Participant Bios (CHC Humanities Communication Convening)

Kaelyn Grace Apple
Kaelyn is the Founder of Accepted Society, a community for academics to navigate to and through life, research and education. A London-based content creator @kaelyngraceapple, is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University writing a dissertation on matrilineal descent and forced child labor within the law of slavery in the early modern English Atlantic.

A’Lelia Bundles
A’Lelia Bundles is the author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother and the nonfiction inspiration for Self Made, the fictional Netflix/Warner Bros. series starring Octavia Spencer. Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, the first major biography of her great-grandmother, will be published in 2025 by Scribner. She is the founder of the Madam Walker Family Archives and serves on several nonprofit boards including the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, the March on Washington Film Festival, Biographer’s International (BIO), Indiana Landmarks, Columbia Global Reports, the Indiana Historical Society and George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. A former network television news executive and Emmy Award winning producer at ABC News and NBC News, she is a former chair of the National Archives Foundation and a former vice chair of Columbia University’s board of trustees.

Kath Burton
Kath Burton is Humanities Development Director for Routledge, Taylor & Francis. With over 15 years’ experience in scholarly communications, she has worked in a variety of publishing roles from commissioning and program management to designing and implementing effective publishing strategies for scholarly societies and journal editorial teams. Kath’s main area of focus is to discover new opportunities for digital, open and public humanities, using human-centered design techniques and deeply embedding within research and practice communities. She is a co-author of Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication (2023), an OER included in the Scholarly Communications Notebook and sponsored by IMLS, and the Visual Storytelling about Community Food Growing handbook. Along with Daniel Fisher-Livne, Kath co-founded the Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities working group, an informal gathering of scholars, publishers and librarians committed to championing the benefits of values-based scholarship and publication. As a member of the Advisory Board for the Institute of Communities and Society (Brunel University London) Kath supports community-engaged programs and volunteers as a trustee at World Education Berkshire, where she combines publishing and community-gardening expertise to share knowledge about global citizenship and planet-friendly food growing.

Andrew Delbanco
Andrew Delbanco is Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and president of the Teagle Foundation. His most recent book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul (2018), a New York Times notable book, was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf prize for “books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity,” the Lionel Trilling Award, and the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, for a work “of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression.” Among his other books, Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012; 2d edition 2023), has been translated into several languages.  His essays appear in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and other periodicals, on topics ranging from American literature and history to contemporary issues in higher education. Mr. Delbanco earned his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2001. In 2012, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. At the invitation of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2022, he delivered the Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque

Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque transitioned into humanities communications from a freelance writing career, initially covering feminist publishers and writers for Ms. Magazine. She later wrote about diverse entrepreneurs, artists, and musicians for platforms like Huffington Post, Thrive Global, and Medium. Her work in these areas led her to connect with humanities students and faculty at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), ultimately resulting in her role as the Communications Manager for the Humanities and Social Sciences at UMBC. Over the past seven years, Catalina has been responsible for creating a wide range of multimedia content—including digital, print, video, and photo stories—to support the university’s humanities and social science programs, teaching, research, and community engagement. Her portfolio encompasses 22 academic departments, four scholar programs, and five research centers. Additionally, Catalina has developed media workshops and enhanced visibility for underrepresented faculty, securing coverage in major outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, All Things Considered, Marketplace, and C-SPAN. Between 2019 and 2021, Catalina received four CASE District II awards. A Grand Gold in Special Events and a Platinum District Honorable Mention for “Best Practices in Communications and Marketing” for creating UMBC’s first Inclusive Language Conference. Additionally, She was awarded a Silver Award for “Excellence in News Writing: Research, Medicine, and Science News Writing” and a Team Gold in the magazine category, which highlights social justice and community building. In the 2022-2023 academic year, Catalina was a Baltimore Field School Fellow, where she began to do research for developing best practices for non-extractive, community-centered media in higher education.

