Hilton Als is the first holder of the Joan Leiman Jacobson Professorship in Nonfiction Writing, and teaches one course each year in the English Department and one in American Studies. He is a theatre critic and staff writer for The New Yorker , and has also written or edited for The Village Voice , The New York Times Magazine , and Vibe ; his essays have been collected in a wide range of books about the arts and American culture, and he has written a number of introductions to exhibition catalogues and literary works. Als is the author of the memoir The Women , and the winner of a number of awards including a Guggenheim fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Along with his work on the theatre, he has strong interests in literature, film, and the visual arts and has designed sound scores for the dance. He has taught previously at Yale and at the Center for Word, Text, and Image of the San Francisco Art Institute. He will lecture on James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain this fall at Northwestern University, and he has been invited to speak in the Alain LeRoy Locke Lecture Series at Harvard.

Richard T. Chu received his A. B. from Ateneo de Manila University (1986), his M. A. from Stanford University (1994), and his Ph.D from the University of Southern California . Proficient in Tagalog, Chinese (Mandarin and Hokkien) and Spanish, Chu was born and raised in the Philippines , but has spent some time in China . His research focuses on the history of the Chinese and Chinese mestizos in the Philippines and the different Chinese diasporic communities in the world, centering on issues of ethnicity, gender, and nationalism. More recently, he has begun a new field of research; the history of Filipino Americans in New England . He has published several well-received articles, including "Rethinking the Chinese Mestizos of the Philippines " (in Shen and Edwards, Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, ANU, 2002), "The Chineses and Mestizos of the Philippines : Towards a New Interpretation" ( Philippine Studies Journal , 2002) and "the Chinaman Question: A Conundrum in U.S. Imperial Policy in the Pacific" ( Kritika Kultura 2006). He is currently revising his first book manuscript Catholic, Sangley, Mestizo: Negotiating Chinese Identities in Manila 1870-1925. He received the Young China Scholars Award given by the China Times Cultural Foundation in 2000, and his research has been funded by various fellowships such as the Chin-Ben See Memorial Fund, the Ahmanson Foundation, and the Centre for Intercultural Studies at the University of Santo Tomás ( Manila ).

W. T. Lhamon, Jr . (aka Rip) trained in American Literature but entered into American Studies in 1985, when he brought Constance Rourke's American Humor back into print and attention. His own first book was an account of American postmodernism, Deliberate Speed (1990; rpt. with a new preface in 2002). Since then, earlier American culture-and the claims it can make on the present-has attracted him. He has published Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (1998) and Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (2003). Now he is writing a book called Secret Histories , about the slow meting out of cultural democracy from Macheath to Bob Dylan. Its many examples range from Herman Melville, Dan Emmett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Bert Williams and ragtime, from the Gershwin brothers to Brecht and Weill and Lenya, from Thelonious Monk and Billie Holiday to Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers.