T. Jackie Cuevas (Syracuse University)
T. Jackie Cuevas is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. Her research examines the construction of racialized genders and sexualities in queer Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures.  She is also a member of Macondo, a creative writers’ collective founded by author Sandra Cisneros.  Her work appears in the third edition of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute, 2007).

Samuel Dwinell (Cornell University)
Samuel Dwinell is a PhD candidate in musicology at Cornell University. His dissertation, "Tempests and Teacups: British Opera at the End of Empire," examines modernist opera production in Britain, particularly in terms of postcolonial and queer critique. He also works on aspects of popular music and globalization. He is organizing an interdisciplinary conference at Cornell University in April 2011 entitled "Music, Gender, and Globalization."

Marc Epprecht (Queens University)
Marc Epprecht is a Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, where he teaches a graduate course on methodology, epistemology and ethics, and undergraduate courses on HIV/AIDS, Africa, and global food systems. He has published extensively on the history of gender and sexuality in Africa including Hungochani: The history of a dissident sexuality in southern Africa (2004 - winner of the 2006 Joel Gregory Prize from the Canadian Association of African Studies) and Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Ohio University Press, 2008 - finalist for the 2009 Mel Herskovits prize from the African Studies Association). He recently received the Desmond Tutu Award for "Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Sexuality in Africa" from the International Resource Network-Africa, an arm of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York.

Richard Fung (Ontario College of Art and Design)
Richard Fung is a Toronto-based video artist, writer, theorist and educator. He holds a degree in cinema studies as well as an ME in sociology and cultural studies, both from the University of Toronto. He is Associate Professor in the Integrated Media program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His work comprises of a series of challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS and his own family history. His tapes, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Uncomfortable (2005), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada and the United States.  His essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002), recently updated and translated into French. Richard is a past Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Lifetime Achievement in Video as well as the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art. Fung has always seen himself as much as an educator as an artist, and in Helen Lee’s essay ‘Dirty Dozen: Playing 12 Questions with Richard Fung’ from Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung (Images Festival and Insomniac Press, 2002), Fung says he aims to produce work which is ‘pedagogical, but hopefully not pedantic’. Richard is a public intellectual who has pushed forward the debates about queer sexuality, Asian identity and the uneasy borderlands of culture and politics.

Thomas Glave (SUNY Binghamton)
Thomas Glave is the author of "Whose Song? and Other Stories", "The Torturer’s Wife", and the essay collection "Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent" (winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award).  He is editor of the anthology "Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles" (winner of a 2008 Lambda Literary Award).  He teaches in the English department at SUNY-Binghamton.

Martin F. Manalansan IV
Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Presently, he is the Social Science Review Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and is on the advisory board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY Graduate Center. His book, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora was published by Duke University Press in 2003 and was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize.  His publications include three edited collections:  Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America (Philadelphia Temple University Press, 2000) which was awarded the 2001 Cultural Studies Book Prize by the Association for Asian American Studies, (with Arnaldo Cruz-Malave) Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York University Press, 2002) and (with Katharine Donato, Donna Gabbacia, Jennifer Holdaway  and Patricia Pessar, Jennifer Holdaway)  a special issue of  the International Migration Review (2006)  entitled “Gender and Migration Revisited.” His essays have appeared in journals such as Social Text, positions: east asia cultures critique, and GLQ. His current projects include Manila’s urban modernity, return migration to the Philippines  and he presently writing two book manuscripts entitled Queer Love in the Time of War and Shopping which is a ethnographic and theoretical reflection on the mainstreaming of U.S. LGBT politics, gentrification and neoliberalism, and  Altered Tastes: Beyond a Palatable Multiculturalism which is an ethnography of Asian American immigrant spaces, fusion and ethnic cuisines, and olfaction in New York City

Carla Marcantonio (George Mason University)
Carla Marcantonio is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department at George Mason University. Her work focuses on the intersection between film, globalization, and genre. She is currently at work on a book, Geo-Emotive Landscapes: Film Melodrama in the Global Era. Her work on Pedro Almodóvar has appeared in several publications, including most recently, “The Transvestite Figure and Film Noir: Pedro Almodóvar’s Transnational Imaginary,” in the edited collection Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (2008).

