Lorinc Redei is the assistant dean for undergraduate education and an associate professor of instruction at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is from Hungary and an expert on the politics of that country, policy-making in Europe, democratic backsliding, and international relations.

Mark Peterson is the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale University.  He is the author of three major books: The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England; The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865; and, most recently, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History.

Eliot Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, author of the forthcoming book The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics, and co-host of the Shield of the Republic podcast. Cohen is also the author of The Hollow Crown, Supreme Command, Conquered Into Liberty, The Big Stick, and other works on military history and national-security policy. He created the strategic-studies program at Johns Hopkins SAIS and served as the school’s ninth dean. He has also served as the counselor of the Department of State and in other positions in the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

Michael Dennis is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Dr. Dennis served as Chief of Intelligence Operations and Chief of Strategic Futures at Army Futures Command and was a member of the Intelligence Community, serving at the National Ground Intelligence Center as a Senior Intelligence Analyst. He was appointed an Exceptional Analyst Research Fellow at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and taught at the National Intelligence University’s Center for Strategic Intelligence and Research. 

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Her latest book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan 80s, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026).

Zachary sets the scene with his original poem, "Nicollet Avenue".

Professor David Aiona Chang is a historian at the University of Minnesota. He studies Indigenous people, colonialism, borders and migration in Hawaii and North America, focusing especially on the histories of Native American and Native Hawaiian people, as well as the history of social movements in the United States.

Zachary opens the episode with an excerpt from George Orwell's essay, "Can Socialists Be Happy?"

Steven Mintz is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an authority on the history of families and childhood. Steve is also a pedagogical innovator and a commentator on the arts and the human condition. From 2012 to 2017, he directed the UT System’s Institute for Transformational Learning. Steve is the author of many prizewinning books, including: Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004) and The Learning-Centered University: Making College a More Developmental, Transformational, and Equitable Experience (2024).

Zachary begins the episode by reading "Knife", a poem by Ukrainian author, Lyuba Yakimchuk.

Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America, and the director of the Kennan Institute. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. His latest book is Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability.

Jeremi sets the scene by reading the opening lyrics to Bob Dylan's 'Masters of War,' which was written in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Dr. Renata Keller is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of two books:  Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution and, most recently, The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War. Dr. Keller received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Zachary sets the scene with a passage from Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 85.

Dr. Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University.  His most recent book is The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience. Other publications include Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive  (with John Dearborn and Desmond King), The Policy State: An American Predicament (With Karen Orren), The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, and Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982).

Jeremi opens the conversation with a powerful excerpt from C.P. Cavafy’s poem "Waiting for the Barbarians," setting the tone with a poignant reflection on the complexities and challenges of democracy.

Dr. John A. Lawrence served for thirty-eight years as a senior staff person in the United States House of Representatives, including as chief of staff for Speaker Nancy Pelosi from 2005 to 2013. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of California’s Washington Center. He is the author of:  The Class of ’74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship;  Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership;  and Sherlock Holmes: The Affair at Mayerling Lodge.

Zachary sets the scene with an excerpt from the poem "Rise" written by climate activists, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana.

Dr. Mikkel Runge Olesen is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). His research interests include NATO and transatlantic relations, the Arctic, the Nordic countries, Danish foreign policy, and recent Danish diplomatic history. His theoretical interests include realism (international relations), foreign policy analysis, and political psychology.

Gryffin Wilkens-Plumley is a senior at Yale University and a deliberative-democracy designer. He currently works as Project Manager and Design Lead for the Connecticut Citizens’ Assembly initiative at the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities -- an initiative to hold the first ever official State-level citizens’ assembly in America. Gryffin's work focuses on citizen governance, designing assemblies for independent citizen governance, and working with funders and elected officials to turn designs into reality.

We set the scene with a reading of The Polio Vaccine, Chatham, Virginia, 1964, by Claudia Emerson.

John Beckett Wallingford is a developmental biologist with three decades of experience.  He is the Mr. and Mrs. Robert P. Doherty Jr. Regents Chair in Molecular Biology and a Professor in the Dept. of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin.  Since 2003, his laboratory has sought to understand how form and function arise in embryos using advanced microscopy, systems biology, and biomechanics. Wallingford's research explores animal models and collaborates with human geneticists to understand human birth defects. He is writing a forthcoming book about embryos:  In the Beginning.

Zachary sets the scene with Muriel Rukeyser's "Elegy in Joy".

Dr. Jack Loveridge is the vice president of the El Paso ISD Board of Trustees, a public school district serving over 48,000 students on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is also the CEO and co-founder of Panoculum, Inc., a digital history startup based in his hometown. Jack holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.Phil. in International Development from Oxford, and a B.A. with honors from Stanford University.

Zachary sets the tone by re-reading the poem from the first episode about the conflict in Ukraine, entitled "Our Ukrainian Love Story" to reflect on the initial days of the invasion and how perceptions and realities have shifted.

Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America, and the once-former-and-future director of the Kennan Institute. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. His latest book is Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability.

Jeremi sets the scene with some words from a lecture from George Kennan, an influential American diplomat and historian.

Colonel Nathaniel Lauterbach is an active-duty United States Marine Corps officer. He recently commanded a squadron in California. He previously served as an operational planner and strategist with the 2d Marine Aircraft Wing, responsible for war plans and long-range planning for all combat marine aviation on the US East Coast. Colonel Lauterbach served as a lead planner for NATO and efforts to integrate military robotics and artificial intelligence into the Marine Corps. He received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a student of Professor Suri.

This week, instead of the usual poem, we set the scene with an audio excerpt of Martin Luther King Jr. reading from his "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. Prior to joining the UT faculty, Joseph was a professor at Tufts University, where he founded the school’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race and democracy affect people’s lives. In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights, Joseph wrote the award-winning books “Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, “Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama," and “Stokely: A Life" as well as “The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era” and “Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.”" His most recent book is "Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution."

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Stars".

Steven Simon is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, D.C., and a visiting professor at Dartmouth College. He served at the State Department and National Security Council for over 20 years. His most recent book is: Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Ambition in the Middle East (2023).

Zachary opens with his poem titled "At Mr. Evers' Home".

Bryan D. Jones holds the  J. J. "Jake" Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies, and he is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Jones’ books include: Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics (1994), Politics and the Architecture of Choice (2001), and most recently, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (2025).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled "Same Old Lies".

Alan McPherson is a professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of numerous books on the history of U.S. foreign relations, including: The Invaded: How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations; Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice; and, most recently, The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy.

Jeremi and Zachary speak with Kurdish journalist Nedim Türfent, who spent over 2,400 days in a Turkish prison after releasing footage of state forces mistreating Kurdish workers. He was denied a fair trial, convicted on coerced testimony, and silenced for speaking truth. In confinement, he turned to poetry—smuggling out verses that have since reached global audiences. His words remain a powerful testament to resistance, memory, and humanity.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "In Jerusalem".

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and God Save Texas, and three previous novels, Mr. Texas, The End of October, and God's Favorite. His books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. His most recent book is a novel, The Human Scale.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Radio Liberty".

Mark Pomar is a Senior Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas. From 1975 to 1982, Dr. Pomar taught Russian studies at the University of Vermont. From 1982 to 1993, he worked as Assistant Director of the Russian Service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Munich), Director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America, and the Executive Director of the Board for International Broadcasting, a federal agency that oversaw Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. From 1994 to 2008, Dr. Pomar was a senior executive and President of IREX, a large US international nonprofit organization. From 2008 to 2017, he was the founding CEO and President of the US – Russia Foundation (USRF), a private US foundation that supported educational programs and exchanges. Dr. Pomar is the author of two books, most recently: Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "It is a miracle the Earth can twist."

Jeffrey Toobin is the chief legal analyst for CNN and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He is the author of numerous books, including: The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court and Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. His most recent book is: The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.

