Culture, International

Background:
Craft has researched and published extensively in the field of human resources and labor relations. Current research activities include an inquiry into the elements of organizational human resources strategy, the use of human resources systems to enhance organizational competitiveness, and an examination of the evolving characteristics of unions and collective bargaining.

Craft has served as a Brookings Economic Policy Fellow in Washington, D.C., and has been employed as a labor force analyst with the U.S. Department of Labor. He has been a visiting professor at Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (Valparaiso, Chile) and the International Management Center (Budapest, Hungary). In addition, he has lectured on human resources topics in universities and in business programs in Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, Czech Republic, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and Poland.

Background:
Manning is a renowned scholar on the economic history of Africa and a specialist in world history. His research has focused on demographic history (the African slave trade), the social and cultural history of francophone Africa, global migration, the African diaspora as a dimension of global history, and an overview of the world history field.

Manning is author of The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (Columbia Studies in International and Global History, 2009), Migration in World History (Routledge, 2004), and Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Palgrave, 2003). His latest project is an interdisciplinary history of early humanity.

Background:

Weintraub is an ethnomusicologist whose specialty is the music and culture of Indonesia. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in ethnomusicology and is the director of the University Gamelan Ensemble, a group of musicians who play the gamelan—a large set of metal-keyed instruments, gongs, and drums.

Weintraub has traveled the mountains of West Java with professional puppeteers and their accompanying musicians. He wrote about those experiences in Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java (Ohio University Press, 2004). Weintraub is working on two other books—a history of Indonesian popular music and an edited volume on Islam and popular culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. He has performed gamelan music across the United States and in Canada, Asia, and Europe.

Background:

Bruhns, director of the University of Pittsburgh Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs, oversees Pitt’s 27 Nationality Rooms, which are historic landmarks that perpetuate the cultures and traditions of the countries and groups they represent, including those of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Bruhns works closely with more than 35 ethnic groups to create new Nationality Rooms, maintain existing rooms, and administer Pitt’s Summer Study Abroad Scholarship Program, which has approximately 40 scholarship recipients each year. Fluent in French and German, Bruhns has lived in Austria, Lebanon, Jordan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Germany, Greece, and Gabon. She is vice president of the National Ethnic Studies Assembly and is a member of the Pittsburgh Tourism Advisory Board, VisitPittsburgh, and the Cultural Tourism Office.

Background:

Condee is a specialist in contemporary Russian culture and cultural politics, imperial and postcolonial theory, and post-Soviet popular culture. She is a film scholar in Pitt’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and is on Pitt’s Film Studies faculty.

A former senior associate member of St. Antony’s College at Oxford University and a member of the Russian Guild of Cinema Scholars and Critics (Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation), Condee, for more than a decade, has been one of two U.S. scholars annually invited to and supported by the Kinotavr Film Festival (Sochi), Russia’s leading postsocialist film festival. She served for six years as chair of the board of directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the largest U.S. grant agency for social-science research in the former socialist bloc. Condee is coeditor of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. Her latest book is The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford University Press).