Kirsten Ellenbogen
Kirsten Ellenbogen is President and CEO of Great Lakes Science Center where her energetic leadership has included the strategic initiative Cleveland Connections that leverages emerging technologies, such as blockchain and industrial internet of things, to educate and empower youth in developing personal and community solutions. This work was honored in 2021 when the Science Center was recognized as a finalist for the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. She conducts her research at the intersection of informal science education, science communication, and rhetoric, focusing on measuring the community impact of science centers and designing learning experiences to facilitate science talk for families. Her leadership over the last thirty years has advanced informal science education through the Center for Informal Learning and Schools, the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network, the Museum Learning Collaborative, and as co-principal investigator of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education. She serves as co-chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Standing Committee on Advancing Science Communication, and served on the committee that produced the report Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places & Pursuits, and most recently has been appointed to the Board of Science Education. She has volunteered on a number of local and national boards including serving as president of the Visitor Studies Association and as Program Chair of the Association of Science & Technology Centers. She currently serves as Board chair of the Cleveland Water Alliance. Kirsten earned a Ph.D. in Science Education from Vanderbilt University and B.A. from the University of Chicago.

Anke Finger
Anke Finger is Professor of German Studies, Media Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. She has published widely on the total artwork, multimodal scholarship, the media and communication philosopher Vilém Flusser and intercultural literature. She is affiliated with the Departments of Digital Media and Design and Philosophy and with the Martitime Studies Program.

Phillip Brian Harper
Phillip Brian Harper is program director for Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation, overseeing initiatives undertaken by colleges, universities, and organizations in higher education committed to the humanities and social justice. Prior to arriving at Mellon in October 2020, Harper was a faculty member at Brandeis, Harvard, and finally—for 25 years—New York University, where he ultimately served as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science.  A literary scholar and cultural critic, Harper has written extensively on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American and African American expressive culture, and on aspects of lived experience in the contemporary United States, having authored four books and numerous articles on those topics. Harper has furthered the work of the Modern Language Association as a member of the advisory boards for the journals PMLA and Profession, and as member and chair of the James Russell Lowell Book Prize Committee. He has served on the editorial boards of American Literature, Camera Obscura, GLQ, Postmodern Culture, and Social Text. He holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan, as well as an MFA in creative writing and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Cornell University.

Maysan Haydar
Maysan Haydar is the 2022-2024 Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the American Academy of the Arts & Sciences. She works on policy and the state of public humanities within the Humanities, Arts, and Culture program area. Her doctoral research chronicled the unprecedented, selective migration of STEM labor from the developing world to the United States and traced the processes of community- and organization-building by those immigrants. She has larger interests in histories of conflict, labor, and citizenship. Dr. Haydar’s work has been published by HarperCollins, Seal Press, Rowman and Littlefield, and St. Martin’s Press, among others. She is also assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve University.

Christine Henseler
Christine Henseler is the co-Founder and co-President of the Center for Humanities Communication (CHC). She is also Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Union College, NY.  She teaches classes on Spanish literature and digital media, storytelling, social change, innovation, and sustainability. She co-leads 4Humanities.org with Prof. Alan Liu. She publishes public opinion pieces in Inside Higher Ed, HuffPost, Medium, and other outlets. Her most recent book publications include The Entrepreneurial Humanities: The Crucial Role of the Humanities in Enterprise and the Economy (co-edited with Alain-Philippe Durand) and Extraordinary Partnerships: How the Arts and Humanities are Transforming America. She has also designed a student oriented career guidebook called Arts and Humanities: Don’t Leave College Without Them. (www.christinehenseler.com)

Patricia Hswe
Patricia Hswe is the Program Director for Public Knowledge at The Mellon Foundation. As the Foundation’s program area that supports libraries and archives, Public Knowledge makes grants that strive to increase equitable access to–and activation of–recorded knowledge that helps to build an informed, heterogeneous, and civically engaged society. In this context, support for technology in the humanities has been a major focus of the program. Before joining The Mellon Foundation, Patricia worked at the Penn State University Libraries and at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois. She also has experience teaching college-level Russian language and literature. Patricia has chaired the Committee on Information Technology at the Modern Language Association and currently sits on the board of trustees for the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Michelle Hudgins
Michelle Hudgins, APR, is the Vice President of Communications at Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank informing the public about the world’s issues and trends. Possessing over two decades of experience in communications, public relations, marketing, and media, Michelle leads a team of experts in developing and executing innovative and impactful communication strategies that amplify the Center’s research and insights on critical topics such as politics, religion, news & information, technology, social data trends, and global attitudes. At the core of Michelle’s professional journey is her passion for storytelling and case-making. This passion drives her to help individuals and organizations achieve their goals. Michelle’s dedication is evident in her various professional certifications, including an Accreditation in Public Relations (APR), and her role as a Certified Personal and Executive Coach (CPEC). She also holds advanced degrees in Film-making from American University and advertising/strategic communications from the BrandCenter at Virginia Commonwealth University. Michelle’s commitment extends beyond her professional life, as she is active in her community and serves on the national board for the National Hampton Alumni Association, Inc. and Little Free Library. She has shared her insights on impact storytelling, women in leadership, and culture and competency as practice for social impact in her keynotes.

Jackie Kellish
Jacqueline Kellish serves as the Director of Public Engagement at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where she supervises large-scale humanities initiatives including the Being Human Festival (US), the Responsible AI project (in partnership with Google), and the National Humanities Leadership Council. She holds a PhD in English from Duke University and a BA from the University of Chicago. She previously served as associate editor for the journal NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction and is a member of the Board of Directors for flok, a nonprofit that supports research on rare medical disorders.

Stephen Kidd
Stephen Kidd is the executive director of the National Humanities Alliance. Before joining NHA, he was director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Smithsonian Institution’s “Museum without Walls.” As director, he oversaw the development of major, research-based exhibitions including, among others, Crisis and Creativity: Unfolding the AIDS Memorial Quilt (2012), Colombia: the Nature of Culture (2011), and Asian Pacific Americans: Local Lives, Global Ties (2010). Prior to his work at the Smithsonian, he served on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He holds a B.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the George Washington University.

Bruce Lewenstein
Bruce V. Lewenstein (general studies in the humanities, A.B., 1980, University of Chicago; history and sociology of science, Ph.D., 1987, University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of Science Communication in the Departments of Communication and of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. He served as chair of S&TS, 2014-2021. In 2022, he became Cornell’s University Ombuds. He works across the field of public communication of science and technology, including informal science education, citizen science, and communication training for scientists. He is active in international activities that contribute to education and research on public communication of science and technology. As a historian, he tries to document the ways that public communication is fundamental to the process of producing reliable knowledge. Lewenstein was editor of the journal Public Understanding of Science (1998-2003).  He co-chaired the National Research Council study, Learning Science in Informal Environments (2009).  In 2012, he was the first Presidential Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia, now the Science History Institute), working on issues of public engagement.  He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002, and has served as chair of two of its sections: on societal implications of science and engineering (2011), and on general interest in science and engineering (2017). Lewenstein served on the board of directors of Embarcadero Media (based in his hometown of Palo Alto, Calif.), which produces community newspapers and related digital media, from 2015 to 2023. He spent four years as a faculty-elected member of the Board of Trustees of Cornell University (2016-2020).

Brian Lin
Brian Lin oversees EurekAlert!, a non-profit science news release distribution platform operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has more than two decades of experience as a science communicator, having interned at a national daily technology TV show in Canada before serving as a press officer at the University of British Columbia, where he helped communicate scientific and medical research while developing and delivering media training for faculty and students. Since joining AAAS in 2014, he has more than tripled web traffic at EurekAlert! and led the development of a new platform that launched in 2021. His current focus is in expanding access to EurekAlert! in low- and middle-income countries and fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in and through science communication.

