Thomas Schwandt is University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar and Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where he holds appointments in the Department of Educational Psychology, the Department of Educational Policy Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Previously he was a faculty member in the School of Education at Indiana University, where he was also a Fellow in the university’s Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. He has also held a faculty appointment in medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago medical school and was employed in the private sector as an organizational consultant and program evaluator. In addition to his responsibilities at UIUC he has lectured and taught throughout Scandinavia. He has held several appointments in Scandinavia including visiting professor at Roskilde University in Denmark and research professor, part-time, at Statenskunnskaps- og Utviklingssenter for Helhetlig Rehabilitering [National Center for Comprehensive Rehabilitation Research and Development] in Norway. He is the author of Evaluation Practice Reconsidered (Peter Lang, 2004); Evaluating Holistic Rehabilitation Practice (Oslo, Kommuneforlaget, 2004); Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry (Sage, 1997, 2001, 2007), and, with Edward Halpern, Linking Auditing and Meta-evaluation (Sage, 1988); with his Norwegian colleague Peder Haug he has co-edited Evaluating Educational Reforms: Scandinavian Perspectives (Information Age Press, 2003) and with Katherine Ryan, Exploring Evaluator Role and Identity (Information Age Press, 2002). In addition, he has authored sixty papers and chapters on issues in theory of evaluation and interpretive methodologies that have appeared in a variety of books and journals. In 2002 he received the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award from the American Evaluation Association for his contributions to evaluation theory. Schwandt holds a Ph.D. in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University, Bloomington.