Speaker List
Casey Nelson Blake
Benjamin Demott
Fred Dewey
Alexandra Eitle
Todd Gitlin
Jonathan Hansen
Allan M. Jalon
Chris Lehmann
Paul K. Longmore
Clark Middleton
Paul Steven Miller
George Packer
Christopher Phelps
Michael Rosenthal
John Seitz
Barbara Probst Solomon
András Szántó
Michael True
Nicole Wallack
Robert Westbrook
Michael Wreszin

Biographies
Casey Nelson Blake is professor of history and American studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford, as well as many articles on Bourne and his successors.

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Benjamin Demott is a writer and editor for the radical newspaper First of the Month and three-time recipient of the Fund for Creative Communities.

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Fred Dewey is the Founder of Beyond Baroque Books. He has edited and published books by Simone Forti, Ammiel Alcalay, and forthcoming works by Benjamin Hollander and Jean-Luc Godard. His writings have been published in Coagula Art Journal, the Los Angeles Times, New Statesman, LA Weekly, and the anthologies Most Art Sucks: 10 years of Coagula (Smart Art) and The Architecture of Fear (Princeton Architecture Press). He is a cofounder of the Neighborhood Councils Movement in Los Angeles and a member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.

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Alexandra Eitle is an actress in New York City.

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Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of 11 books, including the forthcoming The Intellectuals and the Flag, and Other Essays on Liberal Social Thoughts After September 11. He writes a weekly column on the campaign for www.opendemocracy.net, which he also serves as North American editor, and is a contributing writer to Mother Jones.

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Jonathan Hansen is lecturer in history at Harvard University and author of The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago 2003). He is currently at work on two projects, a history of American expatriates in the twentieth century and a history of the U.S. Naval Base at Guántanamo Bay, Cuba.

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Allan M. Jalon is a freelance journalist and writer, mainly on literary and cultural subjects. He was a National Arts Journalism fellow in 2002–03. He writes mainly for the Los Angeles Times, but his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Jewish Forward, and many other publications. Recent pieces have included one on walking the waterfront of New York with the writer Phillip Lopate, and an Azerbaijani gas-station attendant's love affair with Theodore Dreisier, and a fiftieth anniversary consideration of I. F. Stone's Weekly. He has regularly reviewed contemporary poetry for the San Francisco Chronicle. His fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in such journals as the Southwest Review, Manoa, and Global City Review. He is a 1978 graduate of Columbia College.

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Chris Lehmann is the features editor at New York Magazine and former senior book editor for the Washington Post Book World.

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Paul K. Longmore is professor of history at San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Invention of George Washington (1988) and Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (2003). He coedited the New Disability History: American Perspectives, with Lauri Umansky.

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Clark Middleton is an actor, writer, and director, who has performed in close to one hundred plays in New York City and throughout the United States. He has collaborated in new works with such artists as Sam Sheppard, John Guare, John Belluso, Eduardo Machado, Lanford Wilson, Al Pacino, Geraldine Paige, and Joseph Chaiken. In films, he has appeared in Kill Bill Vol. 2, Serendipity, and The Opponent (soon to be released), The Warrior Class, and Sin City. In television, he regularly appears as forensic technician Ellis in Law & Order. He is the founder of the theater company Apt. 929. His one-man play, Miracle Mile, was critically acclaimed in New York and through the United States. He appeared as Randolph Bourne in the L.A. premier production of John Belluso's play The Body of Bourne.

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Paul Steven Miller is professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law. He recently completed ten years as commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He also has served as the White House liaison to the disability community.

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George Packer is the author of two novels and two book on nonfiction, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is a staff writer of the New Yorker and won two Overseas Press Club Awards in 2004 for his reporting for the magazine.

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Christopher Phelps is associate professor of history at the Ohio State University. This academic year, he is the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Lodz in Poland. He is the author of Young Sidney Hook (issued this fall by University of Michigan Press).

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Michael Rosenthal is professor of English at Columbia University. He has just completed a biography of Nicholas Murray Butler entitled Nicholas Miraculous.

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John Seitz is a veteran actor who has most recently appeared in the film Chelsea Walls, directed by Ethan Hawke. He also appeared in G.I. Jane and many other films. He has won two Obies for his work in Talk and Abington Squares. Other roles were in Krapp's Last Tape and in End Game. He a member of Apt. 929.

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Barbara Probst Solomon is the author of seven books, including the prize-winning Arriving Where We Started, The Beat of Life, Short Flights, and Horse-Trading and Ecstasy. Winner (2004) of Spain's prestigious literary honor Premio Antonio de Sancha for upholding universal cultural and literary values, Solomon is also a professor at Sarah Lawrence and a correspondent of El Pais. She has also written for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Harper's magazine, the L.A. Times, and the Washington Post. She is also the curator of the America—Meet Modernism! exhibit at New York's Instituto Cervantes.

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András Szántó joined the NAJP in 1997 and he was appointed director of the program in 2004. Szántó has coauthored and edited four books as well as numerous critical essays and research reports about culture, media, and arts policy. His reporting and commentary have in appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the American Prospect, Newsday, Architecture, the International Herald Tribune, Variety, and other publications. He has overseen numerous research initiatives and conferences at the NAJP, and he has lectured extensively in academic and cultural institutions in the United States and abroad.

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Michael True is the author of ten books, including An Energy More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature (1995), and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Randolph Bourne (Duke 1964). Emeritus professor, Assumption College, and a Fulbright Scholar in India (1997–98 and 2003–04), he taught at the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, Teachers College, Columbia.

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Nicole Wallack is the associate director of Columbia's Undergraduate Writing Program and a specialist on the history of the essay.

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Robert Westbrook is professor of history at the University of Rochester. He is the author of John Dewey and American Democracy (1991) and Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (2004), as well as a forthcoming book entitled Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Cornell University Press).

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Michael Wreszin is professor emeritus from Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written three biographies of intellectual journalists, Oswald Garrison Villard, Albert Jay Nock, and most recently Dwight Macdonald. He is also the author of a scholarly polemic on Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as a Cold War activist.

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