Nicholas Matte (University of Toronto)
Nicholas Matte is a PhD Candidate in the history department at the University of Toronto, where he is finishing his dissertation on the history of trans activism in North America between 1960 and 1990.  His work has been published in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, GLQ: A journal of gay and lesbian studies, the International Journal of Transgenderism, and the Transgender Studies Reader.  He also teaches in the Sexual Diversity Studies Program at U of T and in Women's Studies at the University of Waterloo.

Raquel Osborne (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid)
Raquel Osborne is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Education at Distance in Madrid. She has held a Fulbright Scholarship at New York University, where she got a MPh. Her main lines of research are related to contemporary issues and debates related to the intersection of Sexuality and Gender. Her present research interests deal with female sexuality under Franco´s regime.

Arsham Parsi (Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees)
Arsham Parsi is the founder and Executive Director of the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees (IRQR), an international queer human rights non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Toronto, Canada. The primary mission of IRQR is to aid and assist to the best of our abilities Iranian Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered refugees in countries all over the world, and who now face the threat of deportation back to Iran, in obtaining asylum status in safe countries. IRQR helps those refugees through their complicated asylum processes and provides funding for safe houses through donations wherever possible, as most of our queer refugee clients are in physical danger in their countries of transit as well. He is also the coordinator and cultural ambassador for the Stockholm-based International Lesbian and Gay Cultural Network (ILGCN), an official member and affiliate of the Brussels-based International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), the Toronto-based Rainbow Railroad Group, and the Berlin-based Advisory Committee of the Hirschfeld-Eddy Foundation for LGBT Human Rights. In April 2008 the Iranian Queer Organization (IRQO), the former NGO which became the foundation for IRQR today, was awarded the Felipa De Souza Human Rights Award by the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). In June 2008, IRQR was recognized at the Toronto Pride Award for Excellence in Human Rights.

Raquel (Lucas) Platero (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Activista por los derechos lgtbq, es docente en educación secundaria y varios programas universitarios de postgrado en género e igualdad. Tiene una licenciatura en Psicología, Master en Evaluación de Políticas y ha cursado el Programa de doctorado en Perspectiva de Género en las Ciencias Sociales (Universidad Complutense). Desde 2003 forma parte de los proyectos europeos MAGEEQ y QUING investigando sobre sexualidad e interseccionalidad en las políticas públicas. Sus últimas publicaciones incluyen la coautoría de "Herramientas para combatir el bullying homofóbico" (Madrid: Talasa, 2007), coordinación de "Lesbianas. Discursos y Representaciones" (Melusina: 2008), así como numerosos artículos sobre la (ex)inclusión de las sexualidades no normativas y la interseccionalidad en las políticas de igualdad. Actualmente participa en un proyecto de investigación sobre la memoria histórica de las lesbianas en el franquismo dirigido por Raquel Osborne.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Columbia University)
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is a Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she also directs the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.  Her research is focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism. She has published several books, most recently The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Duke University Press, 2006).

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and African American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her book, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Duke University Press 2010), excavates and explores Dutch-, English-, and French-language Caribbean women’s texts between 1900 and 1990, tracing how their queering of landscape-as-female-beloved metaphors imagines a poetics and erotics of decolonization. She is currently at work on a novel entitled Water, Shoulders, Into the Black Pacific.

Patricia White (Swarthmore College)
Patricia White is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, and her articles have appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. With Timothy Corrigan, she is co-author of The Film Experience and coeditor of the forthcoming Critical Visions in Film Theory. A member of the editorial collective of Camera Obscura, she also currently chairs the board of Women Make Movies. She is writing a book on global women’s filmmaking in the twenty-first century.

Dagmawi Woubshet (Cornell University)
Dagmawi Woubshet is an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, where he teaches courses in African American and comparative Diaspora literature and culture, the 1980s, and AIDS literature. His essays have appeared in Callaloo, Art South Africa, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art; he is also co-editor of a special issue on Ethiopia in Callaloo. Currently he is completing a book-length manuscript entitled "Looking for the Dead: AIDS, Poetics and Politics," a comparative study of AIDS writing in the United States, South Africa, and Ethiopia. A true itinerant, he splits his time among three cities--Ithaca, New York City, and Addis Ababa.