Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge.  He also serves as Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences in Mumbai and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Gottingen. He was previously Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also held a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School from 2004-2006. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India). During his academic career, he has also held professorial chairs at Yale University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Delhi, the University of Michigan, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Iowa, Columbia University and New York University. Arjun Appadurai has held numerous fellowships and scholarships and has received several scholarly honors. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers: The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013; An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke 2006) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997). His books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Italian. Website

Regarding the topic of the Winter School 2015, his areas of expertise are Financescapes, Anthropology of Globalization, Cultural Dynamics, Urban South Asia

 
Martin Hartmann is professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Lucerne. He studied philosophy, comparative literature and sociology at the University of Constance, the London School of Economics and the Freie Universität in Berlin. He received his PhD with a thesis entitled Kreativität der Gewohnheit. Grundzüge einer pragmatistischen Demokratietheorie (The Creativity of Habit: Principles of a Pragmatist Theory of Democracy at the Goethe University Frankfurt in 2001 where he also qualified in 2009 as a professor (Habilitation) with a thesis entitled Die Praxis des Vertrauens (The Practice of Trust). Martin Hartmann was a scientific assistant and lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of the Goethe University and  a research associate at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (Institut für Sozialforschung). He was a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago and the “Maison des Sciences de l’Homme” in Paris and an associate professor at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, the Technische Universität Darmstadt and the Goethe University Frankfurt. Martin Hartmann is Chairman of the Board of the ”Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Lucerne (GSL)” and Scientific Director of the Executive MAS “Philosophy and Management” at the University of Lucerne. Website

Regarding the topic of the Winter School 2015, his areas of expertise are Social Capital, Network Society, Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy

Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales in Sydney.  She holds a BA Hons from Sydney University and PhD from The University of California at Santa Cruz.  She has an enduring interest in the question of language and matter, and works at the intersection of feminism, deconstruction and science studies.  She has held numerous Visiting Fellowships (Australian National University, University of Waikato, Auckland University, Utrecht University, The George Washington University, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Gujarat).  Her books include Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, Judith Butler: Live Theory, and Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Website