Dr. Todd Swanstrom joined the University of Missouri-St. Louis as the Des Lee Endowed Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy Administration. This is a joint appointment with PPRC, the Department of Political Science, and Public Policy Administration. Dr. Swanstrom is the author of six books, including Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century, 2nd ed. (co-authored with Peter Dreier and John Mollenkopf). This text, published in 2001, examines the relationship between suburban sprawl and the decline of central cities and inner-ring suburbs. He also co-authored City Politics, 5th ed., which is a comprehensive examination of urban politics.
Dr. Bart Hildreth joined Geogia State University in July 2009. Previously, at Wichita State University, Hildreth was the Regents Distinguished Professor of Public Finance with joint appointments in the public administration faculty of the Hugo Wall School of Urban and Public Affairs and the finance faculty of the W. Frank Barton School of Business. Hildreth served as interim dean of the Barton School of Business in 2007-2008. Hildreth is editor-in-chief of the only referred journal devoted to municipal securities and state and local financing, the Municipal Finance Journal. His numerous journal articles and publications include the State and Local Government Debt Issuance and Management Service (with yearly updates), the co-edited Handbook on Taxation, and the co-authored Budgeting: Politics and Power (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Lawrence R. Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute and Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a wide range of public activities, Dr. Jacobs co-edits the “Chicago Series in American Politics” for the University of Chicago Press and has published ten scholarly books including: The Unsustainable American State (with Desmond King, Oxford University Press, 2009); Talking Together: Public Deliberation in America and the Search for Community (with Fay Lomax Cook and Michael Delli Carpini , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Class War? Economic Inequality and the American Dream (with Benjamin Page , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), The Private Abuse of the Public Interest (with Lawrence Brown, University of Chicago Press, 2008), Healthy, Wealthy, and Fair (with James Morone, Oxford University Press, 2005).
William L. Marcy is the assistant professor of history at St. Martin’s University and makes the case that the U.S. has, starting with the joining of the Reagan administration's anti-Communist initiatives with the "War on Drugs," played a large role in actually establishing the drug trade as a central economic base in Central and South America. He has written The Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America (Lawrence Hill Books). "Marcy investigates why South American drug trafficking has remained so hardy and lucrative even as the U.S. has spent billions—usually on wrongheaded measures, as he sees it—to combat both production and export. Costly raids and drug seizures have had minimal impact on production and no impact on U.S. consumption, argues Marcy ... Marcy's connections and conclusions richly reveal how intricately the legitimate and illegal economies are entangled across two continents." - Publishers Weekly.
