Speakers
Edward Ayers has been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, won the Bancroft, Beveridge, and Lincoln prizes in American history, and served as president of the Organization of American Historians and founding board chair of the American Civil War Museum. He is executive director of New American History, online projects designed to help students and teachers to see the nation’s history in new ways. He is university professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond.
David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. In 2020, Yale President Peter Salovey appointed him as chair of the Yale and Slavery Working Group. With his Working Group colleagues, Blight authored the book Yale and Slavery: A History, a narrative study of Yale’s historic involvement and associations with slavery and its aftermaths, published by Yale University Press in February of 2024. He is the immediate past president of the Organization of American Historians (2024-2025). Blight previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University, and Amherst College. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. Blight has always been a teacher first. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Blight maintains a website, including information about public lectures, books, articles, and interviews at: http://www.davidwblight.com/
Lonnie G. Bunch III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian. He assumed his position June 16, 2019. As Secretary, he oversees 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers, and several education units and centers. Two new museums—the National Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum—are in development.
Since 2024, Bunch has been Honorary Professor of Practice at Queen’s University Belfast.
Previously, Bunch was the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. When he started as director in July 2005, he had one staff member, no collections, no funding and no site for a museum. Driven by optimism, determination and a commitment to build “a place that would make America better,” Bunch transformed a vision into a bold reality. The museum has welcomed nearly 13 million visitors since it opened in September 2016 and compiled a collection of 40,000 objects that are housed in the first “green building” on the National Mall.
Before his appointment as director of the museum, Bunch served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society (2001–2005). There, he led a successful capital campaign to transform the Historical Society in celebration of its 150th anniversary, managed an institutional reorganization, initiated an unprecedented outreach initiative to diverse communities and launched a much-lauded exhibition and program on teenage life titled “Teen Chicago.”
A widely published author, Bunch has written on topics ranging from the black military experience, the American presidency and African American History in California, diversity in museum management and the impact of funding and politics on American museums. His most recent book, A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump, chronicles the making of the museum that would become one of the most popular destinations in Washington.
Cynthia R. Copeland is a New York-based public historian and educator who has directed and consulted on many projects related to the legacies of slavery, including Manhattan's African Burial Ground. She is a co-director of the Yale Public History Institute, and serves as a member of the American Historical Association's Committee for Academic Freedom. She is a co-curator of The Occupied City: New York and the American Revolution, an exhibition currently on view at the Museum of the City of New York. Additionally, a co-founder/director, she serves as president of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History, co-chairs the Reparations Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, teaches at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development in the department of Teaching and Learning, and facilitates dialogic, teaching and learning workshops for the Center for Trauma Resilient Communities | Crossnore Communities for Children in North Carolina.
Sylvia Cyrus began her tenure as the executive director of ASALH in 2003. Under her tenure as the 2nd longest serving Executive Director, Sylvia Cyrus leads the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) whose mission is to promote research, preserve, interpret and disseminate information about black life, history and culture. Working with an organization with national profile, she uses this platform fearlessly on behalf of ASALH.
She has expanded ASALH’s community partnerships with established and emerging organizations. These strategic partnerships, including the National Park Service, has heighten the awareness and role of preservation of black history.
Guided by the vision of its founder Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History, Sylvia is honored to lead a 111-year old organization that continues to lead the vital discussion, dissemination and preservation of Black history and culture. She has formed lasting strategic partnerships with corporate and community leaders who share her vision and dream to preserve black history. In 2025, she was the recipient of the Education Award presented by the Black Women's Agenda and was recognized by the Third District and Alpha Omega Chapter (DC) of Omega Psi Phi as Citizen of the Year. The Washington Informer Charities, Inc. named Ms. Cyrus one of Washington’s 50 Influencers. During her leadership, the Association received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Distinguished Organization Avoice Heritage Award and the Historic Achievement Award from The Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Sylvia also received the Centennial Award from the National Parks Conservation Association.
Beth English is Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians and affiliate faculty in the Department of History at Indiana University. Her research and teaching focus on the historical and contemporary labor movement, working class and workplace norms, globalization, and deindustrialization. Prior to her appointment at OAH she directed the Program on Gender in the Global Community at the Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. She is the author of A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry, and co-editor of Global Women’s Work: Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy. English's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the International Labour Organization. She is a regular contributor to the HARPPing on History substack, and has contributed to the Washington Post, NPR, Vox, The New Republic, and other media outlets.
Susan Ferentinos, PhD, is a public history researcher, writer, and consultant helping cultural organizations expand the stories they tell about the past. She served as the public history manager of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from 2002 to 2011. In this role, she advocated for public history within the larger profession and oversaw the cooperative relationship between the OAH and the National Park Service (NPS). Imperiled Promise was among the 100+ OAH-NPS projects she managed during her time in this position. As a consultant, Ferentinos has continued to work on projects with the park service, including three national historic landmark nominations related to women’s history, a scholarly charette at Stonewall National Monument, and a historic resource study of under-represented voices at Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Her project on Maryland LGBTQ history won the Allan Bérubé Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association, and she received the National Council on Public History Book Award for her book Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites.
Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and Civil War Memory. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016) and Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (Fordham University Press, 2025).
She also co-authored with Keith S. Herbert a NPS Historic Resource Study on African American Schools in the South, 1865-1900 (Washington: DC: Department of the Interior, 2022) and co-edited The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham University Press, 2024) with Andrew L. Slap.
In addition, she served as the lead historian on the With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited and the inaugural Oak Row Exhibition focused on the campus history of slavery and post-Civil War exploitation, She currently serves as the Chief Reader for the AP US History exam and is the co-series editor with J. Brent Morris of the Reconstruction Reconsidered, a University of South Carolina Press book series.
James Grossman is Executive Director Emeritus of the American Historical Association, having retired in 2025. Formerly Vice-President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library, he taught at University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego. Author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900-1929, Grossman was project director and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago. He is editor emeritus of the University of Chicago Press book series “Historical Studies of Urban America” (50 volumes). Articles and short essays have focused on urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. Short pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, New York Daily News, North Shore Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, Inside Higher Ed, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, and elsewhere.
Grossman is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians.
Consulting experience includes projects generated by BBC, Smithsonian, and various theater companies, filmmakers, museums, libraries, and foundations. He has served on governing boards of the American Council of Learned Societies, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Center for Research Libraries, National Humanities Alliance, Vivian G. Harsh Society, and Chicago Metro History Education Center.
Nicole A. Moore is a public historian and consultant with over a decade of museum experience, including interpreting the lives of the enslaved. In her role as Senior Director of Education at the National Center for Civil Rights, Nicole leads a multi-year expansion of educational content developed by and for The Center focused on civil and human rights history from the era of Reconstruction to the present and serves as the in-house historian. As a consultant, she works to bridge the gap between first- and third-person interpretation for all age groups, facilitating workshops and training sessions at historic sites across the country, while assisting historic sites with the development and implementation of interpretive plans to improve and enhance visitor learning and engagement.
Active in the field, she is the President of the National Council on Public History and serves on the board of directors for the Slave Dwelling Project, the Georgia Council for History Education and Old North Illuminated. A published author, she has chapters in Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) and Interpreting the Civil War for Museums and Historic Sites (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), as well as Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism (Amherst College Press, 2021) and the forthcoming third edition of The Museum Educator's Manual (Bloomsbury, 2026). Nicole is a featured story in Michele Norris' Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
Nicole received her BA in Psychology, and MA in History with a concentration in Public History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Dr. Colleen J. Shogan served as the 11th Archivist of the United States, the first woman in American history appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). A noted author and political scientist, Colleen is deeply committed to civics education and prioritized sharing the records of the National Archives to a wider audience. Under her leadership, NARA launched numerous strategic initiatives to enhance services and make its holdings more accessible, both in-person and online, with the goal of cultivating public participation and strengthening our nation’s democracy.
