Dark Age Ahead

Presenter Biographies

Marsha Hewitt

Marsha Hewitt is Professor of Social Ethics and Religion in the Faculty of Divinity and the Centre for the Study of Religion at Trinity College and the University of Toronto. She is the Co-ordinator of the Ethics, Society and Law Programme at Trinity College, and past Co-ordinator of the former programme in Psychoanalytic Thought, also at Trinity College. Professor Hewitt teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in ethics, critical theory, philosophy of religion, feminist theory and psychoanalytic thought in the Arts and Divinity Faculties at Trinity College, the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology. Her published works include From Theology to Social Theory, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis, as well as several articles in scholarly journals. Professor Hewitt is also a psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto.

Allan Jacobs

Allan Jacobs is Professor Emeritus and University Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an urban designer, and trained as an architect and city planner at Miami University, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked in many cities, most notably Pittsburgh, Calcutta, Boston and San Francisco, where for seven years he was director of City Planning. He was responsible for San Francisco's now famous Urban Design Plan and for a citizen-approved self-taxing proposition to implement the City's Open Space plan. Most of his present work is focused on the design of streets. With his partner, Elizabeth Macdonald, Jacobs has completed street designs in Ahmedabad, India, San Francisco (a new multi-way boulevard to replace a freeway), Vancouver and Oakland, California. Jacobs' four books include Great Streets and The Boulevard Book (with Macdonald and Yodan Rofe).

Robert Lucas

Robert Lucas is an American economist who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Economics for developing and applying the theory of rational expectations, an econometric hypothesis which suggests that individuals may affect the expected results of national fiscal policy by making private economic decisions based on past experiences and anticipated results. His work, which gained prominence in the mid-1970s, questioned the influence of John Maynard Keynes in macroeconomics and the efficacy of government intervention in domestic affairs. Lucas currently teaches economics at the University of Chicago.

Henry Mintzberg

Henry Mintzberg is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where he has been teaching since graduating from MIT in 1968. Mintzberg is among the most distinguished contemporary management authors and is recognized for his expertise, innovation and dynamism worldwide. General management and organization (including the process of strategy formation, the design of organizations and the impact of design on organizations), are his current research interests. His well-known books include The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), The Structuring of Organizations (1979), Power In and Around Organizations (1983), The Strategy Process (1988, 2nd ed. 1991), and Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations (1989). His book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, won the best book award of the Academy of Management in 1995. His latest book is Managers, Not MBAs.

Norman Wirzba

Norman Wirzba is chair of the Philosophy department at Georgetown College, KY, where he teaches courses in environmental/agrarian thought, the history of philosophy, and theology. He was educated at the University of Lethbridge (history), Yale University (theology), and Loyola University of Chicago (philosophy). He has published articles on contemporary European philosophy and religious thought, and is the author of The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age (Oxford), and editor of The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (Kentucky) and The Art of the Commonplace (Counterpoint). He is currently writing a book on modernity, morality, and religion that will be called Sense and Responsibility.

Martin Wolf

Martin Wolf is associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 for services to financial journalism. He is a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford University, and a special professor at the University of Nottingham. Mr. Wolf was joint winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for excellence in financial journalism in both 1989 and 1997 and won the RTZ David Watt memorial prize in 1994. He was the winner of the 2003 Business Journalist of the Year Decade of Excellence Award. He has been a forum fellow at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum since 1999. He won the Newspaper Feature of the Year Award at the Workworld Media Awards in 2003.