Denise Gigante

DENISE GIGANTE, Associate Professor of English, teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on Romanticism. Her books include Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005), The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology (Yale UP, 2008), and Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009). She is currently working on The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George with Lawrence M. Crutcher (a descendant of George Keats) and a book about American bibliophilia and British Romanticism. (bio taken here)

Click here for a radio interview on her book Life: Organic Form and Romanticism

Dan Pink

With a trio of influential bestsellers, Dan Pink has changed the way companies view the modern workplace. In the pivotal A Whole New Mind, Pink identifies a sea change in the global workforce -- the shift of an information-based corporate culture to a conceptual base, where creativity and big-picture design dominates the landscape.

His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, is an evolutionary transformation of the familiar career guide. Replacing linear text with a manga-inspired comic, Pink outlines six career laws vastly differing from the ones you've been taught. Members of the Johnny Bunko online forum participated in an online contest to create the seventh law -- "stay hungry."

A contributing editor for Wired, Pink is working on a new book on the science and economics of motivation for release in late 2009.

"Pink has a knack for teaching in such an entertaining way that you'll forget you are learning." -Lexi Feinberg, Forbes.com (bio taken here)

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of three books, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference," (2000) , "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (2005), and "Outliers: The Story of Success" (2008) all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.

From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City. (bio taken here)

The Outliers

George Lakoff

George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind", which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. (bio taken here)

John Dewey

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose thoughts and ideas have been highly influential in the United States and around the world. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism. He is also one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century. (bio taken here)

Here is an audio reading of John Dewey's 1897 seminal essay on his educational beliefs called "My Pedagogic Creed." This version was a project recorded and edited by students at the University of Illinois's Music Education Technology class MUS243 (fall 2008).