Professor Bashir’s research is concerned with the intellectual and social history of Iran and Central and Southern Asia from the fourteenth century to the present. He is the author of numerous articles and two books: Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam (2003) and Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (2005). Bashir is currently finishing a book entitled Bodies of God’s Friends: Sufis in Persianate Islamic Societies. This book is based on research for which he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and the Foundation  for Iranian Studies chose his work for its annual prize for the best dissertation in the field.

Professor Buc's research has been concerned with religion and power in pre-modern western Europe. His current research project studies the intersections between three cultural forms -- holy war, martyrdom and terror -- in the longue durée of Western History, from 70 C.E. to the present. It is both an analysis in cultural continuities -- for instance the French terrorists' debt to Catholic martyrdom, universalism and theories of coercion -- and in the reflexive and reflective use of the premodern past by participants in modern terror, martyrdom or holy war. He is the recipient of the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has taught in Heidelberg (Germany) and been a Fellow at the Dutch Institute for Advanced Studies [NIAS].

Professor Fonrobert specializes in classical Judaism, particularly talmudic Judaism. Much of her work has dealt with the ways gender operates in this literature, with the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and with the connection between religion and space or territory. She has published a number of articles in academic journals, anthologies and encyclopedias. Her first book, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (2000) received the Salo Wittmayr Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies, awarded by the American Academy of Jewish Research, and was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She co-edited the Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007) and is currently working on a manuscript entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and Neighborhood. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Professor Klein is the author of some 17 books and 145 articles in several languages on Latin America and on comparative themes in social and economic history. Among these books are four comparative studies of slavery, the most recent of which are The Atlantic Slave Trade (1999) and Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750-1850 (co-author) (2003), as well as four books on Bolivian history. His long-term interests are in comparative economic and social history, and he is currently working on 20th century social change in Latin America and the United States. Aside from courses on Latin America, he teaches methodology classes on quantitative methods in historical research and demographic history. He has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Fulbright Lecturer several times and was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale and Oxford. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is currently the director of the Center for Latin American Studies.

Professor Roberts is currently interested in the social history of everyday life during the 25 years surrounding French conquest of the interior of West Africa. He is particularly interested in examining how colonial conquest and the establishment of colonial rule ushered in changes in African societies and economies. Professor Roberts teaches lecture courses on modern African history and more specialized courses on law in colonial Africa, the slave trade, health and society in Africa, and African Societies and colonial states. He is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished teaching and is the author of eight books and numerous journal publications. His most recent books are Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Coursts in the French Soudan, 1895-1912 (2005) and Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Modern Africa (2006).

Gabriella Safran received a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is interested in Russian, Polish and Yiddish literatures; religion and aesthetics; bilingual writing; biography; the artistic construction of ethnic identities and the impact of media technology on literary form. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where she teaches nineteenth-century Russian prose, the history of Russian critical theory, Russian-Jewish literature and Yiddish literature. She is completing a literary biography of the Russian and Yiddish writer, ethnographer and revolutionary S. An-sky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920), tentatively titled The Hero and the Dybbuk.  

Vered Shemtov’s research focuses on Hebrew Language and Literature. She is currently working on a book entitled Verse and Place: Poetic Form Between Home and Exile in Modern Hebrew Literature. Her recent publications include articles on Jewish and Israeli perspectives of space in Yehuda Amichai’s poetry, Web-based assignments for promoting proficiency in LCTL, discontinuous spaces in A. B Yehoshua’s work and the Bible in contemporary Israeli literature. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University, where he is also a Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). A political sociologist, Walder has long specialized on the sources of conflict, stability and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His current research focuses on changes in the ownership and control of large Chinese corporations and the parallel emergence of a new corporate elite with varied ties to state agencies. He also continues his research interest in Mao-era China, with a focus on the mass politics of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1969. Walder joined the Stanford University faculty in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981 and taught at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His recent publications include Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009), The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited with Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz (2006), "Ownership, Organization, and Income Inequality: Market Transition in Rural Vietnam" in the American Sociological Review (2008), "Ambiguity and Choice in Political Movements: The Origins of Beijing Red Guard Factionalism" in the American Journal of Sociology (2006), "From Control to Ownership: China's Managerial Revolution" in Management and Organizations Review (2009) and "Political Sociology and Social Movements" in Annual Review of Sociology (2009).