David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon 1996), for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An accomplished sleight-of-hand magician who has lived with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, his essays have appeared in such journals as Tikkun, Orion, Environmental Ethics, Wild Earth, Parabola, Resurgence, and The Ecologist, as well as in over 30 edited anthologies. Nomadic by nature, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Watson and Rockefeller foundations, and was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world. David's work focuses upon the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray; upon the experiential effects of technological change; and upon the ecological phenomenology of perception and of language, the way in which these two dimensions modulate the ethical relation between humankind and the animate earth. He recently founded the Alliance for Wild Ethics in his home terrain of New Mexico; he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication and in the rejuvenation of oral culture.Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Article; Link to Interview

Stacy Alaimo received her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana. She is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she teaches multicultural American literatures, feminist theory, environmental literature, and cultural studies. Her book, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell 2000), examines how women writers, theorists, and activists from the early 19th century to the present have transformed politically-charged conceptions of nature. She has also published articles on popular films, Mexican-American performance art, poetry, and science fiction in such journals as Feminist Studies, camera obscura, MELUS, and Studies in American Fiction. She is currently working on several articles, including "Bodies and Natures: Postmodern Feminisms of the Not-Exactly Discursive," and "The Naked Word: The Intercorporeal Ethics of the Protesting Body." She is also starting a new book tentatively entitled, "The Matter at Hand: Bodies, Natures, and the Practice of Immanence," which will compare divergent models of matter in feminist corporeal theory, environmental philosophy, critical science studies, popular science writing, science fiction, and the practices of yoga and tree sitting. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers as well as the Editorial Board of LEGACY: A Journal of American Women Writers. She is a passionate scuba diver, loves to watch birds and insects with her children, and has practiced Iyengar yoga for eight years.Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Gregory Paul Caicco is the Lincoln Assistant Professor of Ethics in Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University and is the Symposium Organizer and Chair. A former Jesuit, he obtained professional and graduate degrees in architecture and philosophy from Carleton University (Ottawa), Cambridge University (England) and Loyola University (Chicago). His 1999 McGill University (Montreal) doctoral dissertation, "Ethics and Poetics: The Architectural Vision of St.Francis of Assisi," won the King Medal for Research Excellence from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium. He has since taught, researched and published in philosophy and ethics in architecture; medieval architectural philosophy; memory, poetics and spirituality as vehicles for design; as well as learner-centered, distance-learning and critical thinking pedagogies. His publications include "Socrates in the Agora," in Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture; "Building Memory (Damming the Deluge)," in Fifth Column; and "Architectural Ethics," in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (Macmillan, 2004). He is co-founder, with his wife Shauna Beharry, of Silent Press, an organization supporting reflections on the role of silence and contemplation within daily life, the arts and architecture. He is currently completing a book-length manuscript entitled The Ethics of Memory: Francis of Assisi and Architectural Theory Before Alberti, and will introduce and edit the book of collected papers from this symposium. Dr. Caicco is now leading an initiative to launch the first international Centre for Ethics in the Built Environment. Link to Homepage

