Harry C. Boyte is founder and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship now at Augsburg College, and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. For more than twenty years, Boyte has helped to organize and direct action research partnerships and projects aimed at developing practice-based theory for what works to engage citizens in public life. Boyte is also the founder of Public Achievement, a civic and political education initiative that aims at developing the civic agency of young people now in hundreds of communities in 23 countries. Boyte has authored eight books on democracy, citizenship, and community organizing.  In the 1960s, Boyte was a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization directed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Harry Boyte is married to Marie Louise Ström, a democracy educator with Idasa, the African democracy organization.

J. Herman Blake is the Inaugural Humanities Scholar in Residence at the Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston, SC). He is also professor emeritus of Sociology and African American Studies, Iowa State University. Blake received his BA from New York University and his MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. All degrees are in Sociology. Blake is noted for his pioneering work in service learning in grassroots communities in California and South Carolina. His publications include the autobiography of Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide. His essay “Doctor Can’t Do Me No Good,” based on his interviews with elderly descendants of African-born slaves in the sea islands of South Carolinam, has been republished in several anthologies.

Paul N. Markham is assistant professor of Honors Interdisciplinary Studies and Co-Director of the Institute for Citizenship and Social Responsibility at Western Kentucky University. Markham is primarily interested in the methods and practice of community organizing and development. He is committed to collaborative approaches to solving complex social problems and seeks to bring the scholarship of community-based research and teaching to bear on these issues. Markham is also interested the sociology of institutional and community life and the exploration of how and why individuals become committed to civic action. His latest research explores the ideological characteristics and organizing practices of the emerging "New Evangelical" movement in the United States. He is the author of Rewired: Exploring Religious Conversion, an interdisciplinary exploration of the phenomenon of religious conversion in the context of community.
 
Cecilia Orphan is the National Manager of the American Democracy Project (ADP), a multi-campus initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). The American Democracy Project focuses on higher education’s role in preparing the next generation of informed, engaged citizens for our democracy. As part of her work with ADP, she manages seven national initiatives: America’s Future: Protecting the Fiscal Health of Our Democracy; Civic Agency; Deliberative Polling; eCitizenship: New Tools, New Strategies, New Spaces; Stewardship of Public Lands; Political Engagement Project; and Seven Revolutions: Educating Globally Competent Citizens. These initiatives serve as laboratories for experimentation with curricular and co-curricular programming that will further institutionalize civic engagement on AASCU campuses. Orphan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Portland State University (PSU). 
 
Scott Peters is an associate professor of education at Cornell University. His research program is centered on the study of American higher education’s public mission, purposes, and work. A key theoretical and practical problem his research seeks to address is that of the dilemma of the relation of expertise and democracy in the American academic profession. His latest book, Democracy and Higher Education: Traditions and Stories of Civic Engagement, will be published in 2010 by Michigan State University Press. Peters holds a B.S. in Education (1983) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in Public Policy (1995) from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and a Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Administration (1998), also from the University of Minnesota.

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Questions? Please contact Kate Hanson at kate.hanson@scup.org, 734.764.2008