Contributors
Simon Bell
Simon Bell studied Classics at Hertford College, Oxford, and was President of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. He worked as a freelance journalist in the 1980s for most of the London broadsheets. Later, he pursued a career in foreign affairs for various think tanks. He had four novels published in the 2000s under a pen name. He is a writer living in Greece and the UK and has three excellent daughters.
Wei-Ching Chang
Wei-Ching Chang is a lifelong learner. He studied philosophy (B.A., National Taiwan University; M.A., University of Minnesota) and Mathematics/statistics (M.A., University of Oregon; PhD, University of Toronto). For over 30 years, he worked in tourism and health care research/strategic planning for the Government of Alberta, and hospital research and quality assurance in Edmonton and Calgary; he also taught biostatistics and engaged in health care and cardiovascular research at the University of Alberta, and published numerous academic papers on the philosophy of health equity, and gender and social influences on clinical interventions and health outcomes based on statistics methods such as dynamic and multilevel modelling. After retirement, he continued his appointment as Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta, and studied acupuncture, fine art, literature, philosophy, gender and social issues, political and cultural theories, etc., and resulting in the following publications: Chang, W-C., Fraser, J.H. (2017). Cooperate! A paradigm shift for health equity. International Journal for Equity in Health (2017) 16:12. DOI 10.1186/s12939-016-0508-4. Chang, W-C. (2019). Finding Meaning and Beauty in an Idiotic World. Victoria, Canada: FriesenPress. Wei-Ching has been on the Advisory/Editorial Board for the International Journal for Equity in Health since 2002, and has served as a board member of a senior centre in Edmonton. Having moved to Courtenay, B.C. in 2020, he has been serving as a board committee member at the Glacier View Lodge, and also as a home-visit volunteer at the Comox Valley Senior Support to provide emotional support to isolated seniors. Through reading, writing and community involvement, he advocates a vision of a peaceful and cooperative society for a better world.
Richard McNeill Douglas
Richard McNeill Douglas is a writer and academic. A research fellow of CUSP (the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Surrey), his academic work at CUSP focuses on the political, philosophical, and economic implications of the limits to growth. An overarching theme of this work is the exploration of the philosophical and theological origins of modernity. He has written non-fiction articles for a range of publications, including: Environmental Politics, International Journal of Green Economics, Social Epistemology, Monthly Review, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, Political Quarterly, Open Democracy, The Mint Magazine, Church Times, Inside Track – the Green Alliance blog, and the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog. He has also contributed to three books, Future Ethics (2010), Facing Up to Climate Reality (2019), and The Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation (2021). In his spare time he also writes songs, short stories, and dramas.
David Fell
David Fell is a white British male in late middle age. The son of an immigrant, he was raised on a blue-collar estate not far from the Ford plant at Dagenham. As a child he secretly chased lizards, read Dickens and wrote poetry. He benefited from the enlightened post-war state education policies of the 60s and 70s and secured a place to study economics at the University of Cambridge. After graduating, and still in shock, he moved to London and initially pursued work as an economist. Inspired by the Earth Summit of 1992 he pivoted towards sustainable development and, in 1999, he co-founded the research consultancy Brook Lyndhurst. Twenty-five years later it’s still where he earns his money, and he works on projects that are concerned, broadly, with social and environmental justice, and the human behavioural aspects of tackling the climate emergency. David also enjoys cooking, wine, the work of Georges Perec, rock and pop music, Greece, travelling by train, good movies, spending time with his two adult sons, giving his mother the opportunity to tease him, and long walks and evenings at home with his partner. He has written many reports and articles as well as a few books (a couple of which have been published). He still writes poetry (which means he’s been doing it for more than 50 years) and still gets excited if he sees a lizard. He hasn’t read Dickens in years.
Douglas P. Fry
Douglas P. Fry is a Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Fry holds a PhD in Anthropology from Indiana University. Some of his related books include Nurturing Our Humanity (co-authored with Eisler), War, Peace, and Human Nature, and Beyond War.
Rachel Hadas
Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations. Her most recent poetry collections are “Ghost Guest” (Ragged Sky Press 2023) and “Pandemic Almanac” (Ragged Sky Press 2022). A prosimetrum on myth, alternating poetry and prose, entitled “From Which We Start Awake,” is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in 2025. Rachel Hadas taught English for many years at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. In addition to poetry, her special interests include myth, classics in translation, and medical humanities; she is Original English Verse Editor of the periodical “Classical Outlook.” She has translated three plays of Euripides and is among some forty translators of the “Dionysiaca” on Nonnus, a rollicking epic from very late antiquity based on the exploits of the god Dionysus (“Tales of Dionysus,” University of Michigan Press, 2022). Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; the O.B. Hardison Poetry prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library; an award in literature from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters; and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Since 2013 she and her husband Shalom Gorewitz have been collaborating on the marriage of poetry and video. www.rachelandshalomshow.com. www.rachelhadas.net
Brian Melican
Brian Melican is a journalist, translator, and author living in Hamburg and London. Working freelance since completing a degree in modern languages in 2007, he has appeared in a range of printed and digital media in the UK and Europe and has written several books about Germany, including Germany: Beyond the Enchanted Forest – A Literary Anthology (2013). Both as a journalist and a translator, his work also extends to other European countries, notably France and Sweden, covering a range of topics in politics, economics, history, and literature.
