Abdul Alkalimat is professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois. Alkalimat was most recently a professor of sociology and director of the Africana Studies program at the University of Toledo. He moderates the largest African-American Studies discussion list, H-Afro-Am, and created and edits Malcolm X: A Research Site as well as eBlack Studies He is a member of the editorial boards of Information, Communication and Society; cy.Rev; and The Black Scholar.

Alkalimat's research interests include: digital inequality, community informatics, and African American intellectual history. He is the director of the Digital Research Initiative of the National Council for Black Studies funded by the Ford Foundation. He will share a joint appointment with Illinois's African American Studies and Research Program.

Alkalimat earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Syd Bauman (Brown U, Women Writers Project) is North American Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Along with the European Editor, Lou Burnard, Syd is responsible for guiding the activities of the TEI. Syd is responsible for guiding the activities of the TEI: assisting the TEI Board of Directors in its task of administering a multi-national research and standards consortium, assisting the TEI Council in its task of setting strategic technical goals for the TEI, assisting each of the TEI work groups in establishing tactical recommendations for various arenas of text encoding, and coordinating and copyediting the Guidelines.

Bryan Carter is an Associate Professor of literature at Central Missouri State University . He specializes in African American literature of the 20th Century with a primary focus on the Harlem Renaissance and has a secondary emphasis on visual culture. He has published numerous articles on his doctoral project, Virtual Harlem and has presented it at locations around the world. In the spring of 2004, he served as Professeur Invite at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne where he taught Digital Communications and Cultural Studies. Dr. Carter has also been one of the forerunners in the Department of English and Philosophy in the use of technology in the classroom where recently he has incorporated desktop videoconferencing, podcasting, Internet radio broadcasts, blogging and Second Life into each of his courses. Being a strong supporter of online collaboration, Dr. Carter actively connects his classes with those of colleagues in Sweden, France as well as universities in the states.

Merle Collins is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1990. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora, US Ethnic and Postcolonial literatures. Among her many publications are: The Colour of Forgetting (Virago, 1995), Rotten Pomerack (Virago, 1992), Rain Darling (The Women's Press, 1990), Angel (The Women's Press, 1987), Because the Dawn Breaks (Karia Press, 1985). She has made contributions to 13 additional journals and collections, including poems in Facing the Sea: An Anthology of Writing from the Caribbean Region, 1990 and edited Watchers & Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain (The Women's Press, 1987), and Callaloo: A Grenada Anthology, (Young World Books, 1984). Merle Collins is a Resident Fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), 2006-2008.

DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid (born Paul D. Miller, 1970), is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called 'illbient' or 'trip hop'. He is a turntablist and producer. He borrowed his stage name from a character in a William S. Burroughs novel. Growing up in DC, Spooky became interested in punk and go-go music, and attended Bowdoin College in Maine, earning degrees in French literature and philosophy. He began writing science fiction and formed a collective called Soundlab with several other artists.

In 2004 DJ Spooky released a book, Rhythm Science published by MIT Press. The same year saw the launch of his film/music/multimedia performance piece "DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation". A live audio/video re-mix of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation which includes footage from choreographer Bill T. Jones and a score newly composed by DJ Spooky, "Rebirth of a Nation" was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival, The Festival d'Automne a Paris, The Spoleto Festival USA, and the Vienna Festival. DJ Spooky continues to tour the world performing this work. In 2006 DJ Spooky produced two extensive compilations of classic Jamaican music from the archives of Trojan Records, the 40 year old Jamaican record label founded by Chris Blackwell and Lee Gopthal. The U.S. release, In Fine Style: DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records focused on "selections" from the archive, while the UK and worldwide release, Riddim Come Forward was a continuous mix. The compilation features a roster of Jamaica's most renowned artists and producers like Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, U-Roy, King Tubby and Prince Jammy. DJ Spooky is also a professor of music mediated art at the European Graduate School where he co-teaches (with Michael Schmidt) Intensive Summer Seminars in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Howard Dodson is Chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library New York, New York. Howard Dodson is a specialist in African-American history and a noted lecturer, educator and consultant. Since 1984, he has been Chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. In addition to his position at the Schomburg Center, Mr. Dodson has extensive teaching experience at institutions such as California State University at Heywood, Emory University, Shaw University and Columbia University. He has worked as a consultant in the Office of the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, served as the Executive Director of the Institute of the Black World, and worked as both a volunteer and staff member for the Peace Corps. Mr. Dodson has also been a consultant for a wide variety of organizations including the Congressional Black Caucus, Atlanta University, the Library of Congress and the U.S. Department of Education.

