Speaker Bios

Danielle Allen - Keynote Conversation (Speaker)

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. She is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy. She is also a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, national voice on pandemic response, distinguished author, and mom. Danielle’s work to make the world better for young people has taken her from teaching college and leading a $60 million university division to driving change at the helm of a $6 billion foundation, writing as a national opinion columnist, advocating for cannabis legalization, democracy reform, and civic education, and most recently, to running for governor of Massachusetts. During the height of COVID in 2020, Danielle’s leadership in rallying coalitions and building solutions resulted in the country’s first-ever Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience; her policies were adopted in federal legislation and a Biden executive order. Danielle made history as the first Black woman ever to run for statewide office in Massachusetts. A past chair of the Mellon Foundation and Pulitzer Prize Board, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a scholar, she currently concentrates on the Democratic Knowledge Project (https://www.democraticknowledgeproject.org/), housed at the Safra Center, and on the Democracy Renovation Project, housed at Harvard’s Ash Center.

In her role as board chair for Partners In Democracy, she continues to advocate for democracy reform to create greater voice and access in our democracy, and drive progress towards a new social contract that serves and includes us all. She also serves on the board of the Cambridge Health Alliance. Her many books include the widely acclaimed Our Declaration: a reading of the Declaration of Independence in defense of equality; Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.; Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus; and the forthcoming Justice by Means of Democracy. She writes a column on constitutional democracy for the Washington Post.

Steve Armstrong - Teachers Roundtable: Dealing With Political Pushback panel

Mia Bay - Writing Textbooks: Is a Unified Narrative of Pluralistic America Possible?

Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history whose recent interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. Bay is the author of the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), which also received a 2022 PROSE Award for Excellence in American History, the OAH’s Liberty Legacy Award, the Lillian Smith Award and the 2021 David J, Langum Prize in Legal History, Bay’s other books include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014). Bay is currently completing a new book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.

Ned Blackhawk - Writing Textbooks: Is a Unified Narrative of Pluralistic America Possible?

Ned Blackhawk is the Howard R. Lamar Chair of History and American Studies at Yale, where he serves as the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, among other projects. Blackhawk graduated from McGill University with a degree in Honours History in 1992, attending under the auspices of the Jay Treaty of 1794. An enrolled member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada, he is the author of the award-winning history of the American Great Basin, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Harvard University Press, 2006). His recent publications include two co-edited anthologies: Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (Yale University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 Modernist Studies Association best anthology prize; Indigenous Genocides and Settler Colonialism (Volume 2 in the Cambridge World History of Genocide); and his forthcoming The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, April 2023). Last month, he delivered the Joanne Goodman lectures at Western Ontario University, which are widely recognized as being the most important history lecture series in Canada.

Jamelle Bouie - Keynote Conversation (Speaker)

Based in Charlottesville, Virginia and Washington D.C., Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for the New York Times and political analyst for CBS News. He covers history and politics. Prior to the Times, Jamelle was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. And before that, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine. He attended the University of Virginia, where he graduated with a degree in political and social thought, and government.

Daisha Brahbam - Teachers Roundtable: History Classroom Practice Today

Daisha Brabham is a public historian, curriculum writer, and educator. She currently teaches at Windsor High School and Southern Connecticut State University. She is also a member of the Anti Racist Teaching and Learning Collective. She has worked to make black and brown histories accessible throughout her career. In 2018, she worked with the Yale New Haven Teachers Institute to publish a curriculum on teaching race in law. She was also awarded a Fulbright for receiving her master’s at the Royal Holloway University of London in Public History and expanding her internship, Homegoing, in which students learn about and produce stories about Afro-Diasporic histories.

Michael Butler - On the Ground in Florida Breakout Session

Anthony Crawford - Teachers Roundtable: History Classroom Practice Today

Anthony Crawford, Jr. is a native of Los Angeles, California. He’s an educator, an artist, a poet, a host, a filmmaker, and a public speaker. He’s an author of three books, which can all be found on Amazon.com. His highest honor is being able to be a father to AKiera Crawford.

