David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, articles, and lectures that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is the author of “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism” and “The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism”, which was one of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2011. Among his other books are “A Companion to Marx’s Capital”, “Limits to Capital”, and “Social Justice and the City”. Professor Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly 40 years. He was director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY from 2008 to 2014.

Eva Illouz has been Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem since 2006 and a Directeur d’Etudes at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris since 2015. She researches how emotional life has been transformed by capitalism and by the culture of modernity. Her studies on emotions, consumer society and media culture are regarded as milestones in the study of emotions and relations in the modern world. She is the author of books such as “Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (Honorable Mention for the Best Book Award, American Sociological Association, 2000), “Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism” (2007), “Saving the Modern Soul Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help” (2008), “Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation” (Best Book Award, Alpine Philosophy Society in France, 2012), “Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey” (2014). Professor Illouz was the first woman President of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem.

Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science, Dean of the Institute for Humanities and the Social Sciences and Director of the PD program in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) in Florence, where she also leads the Centre on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). Between 2003 and 2015 she has been Professor of Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Her latest books are “Late Neoliberalism and its Discontents”, “Movement Parties in Times of Austerity” and “Where did the Revolution go?”. In 2011, Professor della Porta received the Mattei Dogan Prize. The main topics of her research include social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, the police and protest policing.

Yanis Varoufakis is Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens with academic experience in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. He was a member of the Greek Parliament (01-09/2015) and he held the position of Minister of Finance. His latest books are “And The Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability” and “The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy”. He challenges the mainstream notions of economic theory arguing that after the financial crash of 2008 we need a radically new way of thinking about the economy, finance and capitalism. Professor Varoufakis participates in the debates on the global and European crisis and is a co-founder of DiEM25.

Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has worked with the New School for Social Research in New York and the Universities of Augsburg, Duisburg-Essen and Manheim. His research interests are the sociology of time and identity formation and he is considered to be a leading representative of the new critical theory. He is the author of “Social Acceleration”, “High Speed Society, Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity“ and “Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late Modern Temporality“. Professor Rosa is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Time & Society.

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley, where she also teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Critical Theory. As a scholar of historical and contemporary political theory, she has established new paradigms in critical legal studies and feminist theory. In recent years, her work has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise. Her latest books include “Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution”, “The Power of Tolerance” (with Rainer Forst) and “Walled States, Waning Sovereignty”. Professor Brown is also a frequent contributor to debates about the predicaments and future of public higher education. She is a 2017-18 Guggenheim Fellow and UC President’s Humanities Fellow.