David Haig was born in Canberra and grew up in Sydney. He received his degrees from Macquarie University. He was a Royal Society Endeavour Fellow at Oxford and then a Harvard Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows. He is now George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His main research interests are maternal-fetal relations, intragenomic conflict, and the evolution of plant life cycles. He still misses kookaburras.
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. Born in Britain, he was educated at Cambridge University and Princeton University and taught for eleven years at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 2004. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), and among his current projects is a history of the idea of civil war from Rome to Iraq. A frequent visitor to Australia, he has held visiting positions at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney and is currently an Honorary Professor of History in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney.
Peter Godfrey-Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Sydney, and he has a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego. He taught at Stanford University between 1991 and 2002, and then combined a half-time post at the Australian National University and a visiting position at Harvard for a few years. Since 2006 he has been full-time as professor of philosophy at Harvard. His main research interests are in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also works on pragmatism (especially John Dewey), general philosophy of science, and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. He has written three books, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (Cambridge, 1996), Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003), and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009).
Michael J. Hiscox is Professor in the Department of Government. He grew up in Tamworth, a small town in the north-west of New South Wales. He received his B. Econ. (First Class Hon.) from the University of Sydney in 1989 and his Ph.D in Government from Harvard University in 1997. He was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, from 1997 to 2001. From 2001 until 2005 he was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard. The focus of his research is political economy and international trade, investment, and immigration. His first book, International Trade and Political Conflict, was published by Princeton University Press in 2002 and won the William H. Riker Prize for the best book in political economy that year. His second book, High Stakes: The Political Economy of U.S, Trade Sanctions, 1950-2000, will be published this year by Cambridge University Press.
Judith Ryan, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature, came to Harvard University in 1985 after many years of teaching at Smith College. She grew up in Sydney, where she received her B.A. with University Medal in 1965. In 1972, she received the degree of Dr. Phil. from the University of Mźnster, Germany. Her books and articles cover a wide range of scholarly interests, with a special focus on twentieth-century modernism and contemporary literature. Where possible, she includes works of Australian literature in her course syllabi at Harvard. Among her books are: The Uncompleted Past: Postwar German Novels and the Third Reich (1983), The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (1991), and Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (1999). She is also co-editor, with Chris Wallace-Crabbe, of Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World (2004).
James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was formerly based at the University of Cambridge, where he was successively a University Lecturer in English (1989-1999) and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English (1999-2003). He is a Life Fellow of Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was educated at Scotch College Melbourne, Melbourne University (BA) and Oxford University (MPhil). He holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge. His books are as follows: Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (1990); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (1995); Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002); and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (2007)
Members of the Harvard Australian Studies Committee and Australian Nominating Committee, Canberra, Australia, November 2007