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin
Michelle Ciulla Lipkin has served as Executive Director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education since 2012. Michelle has helped NAMLE grow to be the preeminent media literacy education association in the U.S. She launched Media Literacy Week in the U.S. now in its 10th year, developed strategic partnerships with companies such as Thomson Reuters, Meta, YouTube, and Nickelodeon, and restructured both the governance and membership of NAMLE. She has overseen seven national conferences, created the National Media Literacy Alliance for teacher membership organizations, and done countless appearances at conferences and in the media regarding the importance of media literacy education. Michelle was the recipient of the 2020 Global Media and Information Literacy Award given by UNESCO. Michelle is an alumni of the U.S. Dept. of State’s International Visitors Program (Australia/2018). She regularly serves as Adjunct Lecturer at Brooklyn College where she teaches Media Literacy. She sits on the Advisory Council for the ML3: Librarians as Leaders for Media Literacy initiative led by Project Look Sharp.

Alan Liu
Alan Liu is Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published books on Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford U. Press, 1989); The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (U. Chicago Press, 2004); Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (U. Chicago Press, 2008), and Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (U. Chicago Press, 2018). Recent essays include “Toward a Diversity Stack: Digital Humanities and Diversity as Technical Problem”; “Is Digital Humanities a Field?—An Answer from the Point of View of Language”; “N + 1: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities”; and “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” Liu started the Voice of the Shuttle website for humanities research in 1994. He is founder and co-leader of the 4Humanities.org advocacy initiative, and Principal Investigator of the Mellon Foundation funded “WhatEvery1Says” project (2017-2021) on public discourse about the humanities. He is also a co-leader of the Critical Infrastructure Studies initiative (CIstudies.org). Mose recently, he has become co-founder and co-president of the Center for Humanities Communication (CHC). At UCSB, he has in various years been Chair, Graduate Chair, and Undergraduate Chair of the English Department. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the UCSB Center for Information Technology & Society and the UCSB Media Arts & Technology Program; and a member of the Working Group of the UCSB Data Science Initiative. (See his home page: https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/)

Michelle May-Curry
Michelle May-Curry, Ph.D., is Curator of Washington D.C.’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also core faculty for Georgetown University’s Masters program in the Engaged and Public Humanities and is a research affiliate at the National Humanities Alliance. Her scholarly and curatorial work has appeared in The New York Times, American Quarterly, Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack A Black Family Keepsake (2021 winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction), Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors, and exhibitions at The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, The Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard Art Museums, The Carr Center Gallery, and The 2019 Havana Biennial. Her most recent publication, The Routledge Companion To Public Humanities Scholarship, is a co-edited volume with Daniel Fisher-Livne that ​​gathers together the current aims and scope of public humanities scholarship in U.S. higher education through 23 case studies. She also maintains an active art practice in film photography and photo collage, and has exhibited her work exploring family photography and material culture in Washington DC-based exhibitions At Home (2024) and Small and Strange (2024).

Theresa Miller
Theresa L. Miller, PhD, is a Director of Research at FrameWorks and oversees the organization’s health equity and international research. Her work focuses on developing new narratives to advance social justice and equity in the U.S. and internationally. She has experience reframing issues related to health equity, racial equity, education, housing, economic inequality, criminal legal reform, child development, and environmental justice in the U.S., UK, Australia, and Brazil. Across her work, Theresa combines her ability to think strategically to overcome communications challenges with her commitment to social justice and systemic change. Theresa’s expertise conducting collaborative, mixed methods ethnographic research with Indigenous communities in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia informs her partner-centered approach to framing research and strategic communications. She holds a DPhil (PhD) and MPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a BA in International Studies and Spanish from American University. She speaks Portuguese and Spanish. Theresa is the author of Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil (2019) published by the University of Texas Press.

Karen North
Karen North, PhD, is a recognized expert in digital social media and in psychology. She is the founder and former director of USC Annenberg’s Digital Social Media program, the world’s first master’s degree program and research center focused on the leadership, management, and development of digital products, platforms, and communities. She is a clinical professor in the school of communication with primary interests including digital and social media, business and product strategy, privacy and safety online, Artificial Intelligence, brand building, and reputation management. She regularly appears as an expert on national, international, and local news including television, newspaper, radio, podcast, and online news outlets. Trained as a clinical and social psychologist, with considerable experience in federal telecommunications policy and practice, North’s interests come together in the digital world where entrepreneurs and large companies use social and digital media to bring people together, exert influence, form groups, and where these efforts impact our social, cultural, and business worlds. She also focuses on governmental and regulatory efforts domestically and internationally. North teaches at USC and works with small and large companies, foreign and domestic governments, and assorted projects in this sector. Prior USC, North was the assistant dean of the UCLA School of Public Policy. North previously worked in the Clinton Administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Domestic Policy Council. Before that she worked for Senator Edward Markey (D-MA), who was then the Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance.