Zachary sets the scene with the poem "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman.

Michael Vorenberg is an associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. This book was used for Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film, Lincoln. Vorenberg's exciting new book is Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Ode to Blasphemy."

Donald Downs is the Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science Emeritus at UW-Madison. Downs’ scholarship has dealt with a wide range of issues, including:  freedom of speech; academic freedom; and civic education. His prize-winning books include: Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community and the First Amendment; Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus; and Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-Military Students. In 2013, Downs received the national Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award for his defense of academic freedom and freedom of thought.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "On The Other Side."

Dr. Maha Nassar is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, where she specializes in the modern history of Palestine and the Arabic-speaking world. Her award-winning book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), shows how mid-twentieth century Palestinian intellectuals inside the Green Line connected to global decolonization movements. Her academic scholarship has been published in IJMES, Journal of Palestine Studies, Arab Studies Journal, and elsewhere. In 2024 Dr. Nassar was recognized as a Woman of Impact by the University of Arizona’s Office of Research, Innovation, and Impact.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "If Anyone Is Listening."

Award-winning journalist Martin Di Caro is the host of "History As It Happens," a podcast for people who want to think historically about current events. Based in Washington, D.C., Martin launched "History As It Happens" in 2021 after working for decades at major radio stations and news organizations, including the Associated Press and Bloomberg Radio. You can subscribe to "History As It Happens" on Substack or: http://historyasithappens.com.

Sarah Coleman is a professor of 20th century American History at Texas State University. Her research is focused on immigration, race, and rights in the United States. She is a former advisor to President Biden and the author of: The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America.

Zachary opens the episode with a personal poem dedicated to Dr. Alter, who is also his mother, titled "For Mom".

Dr. Alison Alter was elected to the Austin City Council in December 2016. She served in this role through January 2025, when she was term-limited by the Austin City Charter. Dr. Alter has been widely recognized for her rigorous, energetic, and forward-looking leadership of one of America’s fastest growing cities.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "On the Border."

Dr. Meg Reiss received her Ph.D. from the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She was the national security advisor to Senator Mitt Romney from 2019 to 2023. Dr. Reiss is the founder and CEO of SolidIntel, a company using artificial intelligence to help manage global supply chains.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Village."

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). His new book is Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (2024).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Trailblazer".

Mary Ellen Curtin is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies, and Director of American Studies at American University, Washington DC. She is the author of two books: Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (University Press of Virginia, 2000) and, most recently, She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Election Day".

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "A Prophecy".

Dr. Emily Whalen is a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Her first book, The Lebanese Wars, which examines the history of U.S. interventions in the Lebanese Civil War, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2025. She earned her PhD in 2020 from the University of Texas at Austin.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Reserves".

The conversation delves into the historical impact of Banker's Acceptance credit instruments on global trade, the establishment of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, and the dynamics of financial power during and after World War I. They also address the importance of transparency and accountability in maintaining a participatory democracy.

Mary Bridges is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, has just been published. Her next research project focuses on infrastructure building as a means of projecting U.S. influence overseas. Mary has also worked as a business reporter and editor.

The discussion traces Humphrey's rise from a small-town boy in South Dakota to a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement and U.S. politics. Despite not achieving the presidency, Humphrey's impact as Mayor of Minneapolis, U.S. Senator, and Vice President is profound, particularly his efforts on civil rights, African American and Jewish relations.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Old Days."

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of 10 acclaimed books, including the newly-released Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. Jon Meacham has hailed the book as “a compelling and important account of Humphrey’s critical role in the freedom struggles of the mid-20th century.”

Freedman’s previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006); and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013).

With his colleague Kerry Donahue, Freedman co-produced a radio documentary and authored a companion book, both entitled Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How it Transformed The New York Times. The documentary and book were released in conjunction with World AIDS Day on December 1, 2015, and since then the documentary has been broadcast on more than 500 NPR member stations. In 2020, Freedman wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: The Journey From Stage to Screen, the companion book to the film adaptation of August Wilson’s classic play.

Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman’s books have been listed among The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year.

Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the “Forward Fifty” most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.

Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper’s “On Education” column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association’s annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the “On Religion” column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years.

Freedman has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Salon, Slate, Chicago Sun-Times, Tablet, The Forward, Ha’aretz, The Undefeated, The Root, and BeliefNet.

A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 110 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Awards and member of the Journalism Advisory Council of Religion News Service and the faculty advisory board of the Center for Journalism Ethics. He has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and the PBS News Hour.

Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he received in May 1977. He lives in New York with his wife, Christia Chana Blomquist.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Everyone is Laughing".

Paul Stekler is a nationally recognized documentary filmmaker whose critically praised and award-winning work includes George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire; Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style; Vote for Me: Politics in America, a four-hour PBS special about grassroots electoral politics; two segments of the Eyes on the Prize II series on the history of civil rights; Last Stand at Little Big Horn (broadcast as part of PBS's series The American Experience); Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics (broadcast on PBS's P.O.V. series); Getting Back to Abnormal (which aired on P.O.V. in 2014); and 2016’s Postcards from the Great Divide, a web series about politics for The Washington Post and PBS Digital. Overall, his films have won two George Foster Peabody Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, three national Emmy Awards, and a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Speaker".

John A. Lawrence served for thirty-eight years as a senior staff person in the United States House of Representatives, including as chief of staff for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of California's Washington Center. He is the author of: The Class of ’74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship; Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi's Speakership, 2005-2010; and Sherlock Holmes: The Affair at Mayerling Lodge.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A New Season."

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "Bloodstains."

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). His new book is Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (2024).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "When They Go Marching in Chicago"

Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, columnist, television producer, and radio host. He is the author of numerous books, including:  His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life; The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies; The Promise: President Obama, Year One; and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.” His new book is: American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial – and My Own.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "The Judges."

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. Levinson is the author of approximately 450 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals--and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization. He has also written seven books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2d edition 2011); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998, 2d ed. 2018); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012); An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21st Century (2015); Democracy and Dysfunction (with Jack Balkin) (2018); and, with Cynthia Levinson,  Fault Lines in the Constitution:  The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today (2017, 2d ed. 2019, graphic novel ed. 2020).  Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. 2015, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought (2016); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Batholomew Sparrow); Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006); The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2015); and Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2018). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A Constitution of the Soul."

Michael Ignatieff is a historian and the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He has served as rector and president of Central European University and is the author, most recently, of On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times. Ignatieff published an important article this summer in the Journal of Democracy, “When Democracy is on the Ballot:”

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930424.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "The War of Independence" Joanne Freeman is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of two groundbreaking books on political violence in America history: Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. Prof. Freeman writes frequently for the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic. and other publications. She is a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, and other news networks. Her webcast -- "History Matters (...& so does coffee!)" -- can be joined every Friday morning at 10:00am EST: 

Conversations

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Across the Moat."

Kenneth Greene is Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on democratization, political parties, and voting behavior, as well as Mexico’s politics. He is the author of: Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Sighing."

Isabel Cademartori was elected as a Member of the German Bundestag from Mannheim in 2021. She is a rising young leader in the German government. Cademartori served as a city councillor in Mannheim since 2019. She is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which leads the current coalition government in Germany.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "In Leipzig on D-Day."

John W. Hall is a professor and holder of the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in U.S. Military History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He served fifteen years as an active-duty infantry officer in the U.S. Army. He also served as a historian to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, U.S. European Command, U.S. Central Command, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is the author of Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War and numerous essays on American warfare.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Far Away."

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT's Asia Policy Program.  She is also a Nonresident Scholar with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Chestnut Greitens' first book, Dictators and Their Secret Police (Cambridge, 2016), examines variations in internal security and repression in Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines during the Cold War.  Her second book, Politics of the North Korean Diaspora (Cambridge, 2023), focuses on authoritarianism, security, and diaspora politics. She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which addresses how internal security concerns shape Chinese grand strategy. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "For Lisa."

