Maryam Aslany started her academic career as a physicist but then moved to social sciences later. She recently completed her doctorate in Economic Sociology at King's India Institute, London. Her doctoral research, 'The Rural Middle Classes in India', examined the emergence of the rural middle classes in India in the period following economic liberalisation. Her doctoral thesis was based on 18 months of fieldwork in two villages in Pune district in western Maharashtra. She developed a theoretical approach to study the rural middle classes, engaging with three major classical theorists of social stratification and class – Marx (theorising the ownership of the means of production), Weber (access to social capital) and Bourdieu (cultural capital). She graduated from University of Oxford where she completed a master of science in Contemporary India. Her academic research interests include rural middle class formation, patterns of migrations in rural south Asia, labour transitions and informal labour, theories of class, and political behaviour of the middle classes.

Miguel Vedda is a full Professor (titular plenario) of the Chair of German Literature and the Director of the Department of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Vedda is also the Principal Investigator of the Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). He is a Member of the marxist collective “Herramienta” and the President of the Latin American Association of German Studies (ALEG). He is also the Coeditor of Anuario Argentino de Germanística and Ibero-amerikanisches Jahrbuch für Germanistik and a Member of the “Internationale Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft”. His principal interests include modern German literature, marxist literary theory and aesthetics. His recent publications include Siegfried Kracauer: Un pensador más allá de las fronteras (2010); Urbane Beobachtungen: Walter Benjamin und die neuen Städte (2010), La irrealidad de la desesperación: Estudios sobre Siegfried Kracauer y Walter Benjamin (2011), Walter Benjamin: Experiência histórica e imagens dialéticas (2015), Leer a Goethe (2015): Translator and editor of Goethe (Faust), Eichendorff, Heine, Marx, Kafka, Lukács and Kracauer, among others.

Dr. Mikhail Yu. Pavlov represents Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism Studies. He holds the position of Associate professor, department of political economy, Co-chairperson, Center of Socio-Economy Studies, Economic Faculty, Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is member of editorial board of ‘Questions of Political Economy’ Journal, author of many printed works – over 70 (his article "A New Energy Paradigm for the Third Millenium" was published in Indian Journal "World Affairs"), chairperson in many organizing committees of international conferences, he teaches many courses at Lomonosov Moscow State University – "Political economy", "Knowledge economy", "Global economic crises", "Economy of Nanotechnology", "Debt relations in the contemporary global economy" and many other. His post-doctorate thesis is devoted to social and economic conditions for human creative potential formation. He is also the follower of indologist dynasty – his father, prof. Yuriy M. Pavlov was Marxist scientist (in the sphere of Social Philosophy), who devoted his life studying Indian philosophy, culture, religions, relations with Soviet Union and many other spheres. He was the head of many Soviet delegations to India, advisor to Indira Gandhi from the Soviet Union and great expert on India with his father. Mikhail Yu. Pavlov wants to know more about India and Marxism in modern India.

Peter Beilharz is a Professor of Culture and Society at Curtin University. For many years he was a Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. In 1980, he co-founded the international journal of social theory, Thesis Eleven, and has edited it for nearly 40 years. From 2002 to 2014, he was the Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe. He was a Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard 1999–2000. Peter has written or edited 27 books, including Labour’s Utopias (1992), Postmodern Socialism (1994), Transforming Labor (1994), Imagining the Antipodes (1997), Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity (2002), Socialism and Modernity (2009), Thinking the Antipodes (2015), The Martin Presence (2015) and 200 papers. He is a Fellow in Cultural Sociology at Yale and Visiting Professor at the Bauman Institute, University of Leeds. In 2015, he was Research Fellow at STIAS, Stellenbosch, South Africa, and is now affiliated with Sichuan University in Chengdu. He is presently editing books of essays on Gramsci, and on Marx, and is working with Sian Supski on the writing of South African author Ivan Vladislavic, and on a final book of farewell to Zygmunt Bauman.

Peter Hudis is a Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Oakton Community College and author of Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Brill, 2012) and Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015) as well as of numerous essays on Hegelian philosophy, Marxism, Latin American social movements, and Critical Race Theory. He co-edited (with Kevin B. Anderson) of The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lexington Books, 2002) and The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, (Monthly Review Books, 2004) as well as The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, with Annelies Laschitza and George Adler (2011). He is also the editor of Volume I of The Complete Works or Rosa Luxemburg: Economic Writings 1 (2013) and co-edited Volume II, Economic Writings 2, with Paul Le Blanc (2015) and Vol. III, with Bill Pelz and Axel Fair-Schulz (forthcoming, 2018). He is currently the General Editor of The Complete Works of Luxemburg, which will make all of her work available in 17 volumes.

Riccardo Petrella studied Political Science and Economics at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) on "La mondialisation de l'économie". He was also a Professor at the Flemish Free University Brussels on "The European Integration". He holds the degree of Doctor honoris causa from eight universities (DK, S, F, B, CND, Arg). In 1970-1975, he became the Director of the European Coordination Center on Social and Economic Research in Vienna. In 1979-1994, he assumed the charge of Director of the FAST Programme (Forecasting and Assessment in Science and Technology) at the Commission of the European Communities, Brussels. Petrella is also the Founder/Promoter of "European Inter-University Network on ESST (Education on Society Science and Technology)". His books include Limits to Competition (MIT Press), Le biencommun (Labor), The Water Manifesto (Zed Books) , Il diritto di sognare (Sperling and Kupfer), Au nom de l'humanité( Couleurlivres).