Joseph Palca
Joe Palca is a freelance science writer. From 1992 to 2022 he was a science correspondent for NPR. He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology. Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is the founder of the NPR Scicommers program, a collective of science communicators. Palca has also worked as a television science producer, a senior correspondent for Science Magazine, and Washington news editor of Nature. Palca has won numerous awards, several of which came with attractive certificates. In 2019, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).

Sudip S. Parikh
Sudip Parikh is the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of the Science family of journals.  Parikh has spent over two decades at the intersection of science, policy, and business as a Senate staffer, life science business leader, and in the policy community.  He was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship while earning his Ph.D. in macromolecular structure and chemistry from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California and earned his BS in Applied Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Lynn Pasquerella
Lynn Pasquerella was appointed president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities in 2016, after serving as the eighteenth president of Mount Holyoke College. She has held positions as Provost at the University of Hartford and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Rhode Island, where she taught for more than two decades. A philosopher whose work has combined teaching and scholarship with local and global engagement, Pasquerella has written extensively on medical ethics, metaphysics, public policy, and the philosophy of law. Her most recent book, What We Value: Public Health, Social Justice, and Educating for Democracy, examines the role of higher education in addressing some of the most pressing contemporary issues at the intersection of ethics, law, and public policy. Pasquerella is immediate past president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the host of Northeast Public Radio’s The Academic Minute.

Tamara Poles
Tamara Poles is the founder and CEO of SciCom Consulting, LLC. She also serves as the Accessibility Director for the Association of Science Communicators and is on the Artistic Advisory Board for Story Collider. Previously, she worked in leadership positions for museums, science centers, and an international research honor society. As CEO of SciCom Consulting, Tamara blends her experiential and collegiate training in biology, education, curriculum development, and instruction to help train scientists and STEM professionals how to communicate with the public while creating safe spaces for them to practice and hone their skills in science communication. At SciCom Consulting, she also develops science and science-related curricula for non-profit organizations, universities, and for-profit institutions in order to help disseminate accurate and accessible information to the public and K-12 students. Tamara refined her skills in science communication training at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center where she implemented the first statewide science communication training program, IMPACTS. Her work changed the lives of over 500 scientists. Thanks to her, IMPACTS scientists shared their work and passion for STEM with over 48,000 North Carolinians, including 17,000 schoolchildren, in less than four years. Her work has attracted national and international recognition in addition to a $1 million grant from the NC GlaxoSmithKline Foundation. Her most recent peer-reviewed publication is “Beads and Biomes: A Hands-On Classroom Activity for Understanding the Effects of Antibiotics on the Microbiome” in the December 2021 volume of The American Biology Teacher.

Guillaume Ratel
Guillaume Ratel is the Executive Director of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), an international network of arts and humanities centers, institutes, and organizations with over 270 members in 45 countries. Guillaume oversees all of CHCI’s operations and research programs such as the Mellon-CHCI Global Humanities Institutes, the Inclusive Collaboration program, and the most recently launched CHCI Initiatives. His work at CHCI has involved the development and execution of strategic priorities, international partnerships, and a variety of collaborative research projects and fellowship programs. Before joining CHCI in 2016, Guillaume served as the Assistant Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture at Cornell Law School and as a Program Manager at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In these roles, he developed and managed public engagement initiatives, coordinated large interdisciplinary projects, and fostered collaborations between scholars, policymakers, and community groups. He is skilled at making complex scholarly ideas understandable to wider audiences. Guillaume holds a Diplôme d’archiviste paléographe from the École nationale des chartes in Paris, an M.A. from the Sorbonne, and a Ph.D.in European History from Cornell University. His academic background and professional experience reflect his commitment to fostering global and inclusive approaches to humanities scholarship and communication. He has been instrumental in expanding CHCI’s global scope and deepening its impact through innovative programs and partnerships, working to connect the humanities with diverse audiences and demonstrate their relevance in today’s world.