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A Pessimist's Apocalypse"

Dr. Art Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at The University of Texas. Dr. Markman has published more than 150 scholarly works about cognitive science, decision-making and organizational behavior. Dr. Markman has written several books including: Smart Thinking; Smart Change; Bring Your Brain to Work. Dr. Markman also co-hosts “Two Guys on Your Head,” a radio show and podcast on KUT public radio, where he and Dr. Bob Duke explore the human mind with a unique mix of research, humor and everyday relevance. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A Democratic Quest"

Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Vaishnav is the author of: When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (2017),  which was awarded the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation book prize for the best non-fiction book on contemporary India published in 2017.  Dr. Vaishnav is also the host of “Grand Tamasha” -- a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by Carnegie and the Hindustan Times.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "An Appeal for Clarity" Paul Stekler taught at the University of Texas at Austin for many years. He is a nationally recognized documentary filmmaker whose critically praised and award-winning work includes: George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire; Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style; Vote for Me: Politics in America; two segments of the Eyes on the Prize II series on the history of civil rights; Last Stand at Little Big Horn; and Postcards from the Great Divide. His films have won two George Foster Peabody Awards, three Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, three national Emmy Awards, and a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. https://www.paulstekler.com/

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "If I Were at War"

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of:  The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009);  In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). His new book is Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (2024).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "The Old Colossus."

Dr. Julia F. Irwin is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University.  She is a leading scholar of humanitarian assistance in US foreign policy and international history. Professor Irwin is the author of:

Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (2013) and, most recently, Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century (2023).Professor Irwin is also the Co-Editor of the Journal of Disaster Studies.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "If Your God is a God of Truth"

Dr. Daniel Hummel is the Director for University Engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation and Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. Daniel has written about religion, politics, and foreign policy for the Washington Post, Christianity Today, and Religion News Service. His academic research has been published in Religion & American Culture and Church History.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "The Court Has Stopped the Count"

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals--and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization. He has also written six books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2d edition 2011); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012); An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21st Century (2015); and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and teh Flaws that Affect Us Today (forthcoming, September 2017). Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. 2015, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought (2016); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Batholomew Sparrow); Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006); and The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2015). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

He has been a visiting faculty member of the Boston University, Georgetown, Harvard, New York University, and Yale law schools in the United States and has taught abroad in programs of law in London; Paris; Jerusalem; Auckland, New Zealand; and Melbourne, Australia. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1985-86 and a Member of the Ethics in the Professions Program at Harvard in 1991-92. He is also affiliated with the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jewish Philosophy in Jerusalem. A member of the American Law Institute, Levinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He is married to Cynthia Y. Levinson, a writer of children's literature, and has two daughters and four grandchildren.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "For a War of Worlds"

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Dr. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). His forthcoming book is Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (2024).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "To Israel, a Widow"

Salim Yaqub is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of three books: Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Cornell University Press, 2016), and Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He has also written several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "To Study"

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "If The Leaves Could Speak."

Dr. Ruth Simmons is the former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University -- Texas's oldest Historically Black College and University.  She grew up in Grapeland, Texas, the youngest of 12 children born to sharecroppers.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "For the Children of Israel, and the Ones Who Will Try to Forget."

Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He writes the Beinart Notebook newsletter on https://substack.com. His first book, The Good Fight, was published by HarperCollins in 2006.  His second book, The Icarus Syndrome, was published by HarperCollins in 2010. His third, The Crisis of Zionism, was published by Times Books in 2012.  Beinart recently published an important essay in the New York Times (October 14, 2023): "There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive."

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "From The UAW Picket Line"

William Jones is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, where he is a leading scholar of workers, unions, and race in the United States. Prof. Jones is the author of: The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (2005) and The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (2013).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A Bad Sonnet for a Bad Man"

Joe Jaworski is a third-generation Texas trial attorney and former Mayor of Galveston, Texas. He has served as a law clerk to the United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit, and he has spent 32 years in private practice as a trial attorney, mediator, and legal commentator.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "When the Fire Comes."

Randy Denzer has more than 30 years in the fire service and is one of the highest certified and qualified wildland firefighters in central Texas. He retired last year as a operations Battalion Chief with the Austin Fire Department (AFD). During Randy’s career at the Austin Fire Department, he wrote many wildland response policies for the AFD. Randy currently sits as an appointed member of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Wildland Fire Fighting Taskforce Committee in Washington DC

Dr. Alison Alter is the elected representative for District 10 on the Austin City Council. She was first elected in 2016. Among other issues, wildfire prevention is one of her priorities. She has worked closely with various stakeholders to improve wildfire prevention and community resiliency around Austin. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Neue Synagoge, Oranienburger Straße"

Pawel Sawicki is the press and public relations officer at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland.

Zachary sets this scene with his poem entitled, "For Yegor."

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently for Foreign Affairs and other major publications. He has a forthcoming book on the history of the Ukraine War, Collisions.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Four Questions".

Christine Todd Whitman served as the 50th Governor of New Jersey, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the George W. Bush administration, and she is now Co-Chair of the Forward Party. Whitman began her political career in the Nixon administration's Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1993, she helped found the Committee for Responsible Government (now the Republican Leadership Council), a group advocating for moderate positions within the Republican Party. Whitman authored It's My Party, Too: Taking Back the Republican Party…And Bringing the Country Together Again.

Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur, author, philanthropist, non-profit leader, former 2020 presidential candidate, and co-Chair of the new Forward Party. After working as a lawyer and executive at several early-stage technology companies, Andrew eventually became CEO of an education company that became #1 in the country. He then started a national entrepreneurship non-profit, Venture for America, which worked to empower thousands of young entrepreneurs to bring their dynamism to communities across the country. He is the author of Forward: Notes on the Future of Democracy.

Zachary sets this scene with his poem entitled, "Musings on the Great Liars and One Smited Attorney General"

Joe Jaworski is a third-generation Texas trial attorney and former Mayor of Galveston, Texas. He has served as a law clerk to the United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit, and he has spent 32 years in private practice as a trial attorney, mediator, and legal commentator.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "A Dispensation For The Dispensationalists".

Dr. Daniel Hummel is the Director for University Engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation and Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. Daniel has written about religion, politics, and foreign policy for the Washington Post, Christianity Today, and Religion News Service. His academic research has been published in Religion & American Culture and Church History.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "For My City as It Was Three Years Ago".

Steve Adler was the mayor of Austin, Texas from 2015-2023. Before that, he was a prominent lawyer working in the areas of eminent domain and civil rights law. He also served on many public service boards, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Texas Tribune. Throughout his career, Mayor Adler has been widely recognized for his innovative ideas, his leadership, and his hard work.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "For My Generation and the Story We Will Write"

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez is the president and executive director of NextGen America, the largest youth-vote mobilization organization in the country. She is a millennial, a civil rights leader, and a 2020 U.S. Senate candidate who has spent the last 20 years taking on some of the most powerful special interests in her home state of Texas. Cristina’s dedication to lifting up the largest and most diverse generation in history is rooted in her conviction that young people have the power — and the right — to determine the future of our country.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Passover 2023."

Atar David is an agricultural and environmental historian, currently completing his doctorate in the history department at UT-Austin. His current project examines the trans-regional history of agricultural practices, commodity exchange, and knowledge production between the Middle East and the American Southwest at the turn of the 19th century.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Some Messes Can Only Be Cleaned Up With Time."

Jeffrey Engel is a professor of history at Southern Methodist University, where he is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History. He is the author and editor of at least 10 books, including: Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy, Impeachment: An American History, and When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Conceiving the Spies Lament."

