A professor of history and international relations, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the founding director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University. His books include Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the recently-published How to be an Antiracist.

Dr. David Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, African American Studies, and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2019, Dr. Blight became the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History for his latest book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

Dr. Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America and her latest book, Vanguard: A History of African American Women’s Politics, is to be published in 2020.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, emeritus, at the University of Virginia, Dr. Peter Onuf is also a Senior Fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He is a leading scholar of Jefferson and the early American republic, the author of numerous books, including The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, and the co-author of “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.

Dr. Edward L. Ayres, the moderator for the evening, is the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Dr. Ayers has been named National Professor of the Year and won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history. His newest book, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, won the Lincoln Prize for best non-fiction historical work on the American Civil War in 2018.