1776 Salon

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Founding Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world. Brown is the author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), and he was Producer and Director of Research for the award-wining television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), broadcast nationally on season 11 of the PBS series Independent Lens. His first book, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008), was co-winner of the 2009 Merle Curti Award and received the 2009 James A. Rawley Prize and the 2008-09 Louis Gottschalk Prize. His most recent book is Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, published by Belknap Press in January 2020.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009  and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs, 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), and most recently, with Peter S. Onuf,  “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 2018-2019 President of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation. A selected list of her honors include a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfeld-Wolf Book. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest book is This America: The Case for the Nation (2019). Her 2018 book, These Truths: A History of the United States, is an international bestseller and was named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of the decade. (A recent essay considers responses to the book.) Her next book, IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, will be published in 2020. Lepore received a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995. She joined the Harvard History Department in 2003 and was Chair of the History and Literature Program in 2005-10, 2012, and 2014. In 2012, she was named Harvard College Professor, in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar and educator, public servant, and social justice activist who has taught on the faculty at Harvard University since 2005. He currently holds a joint appointment in the undergraduate honors program in History and Literature, Graduate School of Education, and John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he is Core Faculty at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Twice named one of Harvard Crimson’s “Professors of the Year,” he received the 2019 Manuel C. Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Kennedy School’s highest teaching honor. The adopted only son and grandson of public school teachers and factory workers, McCarthy was educated at Harvard and Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in History. A noted historian of politics and social movements, he is the author or editor of five books from the New Press, including the forthcoming Stonewall’s Children: Living Queer History in an Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love. A frequent media commentator, he served as guest editor for The Nation’s historic “Reclaiming Stonewall 50” forum in June 2019. McCarthy is also a board member for the Tony Award-winning American Repertory Theater, where he hosts and directs The A.R.T. of Human Rights and Resistance Mic!.

David Moss is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School and the founder of the Tobin Project. The author of many books, articles, and cases, his early research focused on the history of economic policy and financial markets in the United States. More recently, he has devoted increasing attention to questions of democratic governance and its evolution over time. His latest book, Democracy: A Case Study, explores key episodes in the history of American democracy from the Constitutional Convention to Citizens United. The book grew out of a popular course he created for Harvard undergraduates and MBA students, and he has since launched the Case Method Project, which is piloting this case-based curriculum in high school history, government, and civics courses across the country. Moss is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Student Association Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching at Harvard Business School (eleven times).

Professor Tushnet, who graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law. His research includes studies examining (skeptically) the practice of judicial review in the United States and around the world. He also writes in the area of legal and particularly constitutional history, with works on the development of civil rights law in the United States and (currently) a long-term project on the history of the Supreme Court in the 1930s.

John Stauffer is the Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of 20 books and over 100 articles, including GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, a national bestseller; The Black Hearts of Men, co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize; and Picturing Frederick Douglass, a Lincoln Prize finalist. His essays and reviews have appeared in Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and in journals and books. From 2015 to 2018 he edited 21st Editions, a limited edition photography press. He has presented on national radio and TV and served as a consultant or co-curator on films, exhibitions, and video games, including “God in America”, Django Unchained, WAR/​PHOTOGRAPHY, The Free State of Jones, The Abolitionists, Red Dead Redemption 2, and “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War”. He lives in Cambridge with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two sons, Erik and Nicholas.