Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press).  Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam  is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. Website 

Ange-Marie Hancock is Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor of Political Science. Dr. Hancock joined Kirwan in January 2023 after 15 years at the University of Southern California and previous positions at Yale University, Penn State, and the University of San Francisco.

A globally recognized scholar of intersectionality theory, she has written numerous articles and three books on the intersections of categories of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality and citizenship and their impact on policy: the award-winning The Politics of Disgust and the Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen,”(2004), Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (2011) and Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (2016). She is hard at work on her fourth book, The Scope and Vision of African American Political Thought, a book that covers more than 250 years of African American political thought. In 1993, under the mentorship of NBA Hall of Famer Tom “Satch” Sanders, Hancock conducted the original survey research and designed the business model for the Women’s National Basketball Association. The only women’s professional basketball league to succeed in the United States, the WNBA has been in existence for over 25 years. More recent applied forms of her research focus racial and gender equity at the local and regional levels, including leading a racial equity baseline study for the City of Los Angeles and co-chairing an academic analysis of governance reform in Los Angeles. She has also led community-engaged, empirically rigorous data analyses for the Black Experience Action Team (BEAT) and the USC Department of Public Safety Community Advisory Board. Her current work includes new research projects on asylum requests by survivors of domestic violence, empirical applications of intersectionality, and The Kamala Harris Project, a nonpartisan collective of scholars dedicated to tracking all aspects of the first woman of color vice president in U.S. history. Born in Columbus, Hancock is an alumna of Thomas Worthington High School. Long committed to community work, she has served on the boards of Community Partners, the Los Angeles African American Women’s Public Policy Institute (LAAAWPPI), LA Voice, the Liberty Hill Foundation, and the ACLU of Southern California. She received a bachelor’s degree from New York University, and her MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Website