Mark-Alec Mellor
Mark-Alec Mellor is the founder of Cadenza Academic Translations, a team devoted to translating academic articles and books in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. He lives in Devon, in the UK, with his partner and a dog.
Gary G. Nelson
Gary G. Nelson has worked in systems engineering, including at federally funded Research and Development Centers in Washington, DC. He has worked and published in applying complex systems theory to projects, organizations and urban development.
Nij
Nij is a miniaturist who works chiefly in pen and ink. She has recently become curious about the possibilities of image-editing software. Her creative process usually begins with an abstract idea that sternly resists materialisation—often successfully, but sometimes not. So her images represent ‘the failed efforts of some ideas to enjoy a purely cognitive existence’.
Jack Parvid
Jack Parvid is a philosopher, essayist, and short story writer currently living in the UK. His non-fiction work is mainly concerned with ethics.
Mark Price
Mark Price is an architect working in Dublin. He was a part-time teacher in University College Dublin and Queens University Belfast form 1997 to 2021, where he taught design studio, drawing systems, building technology and history & theory seminars. He is co-editor of the book Rethinking the Crit which was published by Routledge Taylor & Francis in 2023, and has published research on design and art education, most recently ‘The Crit Ritual’ in the 2023 spring issue of Charrette, the journal of the Association of Architectural Educators. His maternal great-grandfather was known as The O’Rahilly, noted for his role in the formation of the Irish Volunteers and his death fighting in the 1916 Easter Rising. He has used his law degree to help anti-war activists in their legal defences since 2003, in cases resulting from their direct action protests against the US military use of Shannon airport. He is co-chair of the Irish Anti-War Movement and one of the founders of the (contemporary) Irish Neutrality League. He is a member of the Community Action Tenants Union and has campaigned for housing rights over many years. He is a member of the Peace and Neutrality Alliance, United Against Racism, and the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He was a board member of Create, the National development agency for collaborative arts in social and community contexts, from 2011 to 2017.
Geneviève Souillac
Dr. Geneviève Souillac is a Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She co-wrote “Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships” (https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00692-8). Souillac holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of A Study in Transborder Ethics, The Burden of Democracy, and Human Rights in Crisis.
Jerl Surratt
Jerl Surratt is a former advisor to and writer for nonprofit organizations in New York City providing early childhood education, medical care, social services, and legal assistance to underrepresented populations. A 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry, his poems have been published in The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, The Irenaut, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, The New Criterion, other journals and two anthologies. He now lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley, where he’s completed one collection of poems and is nearing completion of a second. jerlsurratt.com
Alec Sweeney
Alec Sweeney is an Irish poet and novelist.
Nigel S. Thompson
Nigel S. Thompson is a poet, critic and translator. He has worked as a gardener and museum curator in Italy and an academic and creative writing tutor in Oxford. His latest collections are After War (New Walk Editions) and Ghost Hands (Melos Press), both 2020.
Jaime Velásquez
Jaime Velásquez (Colombia) es magíster en Investigación Psicoanalítica y traductor professional inglés/francés-español, miembro de ACTTI-FIT (Asociación Colombiana de Traductores, Terminólogos e Intérpretes – Federación Internacional de Traductores), cuenta con siete libros traducidos publicados y es colaborador habitual, como traductor o editor, de Cadenza Academic Translations (Reino Unido). Actualmente dirige el seminario Una lectura del Quijote en Logos Psicoanalítico de Medellín (Colombia). Correo electrónico: [email protected]
Charles Webel
Charles Webel is currently Professor and Guarantor of the School of International Relations at the (State) University of New York in Prague. He previously studied and taught at the University of California, Berkeley (where he received his Ph.D.) and Harvard. A five-time Fulbright Scholar, he has been in over 100 countries and is a lifelong peace and social justice activist. Dr. Webel has published many articles and 13 books, including Peace and Conflict Studies (with David Barash), the standard text in that field. two other books on war, peace and conflict, 3 books on terrorism, and 3 philosophical books, the latest of which is The World as Idea, the first volume in a projected trilogy, modestly entitled The Fate of this World and the Future of Humanity. He is an ice-cream-aholic and incurable punster.
