Dr. James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. He worked at IBM for thirty-eight years in sales, consulting, managerial, and research positions. His latest book is Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments, and Businesses. More»
Dr. Chad Orzel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY, where he teaches a wide range of classes, and does research on atomic, molecular, and optical physics. He writes a blog about physics for Forbes.com. He is the author of several books, including Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, and Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects. His latest book is A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. More»
Dr. Azar Gat is the Ezer Weizman Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University, in Israel. He is the founder and head of the University's International Program in Security and Diplomacy Executive Master’s Program in Diplomacy and Security. He’s also the author of books like A History of Military Thought, War in Human Civilization, and Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. His most recent book is Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today’s Culture Wars. More»
Dr. Jon Wisman is Professor of Economics at American University in Washington, DC. He teaches graduate courses in the history of economic thought and economic methodology and undergraduate courses in macroeconomics, European economic history, American economic history, economic development, and labor economics. He is the author of The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality: Sex, Politics, and Ideology. More»
Dr. Philip Dwyer is Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has published widely on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, including a three-volume biography of Napoleon. He is the general editor of a four volume Cambridge World History of Violence, and co-editor of the Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. He is the editor of The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence. More»
Dr. Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He serves as the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate. More»
Dr. Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, a member of the Oxford Law Faculty (where he is a Visiting Professor), a Senior Research Associate at the Uehiro Institute for Practical Ethics (within the Faculty of Philosophy), and a Research Associate at the Ethox Centre and the Helex Centre (both within the Faculty of Medicine). His main areas of interest are medical law and ethics. Recently he has been focused particularly on questions of identity, personhood, and authenticity, on whether theories of human dignity can do any real work in the law, and on the use of intuitions in moral and legal reasoning. He is the author of many books, including his most recent one, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. More»
Dr. Edward Watts is presently the Vassiliadis Professor of Byzantine Greek History at UC San Diego, where he was formerly Co-Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. His research interests center on the intellectual and religious history of the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. He is the author of several books on ancient history, including Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny. His new book is The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. More»
Dr. Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, and formerly Chairman of the Department of Economics, at Harvard University. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1972. Dr Friedman’s newest book is Religion and the Rise of Capitalism – a fundamental reassessment of the foundations of current-day economics, showing how religious thinking has shaped economic thinking ever since the beginnings of modern Western economics and how this influence continues to be relevant today especially in the United States. His two other general interest books have been The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Knopf) and Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After (Random House). More»
Dr. Daniel Hoyer currently holds a postdoctoral position working with Dr. Peter Turchin on the Deep Roots of the Modern World, part of the SESHAT: Global History Databank Project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and comparative project hosted by the Evolution Institute and the University of Oxford. His postdoctoral work focuses on determining the institutional features and structures which underpin economic performance and the provision of public goods in these different places and times. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Buying a Province, Building an Empire: Money, Markets, and Growth in Roman Africa from Augustus to Aurelian on the economic and financial development of the western Roman Empire. He is the author of Figuring Out The Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History. More»
