Ambassador Peter Galbraith has degrees from the Commonwealth School, Harvard College, Oxford University and Georgetown University Law Center. He has served on the staff of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1979 to 1993, where he published many reports about Iraq and took a special interest in Kurdistan. In 1993, he was appointed the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia by President Bill Clinton, later served as United Nations ambassador in East Timor and taught at the National War College (1999, 2001-2003). Currently Ambassador Galbraith is senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006), which argues that this country's "main error" in Iraq has been "wishful thinking" and advocates acceptance of a "partition" of Iraq into three parts as part of a "new U.S. strategy based on the reality of Iraq". He has also written extensively on Iraq in the pages of the New York Review of Books.

Mr. Elkind serves as Vice President of the NH Brain Injury Association; by Governor Lynch’s appointment, he chairs the NH Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Advisory Council. A lecturer and educator, Bud is a Certified Brain Injury Specialist/Trainer, has worked in a-typical sub-acute, and post-acute brain injury rehabilitation settings. Bud is Director of Clinical Operations at Robin Hill Farm, a residential treatment and rehabilitation brain injury facility operating in W. Deering, Hillsborough and Peterborough, New Hampshire.

August Watters is a mandolinist and professor of ear training at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. As founder and director of the New England Mandolin Ensemble, he leads a quartet featuring some of today’s leading mandolinists, including classical mandolin icon Marilynn Mair (Roger Williams University), multistylistic virtuoso Jim Dalton (Boston Conservatory), and mandocello specialist Mitch Nelin. They will perform selections from their new CD "Sip A Little New" in conjunction with Professor Watters' talk on Mandolins and MacDowell.

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. He is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.