Peter Schneider was born in Lubeck in 1940 and grew up in southern Germany. He has greatly contributed to the literary and cultural life of Germany over the last four decades. After finishing his studies in German, History, and Philosophy in 1964, Schneider became a central figure in the 1968 Student Protest Movements in Berlin and Turin, Italy. After completing his Staatsexamen in higher education, Schneider began his career as a writer with his novel Lenz, a retelling of Buchner's novella.

After the success of Lenz in Germany, over twenty other novels, screenplays, and volumes of journalistic essays followed, including the English translated works Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1984), Extreme Mittelage (The German Comedy,1990), Paarungen (Couplings, 1996), and Eduards Heimkehr (Edward's Homecoming, 2000). Schneider's screenplays were filmed by Reinhard Hauff-Messer im Kopf (Knife in the Head) and Margarethe von Trotta - Das Versprechen (The Promise).

His essays can be found in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Le Monde.

His most recent novel Skylla, was published in March.

Marina S. Ottaway specializes in democracy and post-conflict reconstruction issues. She is a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, a research endeavor that analyzes the state of democracy around the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. Her new book, Democracy Challenged, a comparative study of semiauthoritarian regimes in Africa, the Caucasus, Latin America, and the Middle East, was published in January 2003. Her current works focus on political transformation in the Middle East and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She is also a lecturer in African Studies at the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Ottaway carried out research in Africa and in the Middle East and taught at the University of Addis Ababa, the University of Zambia, the American University in Cairo, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

She received her undergraduate educatin at University of Pavia, Italy and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Ottaway's selected Publications include, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Carnegie, 2003); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, edited with Thomas Carothers (Carnegie, 2000); Africa's New Leaders: Democracy or State Reconstruction? (Carnegie, 1999)

Steven Miller is Director of the International Security Program, Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal International Security, and co-editor of the International Security Program's book series, BCSIA Studies in International Security (which is published by the MIT Press). Previously, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and taught Defense and Arms Control Studies in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-author of the recent monograph, War with Iraq: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives (2002) and a frequent contributor to Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Miller is editor or co-editor of some two dozen books, including, most recently, Offense, Defense, and War (October 2004), The Russian Military: Power and Policy (September 2004), Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict- Revised Edition (2001), and The Rise of China (2000).

Miller is the co-chair of the U.S. Pugwash Committee and a member of the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council of International Pugwash, the Advisory Committee of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and the Scientific Committee of the Landau Network Centro Volta (Italy). He is a former member of the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Within Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Miller serves on the steering committees of the Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe and of the Harvard Ukrainian Project.

Suggested readings for the seminar:

(1) Teresa Johnson, "Writing for International Security: A Contributor's Guide." International Security, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 1991), pp. 171-180.

(2) For a critical view of the journal: Hugh Gusterson, "Missing the End of the Cold War in International Security," in Jutta Weldes, et al., Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 319-345.

(3) For a survey of the evolution of the journal: Steven Miller, "International Security at 25: From One World to Another," International Security, Vol 26, No. 1 (Summer 2001), pp. 5-39.

Marc J. Ventresca is University Lecturer in Management Studies at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Fellow of Wolfson College, and University Fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization. For 2004-5 he is a Research Fellow in Organizational Learning and Homeland Security, CISAC, IIS, Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests focus on institutions, organizations, and industry entrepreneurship; organizational learning; organization design and managing change; environmental management; power and leadership in organizations, and economic sociology of strategy.

He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University, after master's degrees in policy analysis and education and in sociology. He has taught at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, the Copenhagen Business School, the Center for Work, Technology, and Organizations at Stanford University, and the Stanford Institute for Research on Higher Education.

Prior to a faculty career, Dr. Ventresca worked as a policy analyst at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington D.C., studied language and politics in Florence, Italy, and worked as a technical writer for hopeful start-ups in Silicon Valley.

Francis Fukuyama is Dean of Faculty and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Fukuyama's book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. It made the bestseller lists in the United States, France, Japan, and Chile, and has been awarded the Los Angeles Times' Book Critics Award in the Current Interest category, as well as the Premio Capri for the Italian edition. He is also the author of Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002). His book State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century will be published by Cornell University Press in the spring of 2004.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. He has, in recent years, focused on the role of culture and social capital in modern economic life, and on the social consequences of technological change.

Born in Shanghai in 1970, Mian Mian first began writing at the age of sixteen. She dropped out secondary school in Shanghai in 1987 and two years later went on her own to Shenzhen, a boomtown in the southern province of Guangdong. She spent five years there delving into society's seedier side before returning to Shanghai, where she continues to reside.

After Mian Mian came home to Shanghai, she started writing again, and by 1997 her short stories and novellas were appearing in Xiaoshuo Jie (Fiction World) and several other widely circulated Chinese literary magazines. The milieu depicted in Mian Mian's work is drawn from her life experience, and many of her fictional characters are also inspired by the subculture she moved in, a subculture peopled by aspiring singers, drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, gangsters, the mentally ill, slackers, and self-proclaimed artists. She became the first Chinese writer to describe drugs. Her style, characteristic of "cruel youth" and her simultaneously hip and introspective attitude toward self-reflection quickly attracted a large following of young readers. In July 1997, with the backing of the New Century Publishing House in Hong Kong, Mian Mian published her first collection of short stories, La La La. Mian Mian's first novel, Tang (Candy), was published simultaneously by Zhongguo Xiju Publishing House and the prestigious literary magazine Shouhuo (Harvest) in January 2000. This novel created a stir in China's literary world and quickly became a bestseller, with a large number of pirated copies produced and sold throughout the country. The publication of Candy was soon followed by the publication of two more collections of short stories, Every Good Child Deserves Candy (Huashan Publishers) and Acid Lover (Shanghai Sanlian Publishing House). In April 2000, the Chinese government banned Candy. Shortly thereafter, the rest of Mian Mian's books were also banned.

Candy has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese. La La La has been translated into German and Italian.

In addition to writing, Mian Mian is also a music promoter, and the only female dance party organizer in China. Following on her experience working as a DJ at Shanghai's Cotton Club in 1996, Mian Mian began bringing rock shows and DJs into clubs in a number of Chinese cities starting in 1997. She has planned numerous large-scale dance parties, where internationally renowned DJs have performed. Her most successful parties include two parties with Paul Oakenfold -- inShanghai in 1999 and at the Great Wall in 2003 -- as well as the Red Age Club party in Chengdu in 2002, a seven-day-long party where the biggest Chinese DJs performed.

In 2002, after the ban on her writing was removed, Mian Mian published Social Dance, a collection taken for the column she writes for the Hong Kong independent newspaper, Apple Daily. At that time, she also signed with the Modern Sky Record Company as her Chinese Agent. In 2003, Mian Mian started to write a column for several famous fashion magazines, marking a departure from her previous policy of shunning the mainstream media. The column focuses on personal issues, such as love relationships and ways of fighting depression. Mian Mian also wrote the screenplay and acted in the film Shanghai Panic which showed in a number of international film festivals.

This program is part of the Winter Colloquium Series, "Globalizing Asian Cultures."