Kevin S. Amidon teaches German Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the Iowa State University, where he serves also as a Contributing Member of the faculty in History of Technology and Science.  He studied German, economics, history, musicology, and art history in Ann Arbor, Freiburg im Breisgau, Princeton, Frankfurt am Main, and Berlin, and received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University in 2001.  He has published on the Frankfurt School, feminist evolutionary thought, sexuality and masculinity, biological thought and argument, opera, drama, German literature, and the history of eugenics and race theory.  His current research projects include book-length studies of the status of Hören (hearing, attention, obedience, and ownership) in the German opera of the 1920s, and of the cultures of investigation and persuasion in the German life sciences in the early twentieth century.  During 2003-2004 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Jeffrey D. Howison lives in upstate New York where he is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at Binghamton University.

Dan Krier is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University and the author of Speculative Management:  Stock Market Power and Corporate Change (2005, SUNY Press) and a number of articles theorizing speculative finance capital and its impact on economic production, labor and contemporary social life. 

George Lundskow has two great professional interests:  religion and cars. Both represent a union of ideological and material priorities—the union of meaning and action—especially in the United States.  They are manifestations of culture, economics, lifestyle, and morality. Lundskow has published several papers and books on religion that apply Frommian Critical Theory to belief and practice, as well as a textbook on the Sociology of Religion. Lundskow also draws from Pierre Bourdieu, as well as Arlie Hochschild, Daniel Bell, and Peter Berger. Like his predecessors, Lundskow rejects attempts to return to the past, but rather, in Nietzschean fashion, to inspire a new social human, one fired by passion and intellect, imagination and critical observation.  In this direction, sociology offers much to understand the necessary social, psychological, and spiritual coherence that the human condition requires. How do we maintain individual initiative, insight, and passion and at the same time maintain a viable social character and collective morality?  His research interests pertain to social change, and include alternative religious groups of the present, medieval demonology, and ancient class-cultural conflict. In particular, he is working on a sociological understanding of class and religion in the Greco-Roman and Byzantine world.  Also, Marianne Weber’s work inspires his interest in the possibility of Neolithic goddess-oriented civilizations that predated the arrival of Northern and Eastern barbarians who introduced a patriarchal warfare culture. Marija Gimbutas and others documented extensive archaeological evidence in the 1970s and early 80s beyond what was available in Marianne’s time, and Professor Lundskow would like to continue Marianne’s sociological work.  Professor Lundskow is also involved in historical-comparative and survey research on the US automobile industry. Can the US working class survive above poverty levels?

Douglas Marshall is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of South Alabama. He has most recently published a critique of “Pure Sociology” as part of a symposium in The Sociological Quarterly (2008, Vol. 49, No. 2: pp. 209-235) as well as a rejoinder to a counter-critique in the same issue (pp. 275-284).  He applies his impure, bottom-up approach to sociological theorizing primarily to the domains of rationality and religion. His book on the former, Adaptive and/or Rational Actors: Of Organisms and Organizations, is nearing completion. Work on the latter is ongoing, but examples can be found in Sociological Theory (2002, Vol. 20, No. 3: 360-380), as well as herein.