John Sipher retired in 2014 after a 28-year career in the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service. At the time of his retirement, he was a member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, the leadership team that guides CIA activities globally. John served multiple overseas tours as Chief of Station and Deputy Chief of Station in Europe, Asia, and in high-threat environments. John also served as a lead instructor in the CIA’s clandestine training school and was a regular lecturer at the CIA’s leadership development program.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A Year After the War Began."

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently for Foreign Affairs and other major publications.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Brazilia Lament"

Seth Garfield is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of: Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988; In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region; and most recently, Guarana: How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Secret to Believing".

Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale University. Her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, was named a best book of 2022 by the Washington Post (Ten Best Books), The Atlantic (Ten Best Books), Publishers Weekly (Ten Best Books), The New Yorker (24 Essential Reads), The New York Times (100 Notable Books), Smithsonian (Ten Best History Books), and Barnes & Noble (Ten Best History Books). She is also the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Sonnet on the Shores of Lake Powell"

Dr. Erika Bsumek is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of: Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace and, most recently, The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau. Prof. Bsumek has received numerous teaching awards, including the UT Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Our Lonely Midnight Feasts".

Art Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Markman is the Founding Director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations program in the College of Liberal Arts at UT, former Executive Director of the IC² Institute, and he is currently the Vice Provost for Continuing and Professional Education and New Education Ventures at the University of Texas at Austin.  Prof. Markman is a frequent contributor to Psychology Today, Fast Company and the Harvard Business Review. He has published more than 150 scholarly works about cognitive science, decision-making and organizational behavior. Dr. Markman has also written several books for general audiences including: Smart Thinking, Smart Change, Bring Your Brain to Work, and Brain Briefs (co-written with Dr. Bob Duke). Beyond the UT Austin campus, he is probably best known as the co-host of KUT’s “Two Guys on Your Head” radio show and podcast, where he and Butler School of Music professor Bob Duke explore the human mind with a unique mix of research, humor and everyday relevance. He also plays saxophone in the Austin ska band Phineas Gage.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Listening"

Manu Meel is the CEO of BridgeUSA, a national organization that is investing in the future of democracy. Through his work, Manu has contributed to several news outlets, advanced pro-democracy efforts nationally, and led the policy operation for a Baltimore mayoral candidate. In the past, Manu worked as an associate at the venture capital firm Amplo and at the Department of State as a political analyst in counterterrorism. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media platforms.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Chickens That Won't Die".

Isabel Cademartori was elected as a Member of the German Bundestag for Mannheim in the 2021 federal election. Cademartori served as a city councillor in Mannheim since 2019. She is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which leads the current coalition government in Germany.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A Blank Sheet of Paper"

Joshua Eisenman is an associate professor of global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the political economy of China’s development, and its foreign relations with the United States and the developing world—particularly Africa. His work has been published in top academic journals including World Development, Development and Change, the Journal of Contemporary China and Cold War History. He has also published widely in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy. Prof. Eisenman is the author of: China and Africa: A Century of Engagement, with David Shinn (2012) and Red China's Green Revolution (2018).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "My First Vote: 10/24/22"

Dr. Geoff Kabaservice is Director of Political Studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington D.C. He is the author of several books including: The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (Henry Holt, 2004) and Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford 2012). Kabaservice has written for numerous national publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Politico, and the Guardian. His most recent article appeared in the Washington Post on December 4: “The Forever Grievance.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Mezuzah Addendums."

Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He writes the Beinart Notebook newsletter on https://substack.com. His first book, The Good Fight, was published by HarperCollins in 2006.  His second book, The Icarus Syndrome, was published by HarperCollins in 2010. His third, The Crisis of Zionism, was published by Times Books in 2012. 

Zachary recites his poem "Worth Waiting For."

Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, 2017). Professor Siamdoust has also published in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, and Jadaliyya, among others, and she often appears in English, German and Iranian media.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Morgan Honaker.

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently on the Ukraine War and related topics for Foreign Affairs.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Every Season Goes."

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University's Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Professor Suri is the author and editor of eleven books on politics and foreign policy, most recently: Civil War By Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. His other books include: The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office; Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama; Henry Kissinger and the American Century; and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. His writings appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Atlantic, Newsweek, Time, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other media. Professor Suri is a popular public lecturer and comments frequently on radio and television news. His writing and teaching have received numerous prizes, including the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas and the Pro Bene Meritis Award for Contributions to the Liberal Arts. Professor Suri co-hosts a weekly podcast, “This is Democracy.” His professional website is: 

Jeremi Suri, PhD.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Morgan Honaker.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "The World, Invisible."

Sarah Kaiser-Cross is a Director and Regional Head of Correspondent Banking and Affiliates for the Americas at HSBC Bank. She is a financial crime risk professional and geopolitical specialist with experience in counter terrorist finance, transaction monitoring strategy,  and cross border correspondent banking risk. Responsible for articulating key financial crime risks to senior banking executives, Sarah brings a nuanced understanding to the nexus between security threats and financial markets. Sarah has lived and worked in five countries around the Middle East over seven years with regional language proficiency, though now calls Miami home. Sarah holds two master's degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, in Middle Eastern Studies and Global Policy. 

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rayna Sevilla.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Professor Lepore is the author of numerous prize-winning and bestselling books, including: The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity; New York Burning : Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan; The Secret History of Wonder Woman; and These Truths: A History of the United States.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Ode to a Doctor."

Dr. Jasbir Singh is a specialist in maternal fetal medicine. He is in private practice with Austin Maternal Fetal Medicine Organization, affiliated with St. David’s Medical System in Austin, Texas.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Kate Whitmer.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "The Third Reconstruction."

Peniel E. Joseph  is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, and Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of award-winning books on African American history, including The Sword and the Shield, Stokely: A Life, and most recently, The Third Reconstruction.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rayna Sevilla and Jasper Murphy.

Zachary reads his poem, "What Mikhail Thought of."

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Morgan Honaker.

Zachary reads his poem, "Never Again the Same."

This episode of This is Democracy was edited, mixed, and mastered by Morgan Honaker.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Prayer at the Sick Bed of Truth"

Kris Mayes is the Democratic candidate for Attorney General in Arizona in 2022. She served on the Arizona Corporation Commission from 2003 to 2010. She is a Professor of Practice at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

https://krismayes.com/

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Probably"

Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the author of several books, including, most recently: The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today (2022), The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (2019) co-authored with Charles Edel, and American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (2018). Professor Brands served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Strategic Planning from 2015 to 2016. He has also served as lead writer for the Commission on the National Defense Strategy for the United States, and consulted with government offices and agencies in the intelligence and national security communities.

Michael Beckley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, Michael was an International Security Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He continues to advise offices within the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Department of Defense. He published his first book in 2018: Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Brands and Beckley have co-written a new book: Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China: 

Danger Zone.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Karoline Pfeil.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Prayer of the Unjustly Imprisoned"

Vida Johnson is an associate professor of law at Georgetown University. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a supervising attorney in the Trial Division at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS), where she worked for eight years. At PDS Ms. Johnson was assigned to the most serious cases at the “Felony One” level, and her experience included numerous trials in D.C. Superior Court representing indigent clients facing charges including homicide, sexual assault, and armed offenses. Ms. Johnson’s responsibilities at PDS also included supervising other trial attorneys and serving as one of the agency’s two representatives to the D.C. Superior Court Sentencing Guidelines Commission. She recently published "Policing and the Siege of the United States Capitol” in Lawfare (16 June 2022): 

Policing and the Siege of the United States Capitol.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Karoline Pfeil.

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He is a leading economic historian and expert on the contemporary global economy. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books: Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006), The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (2014); Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018); and Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy (2021). Tooze frequently comments on current affairs for the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. You can follow him on Twitter: @adam_tooze.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen and Karoline Pfeil.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Ode to President Zelensky".

