Erik Bleich is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including The Freedom to Be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism (Oxford University Press, 2011). His scholarship has appeared in journals in the fields of political science, communications, sociology, religion, and law, and he has contributed to public discussions in the Atlantic, Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He directs the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project, which uses computer-assisted techniques to analyze media representations of marginalized groups.
A. Maurits van der Veen is Associate Professor of Government at William & Mary. He is the author of Ideas, Interests and Foreign Aid (2011), which examines the framing of spending on foreign populations by European politicians. His work has appeared in journals in political science, communications, and religion, and has been discussed in media outlets such as The Washington Post. He directs the STAIR (Systematic Text Analysis for International Relations) lab at William & Mary, which develops and applies computational social science techniques for the analysis of large corpora of political texts.