lecture series. He is the author of studies, including: Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (1992) and (with Dacher Keltner and Jennifer Jenkins) Understanding Emotions now out in its second edition (2006). Keith Oatley is also the author of two The Case of Emily V which won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel and A Natural History (1998). He is a former President of the International Society for Research on Emotions, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Barbara Rosenwein, Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago
Barbara Rosenwein is Professor of Medieval History at Loyola University Chicago Barbara H. Rosenwein received her Ph.D. degree in History from the University of Chicago. She has written extensively books on the medieval monks of Cluny, including: To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–1049 (1989) and Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (1999). She has worked extensively on the subject of emotions in history, editing Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (1998), writing Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) and helping found a new online journal Passions in Context. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Emotions Past: A History, which argues that the history of emotions is best seen as a succession of ‘emotional communities’– social groups whose members share standards and norms of emotional expression. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Utrecht (2005), the École Normale Supérieure (2004), and the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1992).
Sarita Srivastava, Associate Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University
Sarita Srivastava is an Associate Professor in the department of Sociology at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on social movements, the sociology of gender and race, and the sociology of emotions. Her primary interest is the interdisciplinary, historical and organizational study of race and gender. It is this interest that has guided her analysis of anti-racist challenges to social movements in North America, Canadian feminist organizing, and movements for aboriginal self-determination. Her recent work analyses the history, the discursive shifts, and the deadlocks of anti-racist challenges within social movements, primarily within women’s organizations. Here, she is interested in how social movements evolve under anti-racist challenges, as well as in how organizational discourses and techniques shape racial encounters. She has published influential articles in journals such as Signs, New Socialist,and Canadian Women Studies.