Alison McQueen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.  Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.  Alison's book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time.  Alison is starting a third book project on treason in the history of political thought. Her other ongoing research projects explore applications of computational text analysis methods in political theory, and the ethics and politics of catastrophe.

Marie-Pierre Ulloa is a lecturer in the Comparative Literature, and in the French and Italian Department, teaching French and Francophone cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on France and North Africa. She is a faculty affiliate of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, The Europe Center, and the Ehess in Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales).

Marie-Pierre is the author of two books: Francis Jeanson, a Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War (Stanford University Press, 2008, also published in French and Arabic), and Le Nouveau Rêve Américain : Du Maghreb à la Californie (The New American Dream: From North Africa to California, CNRS editions, 2019).

She is the co-founder of the Stanford Global Studies Summer Festival (2008) and the founder of the undergraduate short story contest (2014) sponsored by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. 

Marie-Pierre received the honorific distinction of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic in 2013.

Marie-Pierre holds a degree in History from La Sorbonne, a MA in History and Political Science and an Advanced Post-Graduate Diploma in History (summa cum laude) from Sciences Po Paris, where she wrote her dissertation on intellectual dissidence from World War II to post-Algerian War through the case study of philosopher Francis Jeanson, publisher of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. She wrote her thesis on North African migration and migrant stories from North Africa to California: "From North Africa to California: migrant trajectories, integration narratives" at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Ph.D, summa cum laude).
 
She is a regular contributor to La Vie des Idées / Books and Ideas. 

Thomas Sheehan specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. His books include: Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (2015), Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth (trans., 2010); Becoming Heidegger (2007);Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Encounter with Heidegger (1997); Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations(1987); The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986); and Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (1981).

Rowan Dorin is a historian of western Europe and the Mediterranean, primarily during the high and late Middle Ages. Much of his research tries to understand how law and society interact with each other, especially where legal norms conflict with social practices. Another strand of his research explores the history of economic life and economic thought, especially medieval debates over usury and moneylending. He has also written on the circulation of goods, people, and ideas in the medieval Mediterranean.

Rowan's recent book, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 2023), was awarded the 2023 Salo Baron Prize from the American Academy for Jewish Research; the 2024 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical Association; the 2023 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize from the Canadian Society of Medievalists; and the 2024 American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Award.

His current book project examines the ways in which medieval canon law was adapted, reinterpreted, or resisted in local contexts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Born and raised in western Canada, Rowan did his undergraduate and doctoral work at Harvard University, earning an MPhil in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge along the way. Before coming to Stanford, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Colleen Anderson studies the culture, history, and technology of Cold War Germany. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017 and has received funding from the American Historical Association & NASA, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, DAAD, the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, and the Central European History Society. Her current project, “‘Two Kinds of Infinity’: East Germany, West Germany, and the Cold War Cosmos, 1945-1995,” studies Germans’ participation in and imaginations about outer space exploration during the Cold War. Her manuscript traces the changing ways in which East and West Germans both saw their own futures as connected to space travel and used outer space to confront the past and envision the world around them.