James Joseph Heckman is a Nobel Memorial in Economic Sciences Prize-winning American economist at the University of Chicago, where he is The Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College; Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy; Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD); and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also Professor of Law at the Law School, a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
James C. Scott is an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism. His primary research has centered on peasants of Southeast Asia and their strategies of resistance to various forms of domination. The New York Times described his research as "highly influential and idiosyncratic".
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Judith Jarvis Thomson was an American philosopher who studied and worked on ethics and metaphysics. Her work ranges across a variety of fields, but she is most known for her work regarding the thought experiment titled the trolley problem and her writings on abortion. She is credited with naming, developing, and initiating the extensive literature on the trolley problem first posed by Philippa Foot which has found a wide range use since. Thomson also published a paper titled "A Defense of Abortion", which makes the argument that the procedure is morally permissible even if it is assumed that a fetus is a person with a right to life. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer is an American sociologist and the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She is an economic sociologist who focuses on the attribution of cultural and moral meaning to the economy. A constant theme in her work is economic valuation of the sacred, as found in such contexts as life insurance settlements and economic transactions between sexual intimates. In 2006 she was elected to the PEN American Center and in 2007 she was elected to both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Lizabeth Cohen is the current Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, as well as a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. From 2011-2018 she served as the Dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Currently, she teaches courses in 20th-century America, with a focus on urbanism, the built environment, and public history. She has also served as the Chair of the History Department at Harvard, director of the undergraduate program in history, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, among other administrative duties.
Joan Wallach Scott is an American historian of France with contributions in gender history. She is a professor emerita in the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Scott is known for her work in feminist history and gender theory, engaging post-structural theory on these topics. Geographically, her work focuses primarily on France, and thematically she deals with how power works, the relation between language and experience, and the role and practice of historians. Her work grapples with theory's application to historical and current events, focusing on how terms are defined and how positions and identities are articulated.
Nelson Lichtenstein is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes,” as well as the root causes of the gender pay gap. She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.
Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.
Victoria Hattam is an Australian-born American political scientist, noted for her research on American political economy and political development, and on the role of class, race and ethnicity in American politics.
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is a bestselling author, transgender activist, professor at Barnard College, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is a vice president of PEN America.
Peggy Deamer is an architect, architectural educator, and Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her research explores the nature of creative work, stretching from a psychoanalytic interpretation of art production and reception – initiated in the dissertation on Adrian Stokes, who was analyzed by Melanie Klein – to neo-Marxist examinations of creative labor. She is the founding member of the international advocacy group, The Architecture Lobby (TAL).
Labor feminism was a women's movement in the United States that emerged in the 1920s, focused on gaining rights in the workplace and unions. Labor feminists advocated for protectionist legislation and special benefits for women, a variant of social feminism. They helped pass state laws regulating working conditions for women, expanded women's participation in unions, and organized to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment.
Lisa Blau Kahn is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on labor economics with interests in organization, education, and contract theory. From 2014 to 2018, she served as an associate professor of economics at Yale School of Management and as an assistant professor of economics at Yale School of Management from 2008 to 2014. From 2010 to 2011, Kahn served as the senior economist for labor and education policy on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.
Sonya Michel is an American historian. She is Professor Emerita at the Department History, University of Maryland. She has also taught at Brandeis University, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Michel served as Director of United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Premilla Nadasen is an activist and historian, who specialises in the histories of women of colour in the welfare rights movement. She was President of the National Women's Studies Association from 2018 to 2020. She is the author of Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (2005) and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2016).