Anna Everett works in the fields of film and TV history/theory, African-American film and culture, and Digital Media Technologies. She is the author of Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Duke Univ. Press, 2001) and is currently at work on books titled Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, and Inside the Dark Museum: An Anthology of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1959. Recent articles include: "The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere" (Social Text, Summer 2002), "The Black Press in the Age of Digital Reproduction" (The Black Press, 2001), "'I Want the Same Things Other People Enjoy': The Black Press and the Classic Hollywood Studio System" (Spectator, 1997), and "The Other Pleasures: The Narrative Function of Race in the Cinema" (Film Criticism, 1995-96). She is founder and managing editor of the Internet newsletter, Screening Noir Online; and she co-organized the conference titled "Race in Digital Space 2.0." Everett is the recent winner of the prestigious UCSB Plous Award, the top recognition for younger faculty at UCSB. Among the courses the film and media scholar, Anna Everett, teaches is one on science fiction and cyberspace. Everett is writing a book on cyberspace and editing an anthology of early black film criticism.

Julia Flanders (Brown U) is the vice-chair of the TEI Consortium, director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University, editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and a consultant at Brown's Scholarly Technology Group. She has spoken and published on the gender politics of editing as well as on theoretical and practical problems in text encoding.

Jerome S. Handler is senior fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Black American Studies, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale). A sociocultural anthropologist and ethnohistorian, he specializes in the early African Diaspora in the New World and Caribbean slavery.

Kara Keeling Assistant professor Kara Keeling's research focuses on Third Cinema and feminist film, as well as representations of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema, critical theory, cultural studies, and African cinema. Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Kara taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), was an adjunct assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and served as a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world, and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life.

She is also the author of several articles published in anthologies and journals. Kara is currently writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled "Digital Media and Social Movements," and completing several essays on topics such as temporality, cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory. She has developed and taught courses on topics such as Media and Activism, Cinema and Social Change, Race, Sexuality, and Cinema, and Film As Cultural Critique, among others. She currently serves as an Elected Representative to the Modern Language Association's Division on Film and on the editorial board of the journal Cultural Studies.

Angel David Nieves is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park and Director of Graduate Research and Training at the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity (CRGE) and as a Resident Fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), 2006-2008. He is an affiliate faculty member in the Departments of American Studies, Women's Studies, African American Studies, and Anthropology. He is also an affiliate member of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies and the Program in LGBT Studies. He completed his doctoral work in architectural history and Africana studies at Cornell University in His book manuscript, 'We Gave Our Hearts and Lives To It:' Black Women and Nation-Building in the New South, is currently being revised for publication with Duke University Press. He is also the co-editor (w/Leslie Alexander) of a forthcoming volume, 'We Shall Independent Be:' African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S., with the University Press of Colorado (due Spring 2008).

His scholarly work and community-based activism critically engages with issues of memory, heritage preservation, gender, and nationalism at the intersections of race and the built environment in the Global South.

For academic year 2007-2008 he will work to launch the first U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, helping fill both faculty and administrative posts during the program's inaugural year.

Alexander G. Weheliye is associate professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University where he teaches African American and Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture, Critical Theory, and Popular Culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture. Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Technologies of Humanity concerns the vexed category of the human in modernity as it pertains to Afro-Diasporic culture. The second, Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin, tracks the different ways in which these thinkers imagine the 'marginal' as central to the workings of modern civilization. His work has been published and is forthcoming in American Literary History, boundary 2, CR: The New Centennial Review, The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, Social Text, and the anthologies Black Europe and the African Diaspora and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland.

Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology. She creates solo works combining operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found percussion objects, spoken word, digital processing, and a MIDI controller called The BodySynth^TM (which allows her to manipulate sound with physical gestures.) In addition to her solo work, she has composed and recorded scores for dance, theatre, film, and new music chamber ensembles. Her large-scale multi-media works have been presented at Theater Artaud and ODC in SanFrancisco and at The Kitchen in New York, and her audio works have been presented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Diözesanmuseum in Cologne. Her multi-media opera Wunderkabinet -- based on the Museum of Jurassic Technology (created in collaboration with Matthew Brubeck and Christina McPhee) has been presented at The LAB Gallery (San Francisco) in 2005 and at REDCAT (Disney Hall, Los Angeles) in 2006. Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center in New York, the Interlink Festival in Japan, the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival in Wuppertal, Germany, and La Biennale di Venezia in Italy. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Fund, the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts, the ASCAP Music Award, and the NEA and Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.