Prior to becoming Archivist, Colleen served in several cultural heritage leadership roles. She was Senior Vice President and Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association, worked in the United States Senate, and served as a senior executive at
the Library of Congress and its Congressional Research Service. She was the Vice Chair of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.
A native of the Pittsburgh area, she holds a B.A. in Political Science from Boston College and a Ph.D. in American Politics from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Colleen is the 2024 recipient of the American Political Science Association’s
Hubert Humphrey Award for outstanding public service.
Colleen is currently the CEO of In Pursuit, the signature history-based civics initiative of More Perfect, a nonpartisan alliance of over 40 presidential centers and hundreds of civic leaders and organizations, that invites Americans to strengthen democracy in five key areas. She is also a Senior Fellow in Civics Education at Stand Together, an Adjunct Professor of Government at
Georgetown University, and a Senior Practitioner Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
In her spare time, Colleen has published eight mystery novels in her award-winning Washington Whodunit series featuring amateur sleuth Kit Marshall. Stabbing in the Senate, her debut novel, received the Next Generation Indie Book Award gold medal in 2016. Larceny at the Library won the 2021 bronze medal for mystery at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs).
As NPCA’s senior director for cultural resources Alan Spears serves as an advocate for the interpretation, management, and preservation of cultural and historic resources and programs within the National Park Service’s inventory. He believes that NPS is the nation’s leading storyteller, a conclusion he reached early on in life during battlefield walks and ranger-led tours at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Harpers Ferry.
Alan helped win the designation of Fort Monroe, Harriet Tubman, and Birmingham Civil Rights National Monuments. He began leading NPCA’s campaign to designate the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in 2018 and working with local and national partners helped win designation of that site in July of 2023, when President Joe Biden used the Antiquities Act to add the Till-Mobley site to the National Park System.
In December of 2022 Alan worked with the Alliance of National Heritage Areas to pass the Heritage Area Act. The bill, which enjoyed strong bipartisan support, established a system of heritage areas and extended federal funding for all NHAs out to the year 2037.
Alan is currently working to secure a new national park commemorating businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools. He is also devoting much of his time to leading NPCA’s efforts to oppose the sanitization and erasure of American history from our national parks.
Alan is a native of Washington, DC, and remains the only NPCA staff person ever to be rescued from a tidal marsh by a Park Police helicopter.
Dr. Robert K. Sutton retired as Chief Historian of the National Park Service in 2016, culminating a 33-year career in the Park Service. As Chief Historian and as Superintendent at Manassas Battlefield, Sutton led the emphasis on expanding the interpretation of the Civil War for the Sesquicentennial. As part of that effort, he encouraged Civil War battlefields to expand their interpretive programs to focus more attention to the social, economic, and political issues during the Civil War Era. In addition to his work for the Park Service, Dr. Sutton has taught for over 20 years at various universities as a full-time and adjunct professor. Dr. Sutton has written or edited numerous books, including the award winning Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas and the Battle Over Slavery in the Civil War Era (2017) and Nazis on the Potomac: The Top-Secret Intelligence Operation that Helped Win World War
Sarah Jones Weicksel is the executive director of the American Historical Association, where she previously served as the director of research and publications. Prior to joining the AHA, Weicksel worked as a project historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Her book, A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2026), is an object-based history that explores how making, wearing, saving, and destroying clothing was central to how people waged war and acutely experienced its cost. She earned a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, an MA in American material culture from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware, and a BA in history from Yale University.
Paul J. Zwirecki joined the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) as External Relations Officer in 2025. Before joining SABR, he spent six years as Director of Advancement and Strategic Partnerships at the Organization of American Historians (OAH), where he directed the public history program and worked on more than 100 collaborative projects with the National Park Service. He earned a master’s and a doctorate in American History from the University at Buffalo and a bachelor’s degree in History from Binghamton University.