Marie Yovanovitch served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (2016-2019), the Republic of Armenia (2008-2011) and the Kyrgyz Republic (2005-2008). She also served as the Dean of the School of Language Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State and as the Deputy Commandant and International Advisor at the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, National Defense University. Earlier she served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, where she coordinated policy on European and global security issues. Before that, she was the bureau’s Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for issues related to the Nordic, Baltic, and Central European countries. Ambassador Yovanovitch is the author of a recent memoir: Lessons from the Edge.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "I'd Like To Think You've Seen the World With Me".

This episode was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen and Jonah Hernandez.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Death Row Lullaby".

Gail Johnson has more than two decades of experience representing clients in criminal and civil cases in federal and state courts in Colorado, California, and the District of Columbia. She has defended clients against many types of criminal charges and convictions, including mail and wire fraud, insider trading, drug and firearm offenses, sexual assault, and murder. Furthermore, she is a graduate of the Yale Law School with an undergraduate degree from Trinity University.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "In between".

Dr. Lorinc Redei is a professor at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as the graduate advisor for the Global Policy Studies Program. He previously served as a press officer in the European Parliament, the directly elected legislature of the European Union. Redei's research and writing focus on European politics, the European Union, and the role of the European Parliament.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "I'd Like To Tell You the World Will Be Fine"

This episode was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Summer Moon"

This episode was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Thinking of the War on a Monday after Returning from the Capitol"

This episode was Mixed and Mastered by Karoline Pfiel and Will Shute

This Episode was Mixed and Mastered by Kate Whitmer, and Alejandra Arrazola

Zachary sets the scene with his poem "Because Someday Maybe"

Jo Ivester is an LGBTQ and civil rights advocate, sharing her family's story as a way of helping others to step beyond their comfort zones when it comes to relating to those who are different from themselves. Raised in a politically active family, Jo spent two years of her childhood living in an all- Black town in the Mississippi Delta, where her father managed a medical clinic, her mother taught in the local high school, and she was the only white student at her junior high. This experience, captured in Jo's first book -- The Outskirts of Hope — led to Jo's lifelong commitment to advocating for equal rights for all.Prompted by the realization that her son is trans, Jo has recently broadened her focus to raise awareness about what it means to be transgender. Her second book — Once a Girl, Always a Boy — presents her son's journey, told from multiple perspectives, beginning when he was a small child, viewed as a tomboy. When not writing, Jo devotes time to her community, serving on the boards of Equality Texas, the Anti-Defamation League of Central Texas, and the Ground Floor Theater. 

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Karoline Pfeil and Morgan Honaker.

Jeremi and Dr. Osgood have published an article on this topic in THE HILL.

Problems with presidential records are not just about Trump

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Forwards".

Dr. Kenneth Osgood is professor of history at Colorado School of Mines. He is author or editor of five books on US political and diplomatic history, exploring how presidents “sell” war, civil rights and the conservative movement, international public diplomacy, and the propaganda and politics of the Cold War.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Will Kurzner & Oscar Kitmanyen.

Will Hurd is a former CIA officer, cybersecurity executive, and elected member of Congress. From 2015 to 2021 he represented the 23rd Congressional District in Texas, a region stretching from San Antonio to El Paso, along the US-Mexico border. Will Hurd recently published a new book, American Reboot: An Idealist’s Guide to Getting Big Things Done.

This Episode was Mixed and Mastered by Amanda Willis

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently on Ukraine, Russia, and U.S. foreign policy in Foreign Affairs and other major publications. 

This Episode was Mixed and Mastered by Karoline Pfeil, Oscar Kitmanyen, and Will Shute

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Of Oligarchs and Idealists"

Joseph Fishkin is a Professor of Law at UCLA, where he teaches and writes about employment discrimination law, election law, constitutional law, education law, fair housing law, poverty and inequality, and distributive justice. Before joining the UCLA faculty he taught for a decade at the University of Texas School of Law. His first book, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award, was published by Oxford University Press. He is the coauthor with Willy Forbath of The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (Harvard University Press 2022).

William Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair and is Associate Dean of Research at UT Austin School of Law. He is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (with Joseph Fishkin), and dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays on legal and constitutional history and theory and comparative constitutional law. He is completing a trans-national history of Jewish lawyers and Jewish politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In addition to UT, he has taught at UCLA, Sciences Po, Tel Aviv, Columbia, and Harvard.

Zachary sets the scene with a section of his poem "Our Ukrainian Love Story"

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020).

Dr. Andrés González is a political scientist based in Quito-Ecuador. He obtained his Ph. D. in Political Science and International Relations at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and has taught in several universities and high schools in Germany and Ecuador. He is currently the President and Academic Director of POLITIKUM, an independent education corporation focused on citizenship and political education for students of all levels in three languages. See their website: https://www.politikumecuador.com. Dr. González is also the author of the book, Governance for the 21st Century: The Fight Against Corruption in Latin America (LIT Verlag).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Nowadays"

Jason Flowers is entering his seventeenth year teaching AP US History at the Liberal Arts and Science Academy in Austin.  In addition to APUSH, Mr. Flowers teaches American Film and coaches Quiz Bowl and History Bowl.  He is originally from South Louisiana and has a B.A. in history from LSU along with a master’s degree in social studies education from North Texas.  Mr. Flowers is also the head coach and team leader for Team USA for the International Geography Olympiad and serves on the board of directors of the National Consortium of Specialized STEM Schools. Under normal circumstances, Mr. Flowers spends lots of time traveling, but since March has spent lots of time riding his road bike around Austin.  He lives in Austin with his partner Meagan and his two kittens Moxie and Muffin. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "Around the Corner"

Hanna Senko is a sexual assault survivor whose case was closed via exceptional clearance by the Austin Police Department. She now serves as a survivor speaker, writer, and advocate fighting for change in the understanding, reporting, and handling of sex crimes.

Alison Alter serves as Mayor Pro Tem of Austin, Texas and represents District 10 on the City Council. Among many other things, she has led efforts to improve the city's sexual assault response system to provide healing and justice to sexual assault survivors.

cw: Sexual Assault

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "What You Still Have Left To Give."

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the co-author, with Jeremi and Zachary Suri, of a recent article in The Hill: "Give Young People the Vote," https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/587055-give-young-people-the-vote.

Zachary caps the year off with a new poem, "This year I'd like to love my country"

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Not Just Us".

Dr. Garret J. Martin is a Senior Professorial Lecturer and the Co-Director of the Transatlantic Policy Center in the School of International Service at American University. He has written widely on transatlantic relations and Europe. He focuses on security, US foreign policy, NATO, European politics, European foreign policy and defense, and the European Union. He is a frequent media commentator, providing analysis and interviews, among others, to NPR, the BBC, CNN, Voice of America, USA Today, WUSA, ABC News Australia and France 24.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Most Careful Stalemate."

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations, and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); and most recently, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020).  His most recent article (co-authored with Michael Kofman) is "Russia Won't Let Ukraine Go Without a Fight," Foreign Affairs, 22 November 2021: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2021-11-22/russia-wont-let-ukraine-go-without-fight. 

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Kate Whitmer and Morgan Honaker.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "To the Immigrant that Waits at the Border Station."

Sarah Coleman is a historian of 20th century America at Texas State University. Her research is focused on immigration, race, and rights in the United States. She is a former advisor to President Biden and the author of The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. Dr. Coleman received her PhD from Princeton University.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Allie Arrazola.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "As if Looking Backwards Through a Telescope".

Andrew Waxman is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His research examines Environmental and Urban Economics, among other subjects. 

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "Our Knots".

Renee Lafair is the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in Austin, Texas.  Dr. Alison Alter represents District 10 on the Austin City Council. 