Misty Crompton - Teachers Roundtable: Dealing With Political Pushback panel

Mira Debs - Teachers Roundtable: History Classroom Practice Today

Mira Debs is the Executive Director of Yale’s Education Studies Program and a lecturer in Sociology. Her research and teaching interests include urban education policy, families and schools, progressive schooling and comparative international education. She is a former public school history teacher, and she is the author of Diverse Families, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in the Era of School Choice (Harvard Education Press, 2019) and co-editor of The Handbook of Montessori Education (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Chris Dier - Teachers Roundtable: History Classroom Practice Today

Chris Dier is a history teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans. He is the 2020 Louisiana Teacher of the Year, a 2020 finalist for the National Teacher of the Year, and the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Louisiana Teacher of the Year. His pedagogical scholarship and his student advocacy have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico, and he has appeared on NPR, CBS, The Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and CNN. Chris is also the author of The 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre, published by The History Press. Dier has two master’s degrees from the University of New Orleans, and he is presently pursuing a Ph.D. in curriculum development.

Ed Donnellan - Teachers Roundtable: Dealing With Political Pushback panel

Ed Donnellan is a US History and Government teacher at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, DC. Donnellan grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts and graduated from the University of Massachusetts where he studied history. He has been teaching high school for thirty nine years. Ed currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Teaching the history of slavery took on greater meaning when Ed led a group of Gonzazga students on a three year journey to research Gonzaga’s historical ties with slavery. Working at the Georgetown University archives, the students read 19th century financial records that showed the school was built with profits from Jesuit run slave plantaiton in Southern Maryland. The students also identified five enslaved persons who worked at the school. Reckoning with this history has been challenging and continues to this day.

Shekema Dunlap - Teachers Roundtable: Dealing With Political Pushback panel

Shekema Dunlap is an Educational Leadership doctoral candidate at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro. Her research interests include Afican American Pedagogical Excellene, Black Language, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, Endarkened Feminist Epistemology, and Fugitive Pedagogy. Dunlap’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Language Magazine, and English Journal. Her work inside the secondary classroom was featured on CNN. In 2017, Dunlap founded the IFE Academy of Teaching & Technology, a K-12 virtual school that prepares students for careers in the teaching profession. She holds a B.A. in English and an M.Ed. in Secondary English Education (Georgia State University). Her life’s greatest achievement is being a wife to Deante Dunlap and a mother to their blended family of five.

Eric Foner - Writing Textbooks: Is a Unified Narrative of Pluralistic America Possible?

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and author of the textbook Give Me Liberty! An American History.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries - History of U.S. Education: What’s Race Got to Do With It?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries is associate professor of History at The Ohio State University where he has been teaching courses on African American history. He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, and the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a book of essays by leading civil rights scholars on how to teach the Civil Rights Movement. He also wrote and narrated the 10-episode Audible Original series Great Figures of the Civil Rights Movement. In the classroom, he has won several major teaching awards, including Ohio State University’s highest award for teaching. Dr. Jeffries has worked on several public history projects, including serving as the lead historian for the $25 million renovation of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He is also the host of the podcast Teaching Hard History, a production of Learning for Justice, a division of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He earned a BA in history from Morehouse College in 1994 and a PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history from Duke University in 2002.

Gloria Ladson-Billings - History of U.S. Education: What’s Race Got to Do With It?

Gloria Ladson-Billings is the former Kellner Family Distinguished Chair of Urban Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ladson-Billings is the Immediate Past-President of the National Academy of Education, former President of the American Educational Research Association, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Hagler Institute of Texas A&M University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. She is author of the critically acclaimed, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children and Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms, Critical Race Theory: A Scholar’s Journey, along with more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Erika Lee - Writing Textbooks: Is a Unified Narrative of Pluralistic America Possible?

Erika Lee is a Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies, Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and President of the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four award-winning books including most recently, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in America and The Making of Asian America. She is currently working on Made in Asian America: A History for Young People with Newberry-award-winning author Christina Soontornvat.

