Allen Weinstein was a college professor, historian, author, and international envoy. From 1985 to 2003, he served as president of The Center for Democracy, a nonprofit foundation he created in 1985 to promote and strengthen the democratic process, based in Washington, DC. His international public service activities include chairing the Center’s election observation delegations in El Salvador (1991), Nicaragua (1989-90, 1996), Panama (1988-89), the Philippines (1985-86), and Russia (1991, 1996, 2000).

Professor Weinstein’s international awards included the United Nations Peace Medal (1986) and The Council of Europe’s Silver Medal (twice, in 1990 and 1996), presented by its Parliamentary Assembly. His other awards and fellowships included two Senior Fulbright Lectureships, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, the Commonwealth Fund Lectureship at the University of London, and a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship.

He was University Professor and professor of history at Boston University from 1985 to 1989, University Professor at Georgetown University from 1981 to 1984, and from 1981 to 1983, executive editor of The Washington Quarterly at Georgetown’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. He served as a member of The Washington Post editorial staff in 1981. From 1966 to 1981 he was professor of history at Smith College and chairman of its American studies program. In 1984 he served as president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. From 1982 to 1984 he directed the research study that led to creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and was acting president of the endowment. He also held visiting professorships at Brown, Columbia, and George Washington universities.

Weinstein’s books include The Story of America; The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era; Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, which received several citations including an American Book Award nomination; Freedom and Crisis: An American History; Between the Wars: American Foreign Policy from Versailles to Pearl Harbor; Prelude to Populism; and among edited collections, Conflict in America; American Negro Slavery; American Themes: Essays in Historiography; and Truman and the American Commitment to Israel.

Weinstein’s articles and essays have appeared in numerous popular and scholarly publications as well as mainstream newspapers and magazines. His television credits include that of historical consultant on two History Channel programs on Soviet espionage (1998-99) and the 1988-89 PBS series Face-to-Face: Conversations on the U.S.-Soviet Summitry (co-host, editor and writer). He was a frequent commentator on CNN, C-SPAN, and other networks. Source – United States Archive

Amritjit Singh is professor of English at Rhode Island College and coeditor of Postcolonial Theory and the United States, Interviews with Edward W. Said, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, and Conversations with Ishmael Reed, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Born in Belfast in 1960, Deirdre Madden was raised in Toomebridge, Co. Antrim, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin and at the University of East Anglia.

Her first book, Hidden Symptoms, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1987. The Birds of the Innocent Wood (1988) won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1989, and One by One in the Darkness (1996) won the Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year Award at the Listowel Writers’ Week festival in 1997. Other novels include Remembering Light and Stone (1992), Nothing is Black (1994), and Authenticity, which was published by Faber & Faber in 2002. In 1980, she won the Hennessy Award.

She was writer-in-residence at University College Cork in 1994, and writing fellow at Trinity in 1996-97. Her work has been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, French, German and Spanish.

Ilan Stavans is an American writer and academic. He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures. He is the author of Quixote and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.

Historian and novelist Morgan Llywelyn was born in New York City, but after the death of her husband and parents in 1985 returned to Ireland to take up citizenship in the land of her grandparents and make her permanent home there.

After making the shortlist for the United States Olympic Team in Dressage in 1975, but not making the team itself, she turned to writing historical novels exploring her Celtic roots. The most successful of these was Lion of Ireland – The Legend of Brian Boru, which was published in 1980 and has sold into the millions of copies.