Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at Harvard University, President of the Society for African Philosophy in North America, an editor of Transition, Associate Director of the Black Periodical Literature Project, and a Board Member of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and the former Chairman of the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Studies. His interests are African and African American philosophy and literary theory; the history and theory of nationalism; Black nationalism, including Pan-Africanism; the idea of "race" and its history; multi-culturalism and pluralism; ethical questions about racism, and post-colonial literary theory.

Professor Appiah is the author of Color Conscience: The Political Morality of Race (1996) and In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), a winner of the coveted Herkovitz prize. He is also the author of an introduction to analytic philosophy, several monographs in the philosophy of language, and three novels: Another Death in Venice, Nobody Likes Letitia, and Avenging Angel. In addition, he has published many articles and reviews on topics ranging from post-modernism to the collapse of the African state. His philosophical work has been largely in the philosophy of language and of mind; his work in African and African American Studies focuses on questions of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity. His current projects include Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (of which his mother is the principal author), an annotated edition of 7500 proverbs in Twi, the language of Asante, in Ghana, where he grew up.

Professor Appiah earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Clare College, Cambridge University. His first teaching post was at the University of Ghana, and he has since taught at Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, and Duke University.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities. Chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. Professor Gates is an editor of Transition. His interests are African and African American literary criticism and history as well as cultural studies and literary theory.

Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial' Self (1987), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism(1989, American Book Award winner), and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992). He is also the author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), The Future of Race (with Cornel West, 1996), and Colored People: A Memoir (1994), which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s. He has edited several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and The Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates' publications also include a cover story on black artists for Time, "The Black Renaissance," and numerous articles for The New Yorker, including, most recently, "The Chitlin Circuit" and "Black London."

Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature at Clare College, Cambridge, and his B.A. at Yale University. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Duke, Cornell, and Yale University. He was named one of the "25 Most Influential Americans" by Time in 1997 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.