Darrick Hamilton is a university professor, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, and founding director of the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy at The New School. Considered one of the nation’s foremost public intellectuals, Professor Hamilton has been profiled in the New York Times, Mother Jones, Bloomberg’s Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. Professor Hamilton was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and the Group Health Foundation. He has been involved in crafting policy proposals that have garnered media attention and inspired legislative proposals at the federal, state, and local levels, including baby bonds, guaranteed income, and a federal job guarantee. He has testified before several Senate and House committees, including the Joint Economic Committee and the Senate Banking Committee. He was born and raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and received a PhD in Economics from the University of North Carolina.

Professor Heathcott studies the metropolis and its diverse cultures, institutions, and environments within a comparative and global perspective. His research and teaching interests include: cities real and imagined; urban spatial production; history and theory of built environments; race, class, and urban planning; and the politics of urban redevelopment.  He recently published two edited volumes on infrastructure, The Routledge Handbook on Infrastructure Design and Urban Infrastructure: Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World.  His book Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic, is due out in October, and includes 200 of his photographs taken around the borough over the last 10 years. Professor Heathcott held the U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair for the United Kingdom, a Senior Visiting Fellowship at London School of Economics, and was the Mellon Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University School of Architecture.  

Lark Lo Sontag is the inaugural Sadie T.M. Alexander Economics Department Fellow at The New School of Social Research. Her research lies at the intersection of law, political economy, and epistemological economic history of the Anglo West in order to examine global implications. Through her work, she seeks to challenge the normative assumptions embedded in Western quantitative methodology as it relates to the political economy by employing a critical quantitative analytic framework based on critical race theory tenets. She is inspired by the works of W.E.B. DuBois, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Polanyi, Amartya Sen, and Elinor Ostrom.

Richard McGahey is an economist and senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, both within The New School. He served as executive director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Labor, and in senior governmental positions in New York State and New York City. McGahey was director of impact assessment and a program officer for economic development at the Ford Foundation.