Bill Flood is a consultant in the area of community cultural development from Portland, Oregon, now living in Berlin. The primary emphasis of his 20-year consulting practice with public organizations and private non-profit groups has been on utilizing culture to build sustainable organizations and communities. Bill Flood served for nine years as the Community Development Coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission where he assisted hundreds of Oregon communities, Indian tribes, and schools utilize local arts resources to build stronger places. He holds a Master of Science degree in Community Systems Planning and Development from Pennsylvania State University. In 2007, he was a Senior Specialists Candidate with the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. Mr. Flood regularly lectures at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and is an affiliate of the Institute for Community Arts Studies at the University of Oregon and a member of the University of Oregon’s Arts and Administration Program Professional Resource Council. He works on several projects in the U.S. and Germany.
http://www.billflood.org
Murray Forman is Professor of Communications at Northeastern University in Boston. His work engages with issues of media and representation in contemporary society, with particular emphasis on images and discourses pertaining to youth, race, and ethnicity. He is the author of The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop, Middletown, CN, 2002, and co-editor, with Mark Anthony Neal, of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, New York 2004, as well as authoring numerous articles on youth, race, popular music, television, and film. He is currently working on a book length project titled One Night on TV is worth Weeks at the Paramount:Music on Television before Elvis and is also co-editor of The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Dr. Forman recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship award. The award is for archival and historical research towards his book project One Night on TV is worth Weeks at the Paramount: Music on Television before Elvis.
http://www.commstudies.neu.edu/faculty_and_staff/murray_forman/
David E. James is Professor of Critical Studies, at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Dr. James has expanded and enriched the cultural scene in Los Angeles, curated countless film programs, worked on museum exhibitions, produced his own film work and published extensively in the arts and popular press, including his latest book The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, Berkeley 2005. James’ awards include an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research. In 2007, he was named one of two Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is the editor of To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, Princeton 1992, as well as The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, Minneapolis 1996, and has served on the editorial boards of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Now Time, and Art Week.
http://cinema.usc.edu/faculty/james-david.htm
Howard R. Wolf is Professor emeritus of American Literature, journalism and creative writing at SUNY Buffalo. His interests are travel and travel writing, imagination and short fiction, general criticism, literary journalism (creative nonfiction), autobiography, letters and history of American and British Literature. Howard Wolf’s publications include Forgive the Father: A Memoir of Changing Generations, 1978, A Version of Home: Letters from the World, 1992, Broadway Serenade, novel, 1993, The Autobiographical Impulse in America, 1993, The Education of a Teacher, 1987, and The Education of Ludwig Fried, stories, 2006. His most recent publication is Far-Away Places: Lessons in Exile, 2007. Professor Wolf was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for Turkey (1983–1984) and South Africa (1988). He was also a Senior Academic Visitor at Wolfson College, Cambridge University in spring 2007.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/wolf/wolf.htm
Martina Kohl studied at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz and Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. She received an M.A. (1985) and a Dr. Phil. (1992) from Mainz University. Her research interest concentrated on 19th and 20th century American literature. From 1985 to 1990, Dr. Kohl taught in the English Department and for the English Composition Board and served as writing consultant at the Business School of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Since 1993, Dr. Kohl has been working as Cultural Affairs Specialist for the U.S. Embassy in Bonn and Berlin where she coordinates a Germany-wide speaker as well as curriculum development program in American Studies. Dr. Kohl frequently teaches Cultural Diplomacy courses at Humboldt University Berlin. Her publications include “The Wilhelm Meister Pebble”: Bildungsromanelemente in Thomas Wolfes Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939) und You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), Würzburg 1994, and Visual Culture in the American Studies Classroom: Proceedings of the U.S. Embassy Teacher Academy 2003, Vienna 2005, which she co-edited with Udo J. Hebel. Together with Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, Prof. Dr. Alfred Hornung, Dr. Kohl edits the American Studies Journal.