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Alejandra Arrazola and Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "Soon to be But Not Yet"

Nelson Lichtenstein is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, which he founded in 2004 to train a new generation of labor intellectuals. A historian of labor, political economy, and ideology, he is the author or editor of 16 books, including a biography of the labor leader Walter Reuther and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. His most recent books are Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy (2016); The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto (2015); The ILO From Geneva to the Pacific Rim (2015); A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor (2013); The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (2012); The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009); and American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (2006). Lichtenstein is currently writing a history of economic thought and policymaking in the administration of Bill Clinton. With Gary Gerstle and Alice O’Connor he has edited Beyond the New Deal Order: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession. He writes for Dissent, Jacobin, New Labor Forum, and American Prospect. Lichtenstein recently published an article in Dissent: "Is This A Strike Wave," (October 25, 2021).

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Karoline Pfeil and Morgan Honaker.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "You Don't Really Wish You Were on a Mountainside"

Called “the Indiana Jones of entomology” by the National Geographic Society, Dr. Mark Moffett is a modern-day explorer with more than a little luck on his side, having accidentally sat on one of the world’s deadliest snakes, battled drug lords with dart guns, and scrambled up trees to escape elephants, all part of his mission to find new species and behaviors in remote places. Presently Mark is studying the stability of societies across animal species and in humans right up to the present day, an outgrowth of his research for his fourth book, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. He received a Lowell Thomas Medal from the Explorers Club for his studies climbing into forest canopies around the world. Mark is one of only a handful of people to earn a doctorate under the Harvard sociobiologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson.

This episode of This is Democracy was mix and mastered by Karoline Pfeil.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “It is Hard to Build Utopias”.

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Until January 2020, he taught history at UT-Austin, where his classes focused on American and international history. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and, this fall, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era, as well as several edited books and numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on various aspects of the history of U.S. foreign relations. Lawrence has held the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellowship at Yale University (2006-2008) and the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professorship in American Foreign Policy at Williams College (2011-2012). He earned his BA from Stanford University and his PhD from Yale University.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “About Freedom”.

Dyana Limon-Mercado is Executive Director of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes.

Sarah Wheat is Chief External Affairs Officer at Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Isaiah Thomas and Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Fuelless”.

Dr. Sheila Olmstead is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, a University Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF), and a Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). Professor Olmstead is a Charter Member of the Science Advisory Board at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 2016-2017 she served in the White House as Senior Economist for Energy and the Environment on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Olmstead has published in leading journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the Journal of Urban Economics, Science, Water Resources Research, and Environmental Science and Technology.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Alejandra Arrazola and Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Transatlantic Elegy”.

James Goldgeier is a Professor of International Relations and served as Dean of the School of International Service at American University from 2011-17. He is also a Robert Bosch Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, and he serves as the chair of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee. He has authored or co-authored four books including: America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (co-authored with Derek Chollet); Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (co-authored with Michael McFaul); and Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO. 

Joshua Shifrinson is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Shifrinson’s book, Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts, explains why some rising states challenge and prey upon declining great powers, while others seek to support and cooperate with declining states. He has additional related projects on U.S. grand strategy, the durability of NATO, U.S. relations with its allies during and after the Cold War, and the rise of China. His work has appeared in International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, and other venues. 

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Something We Should Remember Having Done.”

Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department’s engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary-General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included the deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Apparition".

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale, “Jewish Lives” series, 2018); A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011); The Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013); Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; 2nd ed. 2018); and Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago, 2003, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). He is also the author, with his son Ben Nadler, of the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton, 2017). His most recent book is Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lawrence Shapiro is the Berent Enç Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research spans philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. Within philosophy of mind he has focused on issues related to reduction, especially concerning the thesis of multiple realization. His books include The Mind Incarnate (MIT, 2004) and The Multiple Realization Book (co-authored with Professor Thomas Polger.) His book, Embodied Cognition (Routledge Press), received the American Philosophical Association’s Joseph B. Gittler Award for best book in philosophy of the social sciences (2013). His recent interest in philosophy of religion resulted in The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural is Unjustified (Columbia University Press, 2016).

Drs. Nadler and Shapiro recently co-authored an exciting new book: When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People (Princeton University Press, 2021). 

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Isaiah Thomas and Ean Herrera

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Right to Choose".

Stephen I. Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, constitutional law, national security law, and military justice. Professor Vladeck has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and various lower federal civilian and military courts; has testified before numerous congressional committees and Executive Branch agencies and commissions; has served as an expert witness both in U.S. state and federal courts and in foreign tribunals; and has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession.  Vladeck is the co-host, together with Professor Bobby Chesney, of the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is CNN’s lead Supreme Court analyst and a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is an executive editor of the Just Security blog and a senior editor of the Lawfare blog.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Airplane With the City Clinging to its Wheels".

B. Venkat Mani is a Professor of German and World Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also a Senior Fellow in Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity. He was born and brought up in India and migrated to the US as for graduate education. He researches and teaches German literature, literature of migrants and refugees, and world literature. He is the author, among others of Cosmopolitical Claims(2007) and the multiple award winning Recoding World Literature (2017). He has co-edited a A Companion to World Literature (Wiley Blackwell 2020).  His work on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities with a focus on migration has also appeared in  The Wire (Hindi), Inside Higher Ed,Telos, and The Hindustan Times. His most recent article is: "Empires Slay, Publics Pay: The Global Refugee Crisis Unfolding in Afghanistan,” Hindustan Times (Aug 22, 2021): https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/empires-slay-publics-pay-the-global-refugee-crisis-unfolding-in-afghanistan-101629631940164.html. 

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Morgan Honaker.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "It Is A True Sonnet".

Steven Pedigo is a Professor of Practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and the inaugural director of the LBJ Urban Lab. Pedigo has advised more than 50 cities and regions across the world on how to build more creative, innovative, and inclusive communities.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen and Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "In the Park with the Wide Fountain". 

Steve Sonnenberg, MD, is a psychiatrist and medical humanities and ethics scholar. He serves as professor and associate chair for education in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Dell Medical School. He also holds the Paul Woodruff Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Studies in the School of Undergraduate Studies, where he chairs the faculty panel of the Bridging Disciplines Program “Patients, Practitioners, and Cultures of Care.” That program is designed to prepare healthcare undergraduates with the tools they will need later, as providers, to create a healthcare system where health is a human right and structural disparities in care are eliminated.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "They Say a House is Just a Metaphor". 

Shoshana Krieger is the Project Director of Building and Strengthening Tenant Action (BASTA) at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. BASTA organizes Austin renters to work with their neighbors to ensure that all Austinites have access to safe and affordable housing by facilitating the development of tenant associations and building renter power in Austin. BASTA targets slumlords who profit off of renting substandard properties, the conditions of which negatively impact the health of families. Prior to her work at BASTA, Shoshana was a staff attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County (NLSLA) and a tenants rights organizer at Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES). Shoshana has a J.D. and M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Isaiah Thomas and Will Shute.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "This Peaceful Dawn".

Christopher McKnight Nichols is Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Sandy and Elva Sanders Eminent Professor in the Honors College at Oregon State University, where he is an associate professor of history. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Nichols is best known for authoring Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard, 2011, 2015), and he is editor or author of five other books, including the recently published Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford, 2021). His next book, co-edited and co-authored, is Ideologies and U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (out from Columbia University Press in 2022).

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Sofia Salter.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled "Certainly Probable".

Alan McPherson is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University. He has written and edited 11 books, the most recent of which is Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "They say that sport unites the world".

Robert Edelman is Professor of Russian History and the History of Sport at the University of California, San Diego. He has written four books including: Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR and Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team. He has consulted on documentaries for HBO, PBS, ESPN and CBS. Together with Christopher Young from the University of Cambridge, he is co-editor of the University of California Press’s new series Sport in World History, and is co-editor with Wayne Wilson of the The Oxford Handbook of Sports History.  He is the co-director with Young of an international research project on the history of Cold War sport under the auspices of the Cold War International History Project.  The first of two conference volumes, entitled The Whole World Was Watching was recently published by Stanford University Press.

