Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University Kathleen Belew is a historian, author, and teacher. She specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy. Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House). Belew has spoken about Bring the War Home in a wide variety of places, including The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered. Her work has featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline). Belew is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned tenure at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she spent seven years. Her research has received the support of the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation. Belew earned her BA in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Belew has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2019-20), Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of history of the present, conservatism, race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war. Belew is co-editor of and contributor to A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and has contributed essays to Myth America and The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.
Director, Enterprise AI and Data Analytics Hub, RMIT University Kok-Leong Ong is currently a Professor of AI & Analytics in the College of Business & Law, RMIT University. His research focuses on analytics and machine learning translation into practice within different business verticals, and the development of new techniques as required to meet individual business needs. He was one of the members that started Australia's first degree in Business Analytics back in 2013. In January 2021, he became one of the four Australia-based academics to be named the Leading Data Academics by CDO Magazine, a US-based publication.
Master's Student in Communication, Research Assistant for Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society, Simon Fraser University I am a Master's student in Communication at SFU and currently also a Research Assistant under PIPPS helping conduct their study on Long COVID in British Columbia (PIPPS is also at SFU within the Faculty of Health Sciences). I graduated from SFU with a Honours BA in Communication in 2021. Last year, Dr. Al-Rawi and I co-authored an article in the journal of Health Communication on the role of gender in COVID-hoaxer conspiracies. I have also been a Research Assistant for the Digital Democracies Institute at SFU.
ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow, The University of Queensland Dr Kate Ariotti is an ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. Her research examines the social and cultural impacts of war in Australia. She has published on wartime captivity and the experiences of Australian prisoners of war – including the 2018 book Captive Anzacs: Australian POWs of the Ottomans during the First World War (Cambridge University Press), which was nominated for the inaugural Les Carlyon Literary Award – as well as the ways in which Australians have historically remembered and commemorated wars. In 2017 she edited with Dr James Bennett Australians and the First World War: Local-Global Connections and Contexts (Palgrave). Her current ARC-funded project ‘Between Death and Commemoration: An Australian History of the War Corpse’ will provide the first comprehensive account of the changing policies, practices and attitudes that have shaped the treatment of the physical remains of Australian war dead between the First World War and recent wars in the Middle East (1915-2015). This project will provide a valuable new perspective on the realities of Australian participation in war and a critical understanding of the place of death in war in the Australian past and present. Kate teaches 19th and 20th century Australian history, and supervises both honours and postgraduate students working on research projects within this rich field. Several of her students have won prestigious national prizes for their work. Kate has been a participant in several writer’s festivals, public symposia, and museum exhibitions, and has served as a judge for the NSW Premier's History Awards. Before commencing her position at the University of Queensland, Kate worked as a Historian in the Military History Section of the Australian War Memorial and, most recently, in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle
Adjunct Research Fellow, UWA Oceans Institute, The University of Western Australia Australian marine mammal biologist. PhD on the behavioural ecology of bottlenose dolphins (habitat use, abundance and distribution, home range, climate change), through Murdoch University, Australia. Post-doctorate on anthropogenic noise impacts on humpback whales, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Marine Bioacoustics Lab, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee Dr. Krista Wiegand is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Global Security program at the Center and oversees programing, workshops, speakers, and research projects with faculty fellows, a post-doctoral fellow, graduate student research fellows, and undergraduate student research assistants. She joined the UTK faculty in 2014 after nine years on the faculty at Georgia Southern University, and she received her PhD in Political Science from Duke University in 2004. Dr. Wiegand also serves as the co-Editor-in-Chief with Dr. Brandon Prins of International Studies Quarterly, the flagship journal of the International Studies Association Dr. Wiegand’s research covers territorial and maritime disputes, conflict resolution/management, war and militarized interstate disputes, terrorism and political violence, bargaining strategies, international mediation, arbitration, and adjudication of interstate and civil conflicts, and foreign policy strategies of states in East Asia. She has published two books: Bombs and Bullets: Governance by Islamic Terrorist and Guerrilla Groups (Routledge, 2010) and Enduring Territorial Disputes: Strategies of Bargaining, Coercive Diplomacy, and Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2011), and is co-editor of the book Islands of Contention: The China-Japan Border Dispute in a Multidisciplinary Perspective (Routledge, 2015). She has a forthcoming book co-authored with Dr. Emilia Justyna Powell, Notre Dame University, The Peaceful Resolution of Territorial and Maritime Disputes (Oxford University Press, 2023).
