Chip Berlet is an investigative journalist and independent scholar who coauthored the book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford, 2000). From 1981 to 2011 he was senior analyst at Political Research Associates. In 2012 the University of California Press will publish his chapter on the US Tea Party movement. Other chapters include ‘The United States: messianism, apocalypticism, and political religion’ in The Sacred in Twentieth Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Professor Stanley G. Payne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and ‘The new political right in the United States: reaction, rollback, and resentment’, in Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (NYU Press, 2008). Other works have appeared in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Contemporary Sociology, American Anthropologist, and Research in Political Sociology. His article about right-wing conspiracy theories, ‘Fears of fédéralisme in the United States’, appeared in Fédéralisme Régionalisme; and he co-authored the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s entry on ‘Neo-Nazism’.
E. Lâle Demirtürk is an associate professor of American Literature in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, where she teaches classes on modern American literature and African American literature. She has earned her PhD in American Studies at the University of Iowa in 1986. She has published articles on American and African American novels in Turkey, and in the United States in such journals as Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, American Studies International, Mississippi Quarterly, Melus, College Literature, CLA Journal, Southern Literary Journal, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. Her book, entitled Modern African American Novel (1997) (in Turkish), was the first book published on the African American novel in Turkey. She is also the author of How Black Writers Deal With Whiteness: Characterization Through Deconstructing Color (Edwin Mellen, 2008). She is currently working (in English) on the representations of whiteness in the contemporary black novel, and writing (in Turkish) on critical pedagogy.
Anthony DiMaggio is the author of The Rise of the Tea Party (Monthly Review, 2011), Crashing the Tea Party (Paradigm, 2011), When Media Goes to War (Monthly Review, 2010), and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (Lexington, 2008). He is a PhD Candidate at University of Illinois, Chicago, and has taught American Government and Global Politics at numerous universities and colleges.
Samuel R. Friedman, PhD (Sociology) is the author of about 40 publications on workers’ movements, political economy, racism and social movements, including Teamster Rank and File (Columbia University Press, 1982). He is also an author of about 400 publications on HIV, STI, and drug use epidemiology and prevention, including pieces in Nature, Science, Scientific American, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and the American Journal of Public Health. Honors include the International Rolleston Award of the International Harm Reduction Association (2009), the first Sociology AIDS Network Award for Career Contributions to the Sociology of HIV/AIDS (2007), and a Lifetime Contribution Award, Association of Black Sociologists (2005). He has published many poems in a variety of publications. He wrote two poetry chapbooks, Murders Most Foul: Poems Against War by a World Trade Center Survivor (Central Jersey Coalition against Endless War, 2005) and Needles, Drugs, and Defiance: Poems To Organize By (North American Syringe Exchange Network, 1999) and a book of poetry, Seeking to make the world anew: Poems of the Living Dialectic (Hamilton Books, 2008).
Lauren Langman is a professor of sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. He has long worked in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, especially relationships between culture, identity, and politics/political movements. He is the past president of Alienation Research and Theory, Research Committee 36 of the International Sociological Association, as well as past president of the Marxist section of the American Sociological Association. Recent publications deal with globalization, alienation, global justice movements, the body, nationalism, and national character. His most recent books are The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) edited with Devorah Kalekin and Alienation and the Carnivalization of Society (Routledge, 2011) edited with Jerome Braun.
George Lundskow is an associate professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University, MI. In addition to contemporary rightist movements, his research occurs in two other main areas. One examines the intersection of popular culture and political economy in the US auto industry, and the second delves into matrifocal religion and society in Old Europe. His recent publications include articles on carnival culture, labor relations in the US auto industry, and a textbook on the sociology of religion.
Paul Street is an independent journalist, policy adviser, and historian. Formerly he was Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League. Among his recent books are Crashing the Tea Party (Paradigm, 2011), The Emperor’s New Clothes (Paradigm, 2010), Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (Routledge, 2005). His many articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, In These Times, Dissent, Z Magazine, Black Commentator, Monthly Review, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Social History, and other publications.
Michael J. Thompson is associate professor of Political Science at William Paterson University. His previous books include The Politics of Inequality (Columbia, 2007), Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (NYU, 2007), and Fleeing the City: Studies in the Culture and Politics of Antiurbanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), among others.
Leonard Zeskind is author of Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2009) and is President of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, www.IREHR.org.
