Mechthild Nagel is a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, College at Cortland, and a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for African Development at Cornell University. She is the author of Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play (2002), coeditor of Race, Class, and Community Identity (2000), and coeditor of Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality (2007). Nagel is the editor-in-chief of the online journal Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies.