Dr Putnam is regarded as one of the world's most influential social researchers and the leading authority on social capital. Dr Putnam's international reputation is primarily based on his theories of social capital and social trust. His most famous and controversial work is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), a ground-breaking work on the decline of social capital and social trust in American society. His most recent research has focused on the relationship between trust and ethnic diversity in American society, as well as on the power of religion to divide and unite. He is now working on growing class inequality in America. Dr Putnam has also advised governments in many countries over the last decade.
Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland–College Park. He is Senior Research Fellow, Center for American Law and Political Science, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China and Honorary Professor of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. He the author of eight books, including The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008; paperback, 2010; Chinese translation forthcoming 2011 Chinese Social Sciences Press; Japanese translation in progress), and Segregation and Mistrust: Diversity, Isolation, and Social Cohesion (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and approximately 150 articles and has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage and C.V. Starr Foundations. He was the Fulbright Distinguished Professor of American Political Science at the Australian National University, Canberra in 2010 and in 1981-82 was Fulbright Professor of American Studies and Political Science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
Mikael Rostila is an associate professor of Sociology and works as a researcher and project manager at Centre for Health Studies, Stockholm University/Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. He has also frequently visited Harvard School of Public Health for longer and shorter-term guest research. His research interests include the study of health inequalities and the social determinants of health. Especially, he has been interested in how social capital influences health and health inequality in different welfare state contexts and how welfare state characteristics can stimulate the creation of social capital. His recent publications include: Social capital and health inequality in European welfare states (2013), Palgrave Macmillan; Den orättvisa hälsan – om socioekonomiska skillnader i hälsa och livslängd, Liber (co-edited with Susanna Toivanen); The facets of social capital, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (2011). “The forgotten griever”: Mortality subsequent to the death of a sibling, American Journal of Epidemiology (2012); Mortality differentials by immigrant groups in Sweden: The contribution of socioeconomic position, American Journal of Public Health (in press).
Stein Ringen is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Oxford. He is a Norwegian political scientist whose academic interests are in various aspects of democracy and good government. His research has been in welfare studies and welfare states, income and class inequality, the meaning and measurement of poverty, family policy and family economics, the theory of democracy, and state theory as applied to Scandinavia, Britain, the United States, East-Central Europe during the post-communist transition, and South Korea. He is currently engaged in a study of the Chinese state. Outside of academia, he has served as a government official, including as Assistant Director General in the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, as a news and feature reporter in the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, and as a consultant to the United Nations and to commercial organisations. His most recent book is Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience (Yale 2013). Previous books include The Possibility of Politics: On the Political Economy of the Welfare State (Oxford 1987 and Transaction 2006), What Democracy Is For: On Freedom and Moral Government (Princeton 2007) and The Korean State and Social Policy: How South Korea Lifted Itself from Poverty and Dictatorship to Affluence and Democracy (co-authored, Oxford 2011).
Sverre Raffnsøe holds a doctoral degree in philosophy and a position as Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. He is editor-in-chief of Foucault Studies and research director of The Human Turn (HUMAN) and Management of Self-Management, research programmes funded by Velux Fonden. In addition to Foucault: Studienhandbuch (Fink Verlag, 2010), Foucault: A comprehensive Introduction (Palgrave, forthcoming 2012), Nietzsches “Genealogie der Moral” (Fink Verlag, 2007) and Coexistence without Common Sense, Vol. I-III (doctoral dissertation 2002), he is the author of books and articles on philosophical aesthetics, management philosophy, social philosophy and recent French and German philosophy.
Cheryl Mattingly, Ph.D., is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and the Division of Occupational Science and Therapy, University of Southern California. She is also a Dale T. Mortensen Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University. She has been a frequent Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy in the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her primary research and theoretical interests include: Narrative, moral reasoning and experience, phenomenology, the culture of biomedicine, chronic illness and disability, the ethics of care, and health disparities in the United States. She has been the PI and CI on federally funded grants from National Institutes of Health, Maternal and Child Health and the Department of Education. She has published extensively on these topics, including numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters and six books (including one forthcoming). She received the Victor Turner Prize (American Anthropological Association) for Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots (1998) and the Stirling Book Prize (Society for Psychological Anthropology) for The Paradox of Hope: Journey Through a Clinical Borderland (2010). Her other books include: Clinical Reasoning in a Therapeutic Practice (1994); Narrative, Self and the Social Practice (2009),co-edited with Uffe Jensen; and Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (Forthcoming).
Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama and Director of the Shakespeare Programme at Lancaster University (UK). She is the author of Illegitimate Power (1994), A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (1998), Women in Shakespeare (2010) and Much Ado About Nothing: a guide to the text and the play in performance (2011). Alison was co-director of a research project on early women's drama, producing a series of filmed performances and a co-authored book Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 (2000). She went on to write a specialised study of site-specific production, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (2006). She has published essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries and is a General Editor of the Revels Plays (Manchester University Press). Alison is dramaturg to the Rose Company who in 2013-14 have produced Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia (c.1555), the first known play by an Englishwoman. She is currently organising a ‘Lancaster Season of Shakespeare’ for 2014 and ‘Dramatizing Penshurst’, a conference to be held on 8-9 June 2014 at Penshurst Place with an on-site production of Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory by the Globe Theatre.
Svend Andersen holds a doctoral degree in theology both from Ruprecht Karl Universität, Heidelberg, and the University of Aarhus. He is Professor in ethics and philosophy of religion at the University of Aarhus. He has written about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and about philosophy of religious language. His most recent book is on political ethics, including the ethics of Søren Kierkegaard. Among his current research issues is the thought of his predecessor, the theologian and philosopher Knud E. Løgstrup.
Gerd B. Achenbach is a German philosopher and renowned for founding the first philosophical practice, combining philosophy and psychotherapy. He received his Doctorate in 1981, and has since taught at universities in several cities, including Vienna, Klagenfurt and Berlin.