Kacie Nadeau - On the Ground in Florida Breakout Session

Kacie Nadeau is a fifth-grade teacher of the gifted in language arts and social studies in Sarasota County. Her 20 years in the district has included experiences in interdisciplinary curriculum design, professional development, and leadership in social studies content and pedagogy. She has also taught undergraduate and graduate elementary social studies methods courses at the University of South Florida. She earned her Ph.D. from USF in curriculum and instruction in interdisciplinary education and her research includes the history of American education and curriculum reform, as well as social science content and instruction.

Johann Neem - History of U.S. Education: What’s Race Got to Do With It?

Johann Neem teaches history at Western Washington University. He is author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (Johns Hopkins 2017). With historian Joanne Freeman, he co-edited the recently-published volume Jeffersonians in Power. His public writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hedgehog Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, USA Today, and the Washington Post, among other venues.

Paul Ortiz - Writing Textbooks: Is a Unified Narrative of Pluralistic America Possible?

Paul Ortiz is professor of history and director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. He is a National Archives Distinguished Fellow in Latinx History, in 2022-2023. His book An African American and Latinx History of the United States was identified by Fortune Magazine as one of the “10 books on American history that actually reflect the United States.” Bustle.com named An African American and Latinx History of the United States as one of the “10 Books About Race to Read Instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You.” He is also the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, as well as People Power: History, Organizing, and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century (with Wesley Hogan). He is president of the United Faculty of Florida-UF (FEA-AFL-CIO), the union that represents tenured and non-tenure track faculty at UF. He is a former president of the Oral History Association.

Daryl Scott - Concluding Roundtable: “Why Do We Teach US History?

Daryl Michael Scott is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, Geography, and Museum Studies at Morgan State University. He has taught African American and United States History at two public, two historically black, and two private institutions, including Columbia and Howard. He retired from Howard this year before joining Morgan. In addition, he spent thirteen years rebuilding the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), serving as the president during the organization’s centennial in 2015. He is currently working on two projects: How the Thirteenth Amendment Has Nothing to Do with Mass Incarceration and The Lost Now Found History of White Nationalism in America.

Kevin Staton - Teachers Roundtable: Dealing With Political Pushback panel

Layla Treuhaft-Ali - Teachers Roundtable: History Classroom Practice Today

Layla Treuhaft-Ali is a 5th and 6th grade reading and writing teacher at Bronzeville Classical School in Chicago. She focuses on helping children develop robust reading lives and empowering students to publish their writing to make their voices heard. She previously taught at Claremont STEM Academy, where she received a $1.5 million Chicago City Works grant from the city to build a playground researched, designed, and presented by students. She also notably raised money to purchase a culturally relevant classroom library that now contains over 900 books. She is a 2022 2023 Teach Plus Illinois Policy Fellow focusing on legislation to improve statewide early literacy. She earned her BA in history from Yale University, an MAT from the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago, and her ESL teaching credential from the University of Illinois Chicago.

Stefanie Wager - Teachers Roundtable: Dealing With Political Pushback panel

Stefanie Wager is a Senior Technical Assistance Consultant at the American Institutes for Research. Prior to this role, Stefanie worked for the Gates Ventures OER Project and served at the Iowa Department of Education providing leadership and guidance at the state level for social studies education. She also taught high school social studies for Des Moines Public Schools and Dallas Center-Grimes Schools and worked at Instituto Thomas Jefferson in Naucalpan, Mexico. In addition, she formerly served as the coordinator of a Teaching American History Grant. She received both a Bachelors and Masters degree from Drake University in Des Moines, IA. She is the Past President of the National Council for the Social Studies. In 2011, Stefanie was named an Emerging Leader in Education by ASCD.

Donald Yacovone - History of U.S. Education: What’s Race Got to Do With It?

Donald Yacovone, lifetime Associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, published Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity, his ninth book, in the fall of 2022. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, co-written with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., won the 2014 NAACP Image Award. The previous year, he received the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African American studies. He earned a Ph.D. at the Claremont Graduate University and has taught at several colleges and universities. He helped edit the Black Abolitionist Papers, and before becoming the Manager of Research and Program Development at the Hutchins Center, Yacovone was the Senior Associate Editor of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he founded and edited the Massachusetts Historical Review. He has written widely on abolitionism, gender, the African American role in the Civil War, white supremacy, and American cultural history.