  David McDonald is the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of, among many titles: Divided Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914 and “Sport History and the Historical Profession,” in R. Edelman et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook to Sport History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 61-78.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "I Knew We Had Arrived".

Wendy Davis represented the 10th district in the Texas Senate from 2009 to 2015. She was previously on the Fort Worth City Council. Wendy Davis was serving as a surrogate for the Biden-Harris campaign and was present on the bus when the Trump Train harassed its occupants. The October 30 attack barred her from campaigning for herself and for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris when the Biden-Harris campaign decided to cancel scheduled events due to safety concerns. The former Texas state senator and 2020 congressional candidate remarked that the bus incident was further evidence of a rising temperature in American politics, and that she had never experienced this kind of intimidation before in all the many campaigns she’d run and opposed. After the October 30 attack, Davis considered speaking out about her experience but did not immediately come forward because she feared for her safety.Dr. Eric Cervini is an award-winning historian of LGBTQ+ politics and culture. His first book on queer history, The Deviant's War, was a New York Times Bestseller, an Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. It won the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and was voted the “Best Read of 2020” at the Queerties. As an authority on 1960s gay activism, Cervini serves on the Board of Directors of the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus, and on the Board of Advisors of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of gay American history. His award-winning digital exhibitions have been featured in Harvard’s Rudenstine Gallery, and he has presented his research to audiences across America and the United Kingdom.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Peace; the Privilege, the Chore".

Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian author, documentary filmmaker, and journalist. She specializes in conflict reporting, human rights, and foreign affairs. Gumenyuk is a founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, aimed at popularizing public spirit journalism and overcoming polarization. Since the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, she has  reported on events in Eastern Ukraine. Gremenyuk is one of the few journalists regularly traveling to occupied Crimea. In 2020 Gumenyuk published a book of her reporting, "The Lost Island. Tales from Occupied Crimea' based on 6 years of her reporting.  She is also the author of the book “Maidan Tahrir. In Search of a Lost Revolution” (2015), based on her reporting on the Arab Spring. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Mi Chamocha."

Allison Gill is a veteran, a Ph.D., a former federal government executive, a comedian, an author, and a staunch advocate for the democratic resistance. Her mission as the executive producer and host of the podcast, "Mueller, She Wrote," is to employ her expertise in the absurd amount of Trump Russia news and wrap it up into tasty bites for human consumption; she is committed to do this weekly until the House of Trump falls. Additionally, she is very dedicated to the separation of facts and theory, and she works hard to make sure you know which is which. The truth is the goal, and facts are the tools. Allison hosts and produces a number of additional podcasts for democracy activists and informed citizens, including: "The Daily Beans" and "Clean Up on Aisle 45." Please visit the following podcast links for Allison Gill’s amazing shows: ‎Mueller, She Wrote on Apple Podcasts, ‎The Daily Beans on Apple Podcasts, ‎Cleanup on Aisle 45 with AG and Andrew Torrez on Apple Podcasts.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "What Becomes of a Continent."

Dr. Lorinc Redei is a professor at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as the graduate advisor for the Global Policy Studies Program. He previously served as a press officer in the European Parliament, the directly elected legislature of the European Union. Redei's research and writing focus on European politics, the European Union, and the role of the European Parliament.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "When They Gather In The Hallowed Halls."

Robinson Woodward-Burns is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University, where he researches and teaches on American constitutionalism, civil rights, federalism, DC politics and statehood, and slavery and abolition. His first book, Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, was published in 2021 by Yale University Press. The book proposes that state constitutional reform has addressed national controversies over elections, voting and civil rights, and economic and labor regulation, steering national political development since the founding era. He has also published on abolitionism, constitutionalism, and social movements in the Journal of Politics, Polity, and the Tulsa Law Review. He has also written on these topics, with a special emphasis on DC statehood, in the Atlantic and the Washington Post.

Zachary reads his poem, "Like an Elephant."

Natalie Suri graduated from McCallum High School in Austin in June 2021. She received many academic honors, including the Trustee Scholar award, the University Interscholastic League Scholar award, and the President’s Award for Academic Excellence. In September 2021 she will begin her studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "Just a Little More Earthly"

Lieutenant Colonel Christina “Thumper” Hopper graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and commissioned as the Distinguished Graduate of the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps Program.  She earned Air Force pilot wings in 2000, completed F-16 training in 2001 and was one of only two Black female fighter pilots in the Air Force until 2021. During her time in the Air Force, Christina has been an advocate for women and minorities in aviation.  She has mentored hundreds of young women through programs like Lean-In, Supergirls (which she started among the pilot training bases) and Sisters of the Skies (a mentorship program for Black female pilots).  She has also contributed to strategic diversity initiatives in the Air Force and developed diversity curriculum for student pilots and her local base community. She was featured by Good Housekeeping Magazine, Ebony, and the Harry Connick Jr. Show and Family Circle Magazine named her one of the top 20 Working Moms of 2018. She currently serves as a T-38 Evaluator Pilot with more than 2500 hours in fighter, trainer and airline transport aircraft.  In addition to her Air Force service, Christina is a wife of 20 years, a mom of three, a Delta Air Lines pilot, and professional speaker.  She speaks on various topics related to her life experiences including diversity, overcoming adversity, and harnessing joy for success. To book her as a speaker for your next event visit:  https://www.athenasvoiceusa.com/christina-thumper-hopper.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled "The Solution".

Professor Robert “Bobby” Chesney is a leading scholar and policy adviser on issues related to national security, cybersecurity, and law. Professor Chesney holds the James Baker Chair and also serves as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas School of Law. He is the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, a university-wide research unit bridging across disciplines to improve understanding of international security issues. Professor Chesney is a co-founder and contributor to www.lawfareblog.com, the leading source for analysis, commentary, and news relating to law and national security. He co-hosts the National Security Law Podcast with colleague, Steve Vladeck: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-national-security-law-podcast/id1201314368. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Forest Next to the Trees".

Samuel Truett received his Ph.D. at Yale University and is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico.  He is the author of Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2006), the co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (2004), and writes broadly on borderlands, environmental, and Native American History in North American and global perspectives.  He has been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tampere (Finland) and a fellow at the Huntington Library, Newberry Library, John Carter Brown Library, and Institut d’Etudes Avancées (Institute for Advanced Study) in Nantes, France.  At the University of New Mexico he has led interdisciplinary efforts with the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies and Ted Turner’s New Mexico ranches.  His current work on border crossings in the nineteenth-century world reaches south across the hemisphere and west to imperial and Indigenous spaces in the Pacific basin, the Indian Ocean, and the greater China Seas.  He is also interested in cross-disciplinary ways of using history to rethink planetary crossings, entanglements, and futures of humans and their non-human kin in contexts of rapid social and environmental change.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "A Good Fight".

Dr. Charles Edel is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and a Senior Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Edel’s research and policy expertise is in the politics and security of the Indo-Pacific, U.S. strategy toward the region, American foreign policy, grand strategy, and American political history. He is the co-author (with Hal Brands) of The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (2019) and author of Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic (2014).  Currently, he is working on a book examining America’s history of dealing with authoritarian regimes. In addition to his scholarly publications, his writings appear in The Washington Post,Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The American Interest, and various other outlets.  He also regularly offers foreign policy commentary on television and radio, including CNBC, ABC, Sky News, Australia’s RN, and NPR.  

Previously, Edel was Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, and served on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff from 2015-2017. In that role, he advised the Secretary of State on political and security issues in the Asia-Pacific region.  He also has worked at Peking University's Center for International and Strategic Studies as a Henry Luce Scholar, was awarded the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship, and taught high school history in New York City.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled "In the Radio Static."

Eric Rauchway is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and the author of seven books on U.S. history including, most recently, Why the New Deal Matters (2021). He is the author also of Winter War (2018), on the conflict between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt over the New Deal in 1932-1933.

