Anna Agbe-Davies
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Anna Agbe-Davies is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Specializing in contemporary and historical archaeology, much of her research focuses on life in the African diaspora. Her first book, Tobacco, Pipes, and Race: Little Tubes of Mighty Power (2015), examines craft production on plantations and the origins of racialized slavery in 17th-century Virginia. Her current book manuscript considers the role of material culture in Black women’s pursuit of human rights circa 1900-1950.
Vincent Brown
Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.
Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published two prize-winning books about the history of slavery: The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008) and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020). The author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is also Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013); he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-winning television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens; he was the executive producer and host for The Bigger Picture (2022), co-produced with WNET for PBS Digital Studios; and he was executive producer, writer, and host for How Do You Remember the Days of Slavery? (2024). He is co-founder of Timestamp Media, which explores the history that connects people and places across the world.
Lindsay Chervinsky
Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library.
Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a historian of the presidency, political culture, and U.S. government institutions. She is the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Previously, she was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, a historian at the White House Historical Association, and a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Dr. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (2020) and the co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture (2023). She has been published in the Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, CNN.com, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, The Daily Beast, and many others; she is a regular resource for outlets like CBS News, Face the Nation, CNN, The BBC, Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and CBC News.
Carolyn Eastman
Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Carolyn Eastman is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, book review editor for the William and Mary Quarterly, and will serve as elected president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) starting in 2025. She is the author of the prizewinning A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (2009), and The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity (2021), the latter of which received the SHEAR James Bradford Best Biography prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction. She is developing a book on Black and white New Yorkers’ experiences with the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, seeking to understand how the disease changed people’s lives as well as the city itself.
S. Max Edelson
Professor of History, University of Virginia.
S. Max Edelson is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he co-directs the UVA Early American Seminar. His research examines cartography, geography, and colonization in early North America and the Caribbean. His publications include Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (2006) and New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (2017). His current research examines geographic knowledge, mapmaking, and colonization in seventeenth-century America.
Eliga Gould
Professor of History, University of New Hampshire.
Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. He has written extensively on the American Revolution, emphasizing the entangled history that Americans shared with the rest of the Americas, as well as with Africa, Europe, and the wider world. His books include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (2000), winner of the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute; Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (2005), co-edited with Peter S. Onuf; Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012), which won the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year; and the first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World (2021), co-edited with Paul Mapp and Carla Gardina Pestana. He has held long-term fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University, and the Fulbright-Hays Program to the United Kingdom. In 2025-26, he will be Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford. His current book project, provisionally entitled Peace and Independence: The Turbulent History of the United States’ Founding Treaty, is about the least studied of the nation’s founding documents.
Emma Humphries
Chief Education Officer, iCivics.
Emma Humphries is the Chief Education Officer for iCivics, a position she has held for eight years. In this role, she leads iCivics organizational research agenda and youth voice strategy, serves as the leading brand ambassador, and ensures all iCivics materials are accurate, objective, and non-partisan by shepherding iCivics' Independent Review Council. Dr. Humphries has degrees in political science and education, and in 2004, she was awarded a James Madison Fellowship for excellence in teaching the U.S. Constitution. She lives with her husband and two daughters on Saint Simons Island in coastal Georgia.
Ronald Angelo Johnson
Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History & Associate Professor, Baylor University.
Ronald Angelo Johnson is currently working on two book projects: the first, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom & Atlantic Connections during the American Revolution, examines acts of rebellion by American colonists and rebels of color in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti). The second, We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti, is a diplomatic history of race and revolution, illustrating that Americans and Haitians shared important understandings of liberty. Dr. Johnson's first book was Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (2014). He is the co-editor of In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (2021) as well as the co-editor of the Journal of the Early Republic.
Cynthia A. Kierner
Professor of History, George Mason University.
Cindy Kierner received her PhD from the University of Virginia and is a specialist in early American history, women and gender, and disaster history. She is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer and past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Kierner has written or edited twelve books, including most recently The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and her Family in Revolutionary America (2023). She is also the author of the award-winning Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times (2012) and Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson’s America (2004).
James P. McClure, ex officio
General Editor, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, and Senior Research Historian, Princeton University.
James McClure joined the Papers of Thomas Jefferson editorial project at Princeton University in 1996 and has been General Editor and project director since 2014. He is co-director of the North American Climate History project (NACH), a collaborative effort of the Jefferson Papers at Princeton, the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia, and the Center for Digital Scholarship at the American Philosophical Society to create a digital resource giving free online access to American weather and climate records. He is a former president of the Association for Documentary Editing. He has a bachelor’s degree with a double major in history and political science from Utah State University, a master’s degree from the College of William & Mary with training in historical archaeology, and a doctorate in American history from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the Jefferson Papers, he worked on projects editing the papers of Salmon P. Chase and Daniel Chester French. He was co-editor, with Peg A. Lamphier and Erika M. Kreger, of "Spur Up Your Pegasus”: Family Letters of Salmon, Kate, and Nettie Chase, 1844–1873 (2009); with Leigh Johnsen, Kathleen Norman, and Michael Vanderlan, of "Circumventing the Dred Scott Decision: Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase, and the Citizenship of African Americans"; and with John David Smith, ed., Race and Recruitment (2013).
Johann Neem
Professor of History, Western Washington University.
Johann N. Neem is an historian of the early American republic. He is editor of the Journal of the Early Republic. He is an active contributor to the conversation on higher education reform. His new book, What's the Point of College?: Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform (2019), seeks to answer that very question for our reform-minded era. His other recent book, Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (2017), examines the origins and purposes of American public education between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His first book, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (2008), published by Harvard University Press, examines the development of civil society in Massachusetts after American independence. Neem received his BA in history from Brown University, where he wrote his senior thesis on civic education under the guidance of Ted Sizer. He went on to complete his PhD at the University of Virginia under Peter Onuf. Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University.
Nadine Zimmerli, ex officio
Editor for History and Politics, University of Virginia Press.
Nadine Zimmerli is the Editor for History and Politics at the University of Virginia Press. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed a dissertation in modern European history under the supervision of Rudy Koshar and a PhD minor in Indigenous American history under the supervision of Ned Blackhawk. An acquisitions editor with twenty years of experience, she got her start in academic publishing at the University of Wisconsin Press as a project assistant for the George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas. For a decade, she worked in the books program of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at William & Mary, where she developed award-winning books in various subfields of early American history. Joining UVA Press in 2019, she now oversees diverse lists on American history across five centuries, with an emphasis on the Revolutionary, Early Republic, and Civil War periods, as well as book series on the Black military experience, on South African history, and on early modern German history. Her acquisitions in politics center on the American presidency, the courts, race relations, and global democracy. Her portfolio also includes academic and trade books on the history and culture of Virginia, and in 2023, she was elected to the Virginia Forum Board of Directors for a three-year term.