Our Board

Patrick Weil, Chairman

Patrick Weil is the Director of the CEPIC (Center for the Study of Immigration, Integration and Citizenship Policies) at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and a visiting professor of Law at the Yale Law School. Professor Weil’s work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, securalization and integration law and policy. Patrick’s most recent books are: How to be French? A Nationality In the Making Since 1789 (Durham, Duke University Press, 2008); with co-editor Stéphane Dufoix, L’esclavage, la colonisation et àprésé France, Etats-Unis, Royaume-Uni (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2005);  and Liberté, égalité, discriminations, l’identité nationale au regard de l’histoire (Paris, Grasset, 2008).

Peter Sahlins, Vice-Chairman

Peter Sahlins is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.  A scholar of modern France, he has authored numerous books and articles on a range of topics engaging the history of boundaries, immigration, nationality law, and citizenship in the 17th and 18th centuries. Sahlins has also worked for many years in international education and research collaborations: as Founding Director of the France-Berkeley Fund (1994-2002); as Founding Director of the University of California in Paris (2002-5); and as Director of Academic Programs at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York (2006-2008), where he directed the Fellowships program, SSRC Books, and participated in a wide range of international collaborative research activities on topics ranging from environmental policy to capacity-building at universities throughout the world.  He is the recipient of numerous academic and service awards, including the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), the National Endowment for the Humanities (2010).  He was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1996.

Ramona Naddaff, Secretary

Ramona Naddaff is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also co-founder, co-director and senior editor of Zone Books, based in New York. For over twenty years, Ramona has been deeply involved in non-profit publishing endeavors and has helped launch two successful presses. A graduate of Yale University and Boston University, Ramona has also conducted extensive studies in France. More recently she has been involved in working with independent bookstores in Brooklyn, New York. Ramona is the author of numerous articles on Plato; ancient Greek philosophy and literature; censorship and the arts; and the politics of translation and publishing. She is also the author of a book-length study Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic; co-editor of Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Zone Books) and general series editor of the multi-volume Postwar French Thought (The New Press). Her current work is on the literary censorship trials of Gustave Flaubert and of D.H. Lawrence.

Mark Cramer, Treasurer

Mark Cramer is the CEO of Surf Canyon and has more than 14 years of in-depth experience in the technology sector, in positions ranging from laboratory engineer to Internet executive. At Hewlett-Packard in Grenoble, France, he was a Project Manager in charge of international manufacturing and distribution for high-end PC-workstation product lines. Mark was one of the early employees of Keynote Systems, where he conceived and successfully launched their professional services practice. He was later hired as CEO of NetGeo, where he developed the early business plan, brought the first product to market and raised capital from existing and new investors. Mark went on to NexTag, a vertical search engine, where he directed the launch of the mortgage category. He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where one of his projects included developing search engine software, and went on to earn his MBA from Harvard Business School.