Mr. Jeffrey Werbock has had a life-long interest in the art and music of Azerbaijan. He has made over 30 visits to Azerbaijan over the past 23 years. He was the lead consultant to the Folklife Institute of the Azerbaijani delegation to the Smithsonian’s Folklife Institute’s 2002 Silk Road Festival. Mr. Werbock plays a number of Azeri musical instruments including the kamancha and tar that are part of the Mugham art music tradition. He received two honorary degrees from the National Music Conservatory in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mr. Werbock has performed and lectured on the Mugham music tradition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the American Museum of Natural History, NYC, the Smithsonian Museum’s Silk Road Festival, Washington DC, Merkin Hall, Lincoln Center, NYC, World Music Institute, NYC, Dartmouth University, Hanover NH, Tufts University, Fletcher School of International Affairs, Cambridge MA, West Point Military Academy, NY, Salon de Musique, Basel Switzerland, and many other institutions.

Priscilla Song, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University. She received her BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Yale University and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. As a sociocultural anthropologist interested in the links among health, globalization and social inequality in socialist and post-socialist contexts, she has conducted ethnographic research on the urban Chinese health care system since 2004. She is currently completing a book that situates the rise of medical tourism for stem cell therapies within the politico-economic transformations of the Chinese health care system. She has recently published articles on "Biotech Pilgrims and the Transnational Quest for Stem Cell Cures" (2010) and "The Proliferation of Stem Cell Therapies in Post-Mao China: Problematizing Ethical Regulation" (2011). She has also conducted research on popular religion in Taiwan, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Beijing, stem cell laboratory practices in Boston, and radiation oncology in Cleveland. She teaches courses on modern Chinese culture and society, sociocultural and medical anthropology, and ethics and biotechnology.

Dr. Valerie Hoffman is a Professor in the Department of Religion and is an affiliate with the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in Islamic thought and practice. Dr. Hoffman received her Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Chicago. She has been on the faculty of the University of Illinois since 1983, and teaches courses on all aspects of Islam. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Hoffman is the author of Sufism, Mystics and Saints in Modern Egypt (University of South Carolina Press, 1995) and The Essentials of Ibadi Islam (Syracuse University Press, 2012), as well as numerous articles on Sufism, Islamic gender ideology, the Ibadi sect of Islam, and contemporary Islamic movements. In 1996 she was named a University Scholar, and during the 2009-2010 academic year she was a Carnegie scholar. She is currently working on a book entitled Islamic Sectarianism Reconsidered: Ibadi Islam in the Modern Age.

Dr. Geoff Childs, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, received his PhD from the departments of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University, in 1998. For the past two decades he has conducted research among Tibetans in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region and the highlands of Nepal. His primary research interest focuses on the impacts that economic, political, social and demographic changes have on families in small-scale agro-pastoral societies. Recent research projects investigate how genetic adaptations to high altitude affect fertility, parental strategies for managing family sizes and capitalizing on economic opportunities through migration, and the influence that rapid social and economic development has on intergenerational relations. In addition to publishing articles in various social science journals, Geoff is the author of Tibetan Diary: From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan Village of Nepal (University of California, 2004) and Tibetan Transitions: Historical Perspectives on Fertility, Family Planning, and Demographic Change (Brill, 2008).

Dr. Richard Kernaghan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He completed his doctoral degree at Columbia University in 2006 and was subsequently a visiting fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies of Yale University. Dr. Kernaghan is interested in the politics, economies and transportation predicaments of state frontiers, but also in theories of event, storytelling and ethnographic writing. The geographic focus of his research is a coca-growing area of Central Peru where a twenty-year cocaine boom overlapped with the insurrection of the Maoist Shining Path. His first book Coca’s Gone: Of Might and Right in the Huallaga Post-Boom (Stanford 2009) reflects on the relationship between violence, law and time through the social landscapes produced in the wake of the cocaine economy’s regional demise during the mid-1990s. He is currently working on a minor ethnographic history of the Huallaga Valley that explores the affective, material and spatial dimensions of law. Forthcoming publications include "Readings of Time: of Coca, Presentiment and Illicit Passage in Peru" in M. Holbraad and M. Pedersen (eds.) Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest, and the Future (Routledge, 2013); and “Furrows and Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road,” Mobilities (2013).

Dr. Jon Western's teaching and research interests focus on U.S. foreign policy, military intervention, human rights and humanitarian affairs. He teaches courses such as American Foreign Policy; American Hegemony and Global Politics in the 21st Century; The United States and the Promotion of Democracy and Human Rights; and Propaganda and War. Dr. Western is the author of Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2005. His articles and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including International Security, Security Studies, Harvard International Review, Global Dialogue, International Affairs, and Political Science Quarterly. Prior to joining the Mount Holyoke faculty, Western served as a peace scholar-in-residence and the coordinator of the Dayton Upgrade Project at the United States Institute of Peace. He has taught at Columbia University and George Washington University and served as a Balkans and East European specialist at the U.S. Department of State.