Jeremy Adelman is Director of the Global History Lab at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) and Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. He has written or edited more than a dozen books, including the pioneering Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of Humankind from the Beginning to the Present and the acclaimed biography Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. He is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including, in 2025, being elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. His forthcoming book, The Capitalist Era: The Making – and Unmaking – of the Global Mind, is a history of global interdependence since the Age of Revolutions, which illuminates the “brittle unity” of our troubled present.

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware and directs our Museum Studies and Public Engagement program. Her prize-winning first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, uses a 1746 portrait of the wife of a Philadelphia merchant to tell “hidden histories” of both people and objects, which bring the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to life. Her most recent book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, follows a fascinating cast of characters on both sides of the Atlantic through the imperial crisis and the Revolutionary War, and demonstrates both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era.

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author or editor of nineteen books, among them the award-winning The Ideological Origins of the British Empire and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, which was named a Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement. A graduate of St. Catharine’s College and a former junior research fellow at Emmanuel College, in 2014, he was awarded Cambridge's Doctor of Letters degree in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of learning.

Mia Bay is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of many books, including To Tell the Truth Freely, an acclaimed biography of Ida B. Wells, and Travelling Black, a history of segregation in American transportation, which won the Bancroft Prize in 2022. A pathfinding scholar in African-American cultural and intellectual history, and in histories of civil rights and Black mobility, Professor Bay taught at Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania before her election in 2025 as the fourth Paul Mellon Professor of American History (after Charlotte Erickson, Tony Badger, and Gary Gerstle). She is currently writing a book on African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.

Maggie Blackhawk is the Moses H. Grossman Professor of Law at New York University and a scholar of constitutional and federal Indian law. Her work examines how American democracy can and should empower minorities and places Native Nations, Indigenous peoples, and colonialism at the centre of American constitutional history. She was awarded the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize for her article “Petitioning and the Making of an Administrative State,” published in the Yale Law Journal, which was described as “a work of prodigious scholarship and sharp analytical insight” into the American administrative state.

Kasia Boddy is Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge, where she has taught since 2012. She has taught at the University of Cambridge since 2012. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People (Yale 2020), along with many edited collections and numerous essays on modern fiction and culture. She has a particular interest in short fiction and the American novel, and among other projects, she’s currently working on a book about the influence of the U.S. census on American writers and literature. Her essays have appeared in many venues, iluding The London Review of Books.

Jamelle Bouie is an Opinion columnist for the New York Times. Before joining the Times, he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. In his column and his widely read weekly newsletter, he provides historical context for current events. His writing and reporting have won numerous accolades, including the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism and the Carey McWilliams Award from the American Political Science Association. The citation for that award noted that he had “reinvent[ed] the role of the newspaper political columnist” and “elevated the form"

Before entering politics, Jared served as an infantryman in the United States Marine Corps in Afghanistan and Iraq, and briefly returned to the region to help rebuild in his civilian capacity. He majored in History and Politics at Bates College in Maine, and after working as a staffer on the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, he served four years as a Representative in the Maine State Legislature before his election to the U.S. Congress. During his eight years as a Democrat in the House of Representatives, he has earned a reputation for engagement across the aisle. More recently, he has spoken out against the incivility and polarisation of contemporary political discourse. He announced in November 2025 that he would not seek reelection in 2026, lamenting “just how broken Congress has become” but insisting that “politics can be a positive force.”

Eliga P. Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and is currently the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively about the American Revolution and the ‘entangled’ history of North America and Europe in the late eighteenth-century. His prize-winning book, Among the Powers of the Earth, explores the challenges facing Americans in winning international recognition for their new republic in the aftermath of the American Revolution. He is currently completing a book on the “turbulent history” of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which brought the Revolutionary war to an end.

Nicholas Guyatt is Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation and (with Christa Dierksheide) Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery. He is also the editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of the United States, which will be published in June. He has written about American history and politics for many publications, including the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.

Caroline Johnston is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge, where in September she will become Assistant Professor of American History. Caroline is working on her first book, Carbon Cowboys, which explores the 1970s energy boom in the Rocky Mountains and the rise of powerful conservative organisations and ideas which have done so much to shape our present. A Coloradan, she received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2025, where she was supervised by Jefferson Cowie.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a historian of race and rights in nineteenth-century America, and has written several prize-winning books on the struggle for equal citizenship and belonging in the United States, including Birthright Citizens and Vanguard. Her most recent book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, narrates her family’s encounters with the “jagged color line” and her own experience of inheriting those struggles. She offers regular commentary on law, politics and society for numerous media outlets, including CNN, MS NOW, Politico, and many others.

Emma Stone Mackinnon is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research examines how ‘human rights promises’ from the Age of Revolutions, including the Declaration of Independence, influenced twentieth-century debates over civil rights and decolonisation. Her writing has appeared in many venues, including the Financial Times. Before embarking on her PhD, she worked for five years in Washington, DC and New York City in political communications and social policy research.

Heather Ann Thompson is Frank W Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Her 2016 book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She has written widely on race, prisons and policing for outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and has served on a number of advisory boards and commissions addressing the U.S. justice system. She was the Pitt Visiting Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge from 2019 to 2020. Her latest book - just published — is entitled Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.

Natasha Trethewey is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. From 2012 to 2014, she served as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the recipient of many awards and accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007 for her collection Native Guard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A native of Gulfport, Mississippi, her writing probes questions of race and memory across the long arc of American history. Her most recent book is The House of Being (2024).