Keynote Speaker
Lisa Ling
Since joining National Geographic's Explorer as host in December 2002, Ling has covered war-torn Iraq, investigated the increasingly deadly drug war in Colombia, and examined the complex issues surrounding China's one-child policy. In the 2005 season of Explorer, Ling investigated the phenomenon of female suicide bombers in Chechnya and Israel's occupied territories and the hidden and dangerous culture inside American prisons. Ling also serves as a special contributor for “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which builds on her sense of adventure, taking her from India to the Congo. Prior to traveling the globe for Explorer, Ling was known for revealing her “view” of the world to millions of Americans as co-host of Barbara Walters's hit daytime talk show, “The View,” where she shared no-holds-barred opinions on current events and everyday issues.

Session Speakers
Kim Berman
Kim Berman is the Director of Artist Proof Studio and a Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Johannesburg. Kim received her B.F.A. from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 and her M.F.A. in printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Mass, USA, in 1989. In 1992, Nhlanhla Xaba and Kim founded the Artist Proof Studio (APS), a community printmaking Centre in Newtown. APS provides training and studio facilities to artists. Kim Berman initiated and directed the Paper Prayers campaign-aids awareness through the visual arts from 1996. It currently operates out of APS as a successful income generating activity for HIV positive groups of rural and urban women. Kim has had many solo shows throughout South Africa, Europe, and the United States.

Andrea Buffa
Ms. Buffa is an antiwar and media activist of national renown. She is one of the founders of United for Peace and Justice and serves on its steering committee. She also works with CODEPINK: Women for Peace, which encourages women to approach their antiwar activism through humor and creativity. In 2004 Andrea traveled to Iraq to jump-start a massive protest at Halliburton’s shareholders meeting in Houston, was lead organizer of the anti-war protests in New York during the Republican National Convention, as well a protested in Florida leading up to the November election. Andrea is also the former executive director of Media Alliance, a media activist group based in San Francisco.

Nancy Cott
Dr. Nancy Cott became the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University in 2002. Between 1975 and 2001 she taught at Yale University, lastly as Sterling Professor of history and American Studies. She is recognized as one of the founding mothers in the field of women’s history. Her books include The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (1977), and Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000).

Irene Dankelman
Irene Dankelman is an ecologist. She has been working in the area of environment and sustainable development with national and international NGOs, government agencies, academia and the UN for nearly 30 years. Since 1985 she has focused specifically on gender and environment. She published, with Joan Davidson, “Women and Environment in the Third World”. (Earthscan, 1988). Irene has been coordinator of IUCN-Netherlands. She is an advocate of a just and healthy planet, and enjoys working with students, local women and society groups. Presently she is lecturer at University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands and is closely involved with Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), as well as serves on the board of several environmental NGOs.

Maureen Fordham
Dr. Fordham is Senior Lecturer in Disaster Management at the University of Northumbria, Divisions of Geography and Environmental Management. She has been researching and teaching about hazards and disasters since 1988. She has carried out empirical research in Britain, mainland Europe and India. This work includes comparative studies on the attitudes and needs of local people and experts regarding hazard mitigation and general disaster management. Since the early 1990s she has focused on gender analysis in hazard and disaster research, an area she has found in need of more study. She has also been involved in directly managing various sites of conversation value in England.

Wenona Giles
Wenona Giles teaches and publishes in the areas of gender, migration, refugee issues, ethnicity, nationalism, work, globalization, and war. She coordinated the international Women in Conflict Zones Research Network and the project “A Comparative Study of the Issues Faced by Women as a Result of Armed Conflict: Sri Lanka and the Post-Yugoslav States” at York University. She is presently involved in an international research project concerning protracted refugee situations. A recent publication with co-editor Jennifer Hyndman is Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (University of California Press, 2004).

Jennifer Hyndman
Jennifer Hyndman’s research traverses political, economic, cultural and feminist geography, focusing on people's mobility, economic and political security, and displacement. Her recent work examines the political economy of aid and its influence on nationalism, as well as transnational gender relations in the context of critical development studies. She is concerned with geographies of exclusion, containment, and the production of 'securitized' space both in the Global South and in North America. A recent publication with co-editor Wenona Giles is Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (University of California Press, 2004).

Sherrill Redmon
Sherrill Redmon has directed the Sophia Smith Collection of women’s history archives at Smith College since 1993. Earlier in her career she moved from teaching U. S. history at the University of Louisville to positions in that institution’s archival repositories of regional and medical history, establishing its Women’s Manuscripts Collection in 1986. In recent years Redmon has focused on expanding the SSC’s oral history program and implementing an ambitious collection development initiative whose goal is to gather the papers of women and organizations from previously under-documented ethnic and socioeconomic groups in order to make the sources available for writing U. S. social, cultural, and political history more inclusive.

Erin Solaro
Ms. Solaro is coordinator of Aretéa, a military writer’s group. She has written two series of newspaper articles from Iraq and from Afghanistan. Her work has appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Baltimore Sun, and the Marine-Corps Gazette. She has a B. A. in History from Indiana University, and an M.A. in Diplomacy and Military Science from Norwich University. She is the author of Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military, about women in the military and in combat, based on her first-hand observations in Iraq and Afghanistan as a journalist embedded with combar troops and civil affairs, interviews in the U.S., and academic research.

Azadeh Tabazadeh
Associate Professor jointly with Civil and Environmental Engineering Stanford University, School of Earth Sciences. Almost ten years ago, Azadeh Tabazadeh insisted that human activity was contributing to destroying the ozone layer. Critics and commentators insisted that natural events, including volcanic eruptions, were the cause—not coolants from air conditioners and refrigerators. Tabazadeh showed that volcanic chlorine washes to Earth in rainfall before reaching the stratospheric ozone. Chlorofluorocarbons, on the other hand, don't dissolve in water and float up undisturbed, reducing the ozone layer's capacity to filter ultraviolet rays. Her work helped pave the way for a landmark 1996 ban on CFC manufacturing. Tabazadeh—now a senior research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California—demonstrated that polar stratospheric clouds, pearly wisps floating more than 10 miles above the poles, serve as a staging area for the chemical reactions that lead to ozone loss. She then became one of the first scientists to make the connection between ozone depletion and global warming.

Phyllis Holman Weisbard
Phyllis Holman Weisbard has been Women’s Studies Librarian of the University of Wisconsin System since 1991. She and her staff publish current awareness periodicals on women and gender, including Feminist Collections: A Quarterly Of Women’s Studies Resources. Shealso maintains a gateway to web-based information on women and gender at http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies.