Samuel Heilman holds the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Center and is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York. In 2007-2008, he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem. He was selected as a Fulbright Senior Specialist and sent to the People’s Republic of China where he lectured at Nanjing, Henan, and Shanghai Universities. More recently he completed another Fulbright at the Universities of Wroclaw, Warsaw and Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He has also been Scheinbrun Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, visiting professor of social anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and a Fulbright visiting professor at the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews as well as thirteen books. Most recently he has written Who Will Lead Us: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America and is co-author of Hasidism: A New History. He is also editor of Death, Bereavement, and Mourning.