Mary Corbin Sies is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of American Studies, an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies Program and of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. A specialist in material culture studies, she is an expert in the social, cultural, architectural, and planning history of American suburbia. In addition to AMST 205, she sometimes teaches AMST 211 (Technology and American Values), AMST 330 (Critics of American Culture), and a course on American Suburbia. In real life she is a sports fanatic, lover of the great outdoors, and intrepid explorer in search of obscure and remote architectural sites.

Tom Klancer is an Junior Computer Science major. We don't know exactly how he got the job as an undergraduate TA, but he's there. He also managed to pull off an A in this course when he took it as a freshman (his TAs were David Silver and Psyche Williams). In addition to being a TA for this course, he's taking 16 credits, including CMSC 411 (System Architecture), CMSC 420 (Data Structures), EDUC 388, ENGL 302 (Medieval Literature in Translation), and ENGL 393 (Professional Writing). He also works for aITs as a First-Aider. On top of all that, he attempts to have a life. In that largely fictional life, he has a girlfriend named Fatima, an Apple Macintosh running Mac OS 8 and BeOS. He also pretends to be a huge fan of the MetroStars, a soccer team in MLS. On the music side, he lies and says he likes listening to Rush, Pink Floyd, The Freddy Jones Band, Peter Gabriel, and a whole bunch of others.