James Shulman
James Shulman serves as vice president and chief operating officer of the American Council of Learned Societies. He has published on renaissance epic poetry, college admissions, institutional change, and high impact philanthropy; his most recent book, The Synthetic College: How Higher Education Can Benefit from Shared Solutions and Save Itself was published by Princeton University Press in October 2023. Prior to joining ACLS, James was a Senior Fellow at the Mellon Foundation. From its founding in 2001 to 2016 he was president of Artstor. Working with his colleagues, he developed and implemented plans for creating an organization that now serves over 2,000 colleges, universities, schools, and museums around the world. At the Mellon Foundation from 1994-2001, he collaborated with William G. Bowen and Derek Bok on The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions and wrote (with William G. Bowen), The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. His earlier works include The Pale Cast of Thought: Hesitation and Decision in the Renaissance Epic and the introduction to Robert K. Merton’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Historical Semantics and the Sociology of Science. James received his BA and PhD from Yale in Renaissance Studies. He has served on the board of the Renaissance Society of America, the Spence School, the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association, and Smith College.

Phoebe Stein
Phoebe Stein is president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Stein served as the executive director for Maryland Humanities from 2008 to 2020 and has been an advocate for the humanities at local, state, and federal levels for more than 20 years. During her tenure at Maryland Humanities, Stein expanded the council’s partnerships and resources and hosted a local public radio spot, “Humanities Connection,” while gorwing the council’s programs. She served on the Federation Board of Directors from 2013 to 2017 as both vice chair and as a member of the Legislative Committee. In 2016, she was recognized as one of “Maryland’s Top 100 Women” by The Daily Record.  Before joining the Maryland council, Stein was the director of public affairs at Illinois Humanities. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from Loyola University of Chicago and her B.A. in English from the University of Michigan. Stein serves on the board of the National Humanities Alliance and on the advisory councils of Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and National History Day.

Christopher P. Thornton
Chris Thornton has been at NEH since 2018, where he oversees all research grants as Director of the Research division. Originally trained as an anthropological archaeologist, Chris spent 8 years overseeing grants for the National Geographic Society, where he also mentored grantees in science communication and careers in public scholarship.

Robert Townsend
Robert is Director of Humanities, Arts, and Culture Programs at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-director (with Norman Bradburn) of the Humanities Indicators (http://humanitiesindicators.org). Prior to the Academy, he spent 24 years at the American Historical Association as director of research and publications. He is the author of one book and over 200 articles on various aspects of history and the humanities.

Zoey Wake Hyde
Zoe Wake Hyde is an experienced advocate for knowledge justice in education and research, with a focus on open publishing and open infrastructures. She has worked across post-secondary institutions in New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Prior to joining Knowledge Commons, she led projects to develop collaborative open textbook publishing and open humanities research processes with the Rebus Foundation, with funding from the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations. She also served on the LPC’s Ethical Publishing Taskforce.

Doron Weber
Doron Weber is Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a New York-based, philanthropic, not-for-profit institution that makes grants for research in science, technology, and economics; quality and diversity of scientific institutions; and public engagement with science. Weber’s signature program, Public Understanding of Science and Technology, supports books, radio, film, television, theater and new media to reach a wide, non-specialized audience and to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities. Weber also directs the Foundation’s new Special Initiatives program to support high-return projects that strengthen the scientific and technological enterprise as a social good. Weber was educated at Brown University, the Sorbonne and Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2012, Mr. Weber published Immortal Bird: A Family Memoir, named one of the 50 Notable Works of Non-Fiction by The Washington Post. He previously coauthored three books and is at work on a novel. Weber currently serves as President of The Writers Room Board, National Secretary for the Israel Rhodes Scholarship, Trustee of Shakespeare & Co, and Board Member of the Wikimedia Foundation.