Souad T. Ali is Associate Professor at Arizona State University. She co-founded Al-Sudan Center for Democracy, Peace, and Civil Rights, and co-chaired the committee for peace in Sudan. A Fulbright Scholar, she is the author of A Religion, Not a State: Ali 'Abd al-Raziq Islamic Justification of Political Secularism (2009) and numerous articles. She is Director of Arabic and Chair of the Council for Arabic and Islamic Studies at ASU, and has been a Board member of the Sudan Studies Association, Head of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies at ASU, and President of the American Academy of Religion/Western Region. An advocate of women's rights, she was born in Sudan and lived in England. Stephanie Beswick was born in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, and spent her early years at Goda on the White Nile and at Bunziger on the Blue Nile. She received her education in Great Britain and the United States, earning her doctorate at Michigan State University. She has written a monograph on South Sudan, Sudan's Blood Memory, a pre-colonial history of the Dinka community. She has co-edited numerous books on Sudan, and has written approximately 30 journal articles. She is a past president of the Sudan Studies Association and a member of the Advisory Council for the Association. Richard Lobban received his PhD from Northwestern University, and is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and former Chair at Rhode Island College. He has written scores of articles, reviews, chapters and several editions of the Historical Dictionary of Sudan, and co-edited Sudan's Wars and Peace Agreements; Sudan Security; and The Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia. His latest co-authored book is Libya: History and Revolution. Jay Spaulding was originally a medievalist by training, and earned a doctorate in African History from Columbia University. He has taught at Kean University, with several visiting professorships at Michigan State University. He is a founding member of the Sudan Studies Association. His publications include The Heroic Age in Sinnar and several co-edited volumes, as well as numerous shorter studies in the field of northeast African history.
