Hello, Firedoglakers! I’m positively giddy to be joining FDL as Deputy Editor and Editor of MyFDL. This is my first day on the job and my brain is like a pinball machine as I get my bearings and plunge into in this exciting work.

It’s a real honor for me to join FDL’s hugely impressive team and participate in the passionate FDL community. Let me say upfront that while I come to this work with a background as an editor and writer and campaigner for social change, I enter FDL’s doors with a profound respect for the identity this publication has built and the impact it’s made since its emergence.

A few words about my background, though.

I spent the last four years as Communications Coordinator for Interfaith Worker Justice, an organization that campaigns for the rights of low-wage workers. I had the pleasure of working with a real visionary in Kim Bobo, the organization’s founder, whose book Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It put the scandal of wage theft on the national agenda and whose manual Organizing for Social Change is an essential text for movement organizers and trainers.

How cool to go from working with one visionary woman to working with another in Jane Hamsher, whose warm welcome to the FDL team I appreciate a lot.

I’ve also been Editor of The Common Review, the Chicago-based magazine of the Great Books Foundation, Senior Editor of openDemocracy, a London-based online magazine of global politics and ideas, and a staff writer for the DC-based Chronicle of Higher Education, where I wrote about philosophers, historians, political scientists, scholars of the Middle East and Africa, among other things.

I was also an editor with Britannica.com back in 1999-2000, when the 200-year-old Encyclopædia Britannica ventured into the world of online publishing.

I’ve authored one book, Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, and co-edited another, The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future, which my co-editor Nader Hashemi and I had a blast discussing on FDL’s Book Salon in February when it came out.

I’ve written for a variety of progressive (and a couple of mainstream) publications, including AlterNet, The American Prospect, The Chicago Tribune, Commonweal, Critical Inquiry, The Guardian, In These Times, MotherJones.com, The Nation, the New Humanist, The Progressive, Salmagundi, Truthdig, and The Washington Post. And I’m a Correspondent for the outstanding global resource LabourStart.

I’ve had the honor of interviewing some of the leading thinkers and writers of our time -– the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman, the French-Bulgarian cultural theorist Tzvetan Todorov, the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, the Iranian political sociologist Hossein Bashiriyeh, the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (PDF), and the late Irish international relations scholar and columnist Fred Halliday.

My interests range from social movements and political philosophy to labor rights and the global economy, from the Middle East and Latin America to US foreign policy in a shifting geopolitical constellation and the role of solidarity in international struggles for justice. In my own writing I’ve tackled wage theft and workplace immigration raids, right-wing schisms over the Iraq war and neoconservative hypocrisy on Iran, the legacy of lynching and the anxieties of being a secular father whose kids go to church with their mother.

My sleeves are rolled up and I’m ready to be part of the FDL project, eager to engage with the hungry minds and passionate souls who make this one of the most promising forces in the digital commons today.