Edward S. Casey is Leading Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook, where he has been chair of the department during most of the last decade. His early writings concerned imagination and memory, and in the 1990s he turned to the question of place in a series of books on this subject: Getting Back into Place, The Fate of Place, and Representing Place in Landscape Paintings and Maps. His effort has been to bring this neglected topic to a new level of rigorous description, and in particular to show the intimate ties between place and bodily experience. An exploration of contemporary painters is soon to appear: Earth-Mapping: Concerning Artists Who Map the Landscape. Still more recently, a study entitled The World at a Glance has been completed. New forays concern the edge and human feeling. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Lily Chi is Associate Professor of Architectural design, Theory and Criticism at Cornell University. She received her professional degree in Canada and graduate degrees in architectural theory and history at Cambridge and McGill Universities. Design Editor of the Journal of Architectural Education since 2000, she has written widely on issues of contemporary design criticism and education. Her doctoral work examined the role of Enlightenment concepts of custom, nature, and history in the formation of a modern architectural discourse. These themes are developed in her current research on tourism, urbanism, and propaganda in colonial Indochina. Issues of design, history and global society were also the subject of a Cornell graduate studio she conducted in Hanoi as recipient of a 2002 Rotch Traveling Studio award. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Richard Kearney holds the Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and is a visiting Professor at the University of Dublin and the European University Institute at Florence. He is the author of over twenty books on philosophy and culture and editor of a further fifteen. His major philosophical works include The Wake Of Imagination, Poetics Of Imagining, On Stories, and Strangers, Gods And Monsters. He has also published two novels and a volume of poetry. Richard Kearney is also a well known public intellectual and commentator in Britain and Ireland, where he has served on the national Arts Council, the Higher Education Authority and the Irish Film School (which he chaired). In addition he has hosted his own book program on television and radio and has served as speechwriter to the Irish President Mary Robinson. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Melvin Mitchell has practiced architecture in Washington D.C. since 1972. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, past Chairman of the D.C. Board of Architects and a former member of the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board. His degrees are from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was Director of the Graduate Architecture Program at Morgan in Baltimore from 1997-2002. Between 1972 and 1992 he was a professor at both the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and Howard University. He was featured as one of 50 outstanding living African American, African, and Afro-European architects in an exhibition of their work at the Chicago Athenaeum in 1993. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Crisis of the African American Architect (Writer’s Showcase 2002). Professor Mitchell’s most notable built projects include Mount Vernon Plaza, a 250-unit high-rise-townhouse complex in downtown Washington D.C. and the One million SF Metro Center Office/Retail Complex where he was associated architect. Most recently he was the architect, developer, and builder of a new 110-unit, predominately African American subdivision in the Southeastern D.C. area, which is credited with being a key catalyst of the current new home building renaissance occurring in that area. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and professor, lives and works in Helsinki. He has been engaged in architectural practice, graphic design and town planning since 1963. Over the past three decades, he has been appointed Rector of the Institute of Crafts and Design in Helsinki (1971-72); Associate Professor at the Haile Selassie I University in Addis Abeba (1972-74); Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture (1978-83); State Artist Professor (1983-88); Professor of Architecture, Helsinki University of Technology (1991-97); the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University (1993); Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus (1999); the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia (2002); and the Raymond E. Maritz Visiting Professor at the Washington University in St. Louis (1999-). In addition, he has taught and lectured in numerous other universities in Europe, North and South America and Africa. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a member of the CICA International Committee of Architectural Critics. He has designed numerous exhibitions on Finnish architecture, planning and visual arts; contributed over three hundred articles on cultural and architectural philosophy to books and publications published in over twenty languages; and written and edited numerous books and exhibition catalogues. He is author and/or editor of Encounters: Architectural Essays 1976-2000 (in press); The Alvar Aalto House 1935-36 (2003), Juhani Pallasmaa: Sensuous Minimalism (2002); The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (2001); The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996); The Melnikov House (1996); Animal Architecture (1995); and Language of Wood (1987). Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, our Symposium Keynoter, was born in Mexico City in 1949 and became a Canadian Citizen and a Quebec resident in 1987. He obtained his undergraduate degree in architecture and engineering in Mexico City, did postgraduate work at Cornell University, and was awarded a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. by the University of Essex in England. He has taught at universities in Mexico City, Houston, Syracuse, and Toronto, at the Architectural Association in London, and was Director of the Carleton University School of Architecture from 1983 to 1986. He has lectured extensively in North America and Europe.

His numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, AA Files, Arquitecturas Bis, Section A, VIA, Architectural Design, ARQ, SKALA, A+U, Perspecta, and many other periodicals. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press 1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field.

In January 1987, Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University, where he is currently Director of Post-Professional (Master’s and Doctoral) Programs, and chairs the History and Theory of Architecture division. From March 1990 to June 1993, he was also the Founding Director of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research institute which he instigated, co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Université de Montréal and McGill University. Students of Dr. Pérez-Gómez now teach most Canadian architecture programs, and in many North American and European Universities.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is the author of Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture that retells the love story of the famous fifteenth century novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms, a text that has become the source of numerous projects and exhibitions. He is also co-editor of a now well-established series of books entitled CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (McGill-Queen’s University Press), which collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories. A recent major book co-authored with Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (MIT Press 1997), traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, with special reference to the role of projection in architectural design. At present, Dr. Pérez-Gómez is engaged in a project to redefine the nature of architectural education by revisiting its historical sources during the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century, an urgent task after the failure of globalization, which has become a stark reality after September 11, 2001. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Beverly R. Singer, our Lincoln Ethics Affiliates Council Visiting Scholar is an award-winning documentarian whose video productions explore ancestral knowledge and indigenous protocol in native communities. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She has served as a public programs specialist with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Film and Video Center and the American Museum of Natural History. She taught at Parsons School of Design in New York and at California State Polytechnic University. She received her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of New Mexico; M.A. in Administration from University of Chicago; B.A. in Social Welfare/Psychology from the College of Santa Fe; and film training from the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe. She is author of Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video. She resides at Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

Susan Stewart is a MacArthur Fellow and the Regan Professor in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics. Her books of poetry are Yellow Stars and Ice, The Hive, The Forest and the just-issued Columbarium. She is the author of a number of works of literary criticism, including Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature; On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection; and Crimes of Writing. Her most recent critical book, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa. With Wesley Smith, she has translated Euripides' Andromache for the Oxford University Press New Classics in Translation series, and with Brunella Antomarini she translated the poetry and prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione, published by Charta in 2002. She and the Australian poet John Kinsella recently co-edited a special issue of TriQuarterly on "New Pastoral" and next year Chicago University Press will publish a collection of her art writings titled The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics 1987-2003. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Publisher Site; Link to Homepage

Jace Weaver is associate professor of religion and law at the University of Georgia, specializing in Native American studies. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice. He has lectured widely on environmental ethics. He is a former member of the White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals. Prior to coming to Georgia in 2002, he was associate professor of American studies, religious studies, and law at Yale University. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage