Colin Allen received his B.A. from University College London and his Ph.D. from UCLA. His research interests include the philosophy of biology and cognitive science, and he is best known for his work on animal behavior and cognition. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is coauthor of Species of Mind (1997) and coeditor of The Evolution of Mind (1998), Nature’s Purposes (1998), The Cognitive Animal (2002), and Philosophy Across the Life Sciences (2005). He is also co-editor of a special issue of the journal Biology and Philosophy (Dec. 2004) on animal cognition, in which he has a paper titled “Is Anyone a Cognitive Ethologist?” Other recent articles explore animal pain and the problem of rationality in animals. Allen is Associate Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, coauthor of a logic textbook, Logic Primer, and co-developer of two, online logic instructional sites.
Norma Feshbach is Professor of Psychology Emerita at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She earned her B.S. in psychology at CCNY and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include emotional, social and personality development; the development, measurement, and training of empathy; parental stress; child advocacy; child abuse and social policy; and children’s ethnic tolerance. A long-time specialist in the problem of empathy as it relates to child development, education, and training for prosocial behavior, her first article on the subject—”Empathy in six and seven year olds”—appeared in 1968. This was the beginning of a life-time of important work, addressing such topics as empathy and aggression, empathy in children, parent empathy, empathy practice in psychotherapy, empathy training.
Virgina Held is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate School and Professor Emerita at Hunter College. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University. Among her books are The Public Interest and Individual Interests (1970); Rights and Goods: Justifying Social Action (1984); Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (1993); the edited collections Property, Profits, and Economic Justics (1980) and Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics (1995); and the co-edited collections Philosophy and Political Action (1972) and Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs (1974). She was President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) and has been a fellow at the center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and received Fulbright and Rockefeller fellowships.
William Reddy received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and holds joint appointments in the departments of history and anthropology at Duke University. A recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, fellowships at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and at the National Humanities Center, this year he is in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His research focuses on such the social history of industrialization, comparative social history of the modern era, the history of emotions and gender identities in France since 1750, theories of culture, and theories of emotions. His book, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (2001) examines current theories of emotions in cognitive psychology and ethnography and proposes a new theory of emotions that makes it possible to conceive of and examine historical change in emotional experience. He is now working on the comparative history of romantic love.
Kenneth Reinhard, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Libertature at UCLA, received his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. His research fields include the History of Critical and Aesthetic Theory, Contemporary Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is the co-author of Neighbors, A Love Story (forthcoming, 2005) and After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (1993), as well as articles on Freud, Lacan, Levinas, Henry James, Jewish Studies, and the Bible. He has edited a special issue of Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonialism on religion. Currently, he is writing a book on the ethics of the neighbor in religion (Torah, Talmud, and Patristic writings), philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard, Adorno, Rosenzweig, and Levinas), and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan). He has received grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Jacqueline Stevens is Assistant Professor of Law and Society at UCSB. She earned her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. The author of Reproducing the State (1999), her research explores how laws create hereditary membership groups that seem to be natural by constituting the nation, ethnicity, race, family, kinship, and sexuality. She is also interested in the role of government research in constituting taxonomies of race and ethnicity through the research done on the Human Genome Project. She is currently writing two books, States without Nations, that addresses history and theory for imagining governance in a world that allows for the free movement of people regardless of ancestry or place of birth, and Human Being Project, that documents the origin of the U.S. HGP in the Manhattan Project and the continued resonance of racism and eugenics in this line of research.