PHILIP E. STEINBERG is an Associate Professor of Geography at Florida State University. Much of his work foregrounds the in-between spaces of movement that are both governed and inhabited, even as they are perceived as empty spaces beyond society through which one merely passes. His key publications in this area include The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001). His present research focuses on the role of cartography and especially marine cartography in constructing the idealized dichotomy of fixity-in-place versus movement-across-space that provides the normative template of spatiality against which globalization is perceived as a place-transcending phenomenon.

KÄREN WIGEN is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches Japanese history and the history of early modern mapping. Her research interests include the historical geography of East Asia, early modernity in Japan, regional economies and rhetorics, and geographies of the imagination. She is the author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery (California, 1995), which won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, and co-author with Martin Lewis of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (California, 1997). Her current work centers on the discovery of the Japanese Alps at the turn of the twentieth century.

JEREMY PRESTHOLDT, Rockefeller Fellow at UC Santa Cruz during fall 2003, works in world history. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University (2003), and has recently joined the History faculty at Northeastern University. His current project seeks to both recover the interests of seemingly marginal people in processes of global integration and demonstrate the significance of historically under-considered populations to the genealogies of contemporary globalization. In its focus on East African consumer desires and their repercussions for places as distant as Boston and Bombay, the project excavates alternative visions of globality and develops a narrative of interrelation focused on local and social contingencies.

ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY, Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, is a Rockefeller Fellow at UC Santa Cruz for 2003-2004. She has completed one book manuscript, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, and her talk is drawn from her work in progress, Island Transplantations: Globalizing the Literary Seeds of Culture. Tracing the 18th-century history of commodity crop transfer between island spaces, she argues that human and plant diasporas facilitated a sense of modernity centuries before what we now term globalization. Her talk examines the 18th-century mutiny on the HMS Bounty and the tensions between the botanical and mutineer "seeds" of diaspora.

IVAYLO DITCHEV is Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of History and Theory of Culture at Sofia University, Bulgaria, and a Rockefeller Fellow at UC Santa Cruz for winter and spring quarters, 2004. His publications include "The Eros of Identity," in Balkans as Metaphor, ed. Savic Bielic (MIT, 2002), and From Belonging to Identity: Politics of the Image (LIK, 2002). Ditchev’s project, "Globalizing Civic Ritual: Imported Forms of Belonging and Legitimation in the Balkans," looks closely at imported ritual and at the role of the media in the dissemination of ritual practice. The regional focus of the project is southeastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. His presentation focuses on urban development and the culture of mass consumption in the Soviet empire in the 1950s and 1960s.

DAVID GRAEBER, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, works with groups such as the Direct Action Network, People’s Global Action, and the newly created Planetary Alternatives Network, all direct-action oriented, broadly anarchist or autonomous in philosophy, and active both in confronting neoliberal globalization and promoting concrete alternatives. He is the author of "The Globalization Movement and the New New Left," in Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century, ed. Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney (Basic Books, 2003) and "The New Anarchists," New Left Review 13 (January/February 2002). His Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology will appear in Spring 2004 (Prickly Paradigm).

ENGSENG HO is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Studies at Harvard University. His publications include "Names Beyond Nations: The Making of Local Cosmopolitans," in Études Rurales (July/Dec. 2002), and "Before Parochialization: Diasporic Arabs Cast in Creole Waters," in Huub de Jonge and Nico Kaptein (eds.), Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade and Islam in Southeast Asia (KITLV, 2002). He is interested in how issues of mobility challenge received theories of society and state, pursuing this interest through the study of diasporas and empires, employing ethnographic and historical material. His fieldwork experience is in Yemen and maritime Southeast Asia, among Arab, Chinese and Malay communities.

JAMES GELVIN is Associate Professor of History at UCLA. The focus of his research has been the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East, particularly Greater Syria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the author of Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (California 1998) and The Modern Middle East: A History (Oxford, 2004). His presentation traces the post-1971 transformation of American and IMF policy and the two types of resistance it created in the Middle East: a mass- based popular resistance, which gave rise to populist Islamism, and, more recently, an anarchist-style resistance, which gave rise to the bin Laden phenomenon. It also explores how America’s commitment to globalization dogmas will undercut U.S. policy in Iraq.