Dr. Aaron O’Connell is an Associate Professor of History at UT Austin and Director of Research at the Clements Center for National Security. He is a military historian who focuses on military strategy and culture. His first book was entitled, Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps. His second book was a collection of essays entitled Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts & Minds in Afghanistan. Dr. O’Connell served for 26 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, with the current rank of colonel. He served as a Special Advisor to General David Petraeus in Afghanistan. Later, he served as a Special Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he wrote on issues of terrorism and strategy. Dr. O’Connell also served in the Obama Administration as Director of Defense Policy & Strategy on the National Security Council Staff.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "One You Have Not Heard".

Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and Chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Fellow of the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and the George W. Littlefield Professorship in American History, and the former Associate Dean of The Graduate School. Professor Berry is a scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery as well as Black women’s history in the United States. Professor Berry's books include: Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia; The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation; and A Black Women’s History of the United States, with co-author Kali Nicole Gross.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "What Else?"

Jason Scott Smith is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico. He is a specialist in the history of capitalism and political economy. Professor Smith’s research and teaching range from the nineteenth century through the global financial crisis of 2008. He is the author of:  Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956  and  A Concise History of the New Deal.  

The lyrics to "The Eyes of Texas" are as follows:

The Eyes of Texas are upon you, All the livelong day. The Eyes of Texas are upon you, You cannot get away. Do not think you can escape them At night or early in the morn -- The Eyes of Texas are upon you Til Gabriel blows his horn.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Spirit Lives"

Richard J. Reddick is the inaugural associate dean for equity, community engagement, and outreach for the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the Program in Higher Education Leadership in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy (ELP) at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has served as a faculty member since 2007. Additionally, Dr. Reddick serves as the Assistant Director of the Plan II Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Reddick is a faculty member by courtesy in the Department for African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and a fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. Dr. Reddick co-chairs the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity (CREED), serves on the Signature Course Advisory Committee (SCAC), and was named to the inaugural cohort of the Provost’s Distinguished Service Academy.  Most recently, he served as Chair of the Eyes of Texas History Committee. The committee's report is available at: https://utexas.app.box.com/s/5o2a1klri1htyhq3mziyxdjgxvegprjj. 

Yesterday, UT's Department of History issued a statement in support of UT's Asian & Asian American community. Read the full statement at http://bit.ly/3tGGQBA. Colleagues at the department website, NOT EVEN PAST, have compiled and are still currently collecting resources & information on the mass shootings in Atlanta: http://bit.ly/3f8yJK7.

Julian E. Zelizer is one of the leading experts on modern American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Zelizer is the author and editor of 19 books on American political history, including: Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975; The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society; and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, co-authored with Kevin Kruse. Most recently, Zelizer published Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.

Dr. Sean Theriault is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a leading scholar of American political institutions, and the U.S. Congress in particular. Sean has published five books: Congress: The First Branch (with Mickey Edwards; Oxford University Press, 2020), The Great Broadening (with Bryan Jones and Michelle Whyman; University of Chicago Press, 2019), The Gingrich Senators (Oxford University Press, 2013), Party Polarization in Congress (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and The Power of the People (Ohio State University Press, 2005). He has also published numerous articles in a variety of journals on subjects ranging from presidential rhetoric to congressional careers and the Louisiana Purchase to the Pendleton Act of 1883.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Do Not Be Alone When The Lights Come Back On."

Dr. Varun Rai is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the director of the UT Energy Institute and the Associate Dean for Research in the LBJ School. Through his interdisciplinary research, delving with issues at the interface of energy systems, complex systems, decision science, and public policy, he is developing effective policy approaches to help accelerate the deployment of sustainable energy technologies globally. He has presented at several important forums, including the United States Senate Briefings, Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition, Climate One at Commonwealth Club, and Global Economic Symposium, and his research group’s work has been discussed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Bloomberg News, among other venues. He was a Global Economic Fellow in 2009. During 2013-2015 he was a Commissioner for the vertically-integrated electric utility Austin Energy. In 2016 the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM) awarded him the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize, which “was established to honor persons who, at under the age of 40, have made a distinguished contribution to the field of public policy analysis and management.” He received his Ph.D. and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "That Man Believes Astrology".

Jonathan Marks is a professor of politics at Ursinus College and a blogger for Commentary magazine. He is the author of Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, most recently, Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education. Marks writes frequently on higher education for the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Wall Street Journal.

Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. In her research, Brayne uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the social consequences of data-intensive surveillance practices. Her book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford University Press), draws on ethnographic research with the Los Angeles Police Department to understand how law enforcement uses predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies.

In previous research, she analyzed the relationship between criminal justice contact and involvement in medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions. Brayne's research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science and has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, and the American Society of Criminology.

Brayne has volunteer-taught college-credit sociology classes in prisons since 2012. In 2017, she founded the Texas Prison Education Initiative.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "What No One Ever Told Me."

Dr. Brent Iverson is a distinguished professor of chemistry and dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an award-winning chemistry teacher and he maintains a distinguished research laboratory. Iverson is an inventor on 24 issued U.S. patents. Working with George Georgiou and Jennifer Maynard of the UT Department of Biomedical Engineering, Iverson helped develop an FDA-approved late-stage cure for exposure to anthrax.

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). His published a recent article on Russia and US policy in the New Republic, “How Biden Can Achieve a Russian Restoration:” https://newrepublic.com/article/161044/biden-putin-navalny-russia-protests.

David Greenberg is a professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is a leading expert on presidential history and rhetoric. Prof. Greenberg is the author of: Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (W.W. Norton, 2003), Calvin Coolidge (Henry Holt, 2006), and Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (W.W. Norton, 2016). He writes frequently for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Daedalus, Dissent, Raritan, and many other scholarly and popular publications.

Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History project. A political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the far-right, Hemmer is author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is co-founder and co-editor of Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post. She is also a columnist for Vox and The Age in Melbourne. She co-hosts Past Present, a weekly podcast where three historians discuss the latest news in American politics and culture, and is the producer and host of A12: The Story of Charlottesville, a six-part podcast series on the white-power terrorism in Charlottesville in 2017. Hemmer’s historical analysis has appeared in a number of national and international news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Politico, U.S. News & World Report, New Republic, PBS NewsHour, CNN, NPR, and NBC News.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled "The Year of Elisions".

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled "In My Defense".

David M. Oshinsky directs the division of medical humanities in the department of medicine at New York University, where he is also a professor of history. His books include A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1983) and Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996), which garnered the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for distinguished contribution to human rights. His Polio: An American Story (2006) won both the Pulitzer Prize in history and the Hoover Presidential Book Award, and his articles and reviews appear regularly in the New York Times and other national publications. He is most recently the author of Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital (2016).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled, "For Joseph McCarthy and his Brethren in Moral Promiscuity".

Dr. Geoffrey Kabaservice is Director of Political Studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington D.C. He is the author of several books including: The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (Henry Holt, 2004) and Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford 2012). Kabaservice has written for numerous national publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Politico, and the Guardian. His most recent article appeared in the Washington Post on December 4: "The Forever Grievance.”

Zachary sets the scene with his song titled, "Don Quixote of Oakland and Sancho of the South Side".

Dr. Shirley Thompson is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Associate Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. She is the author of Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Her new book project has the working title: "No More Auction Block for Me: African Americans and the Problem of Property.” She is the author of an influential recent article about social and political changes in Atlanta, "Georgia On My Mind,” New York Review of Books (19 November 2020.)

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Port Huron Revisited."

Vaneesa Cook received her PhD in US history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. She is the author of Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. Her articles on the history of social movements and religious thought have appeared in The Washington Post, Dissent magazine, and Religion & Politics, among others. She is currently the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency historian in residence for the UW-Madison Missing in Action Project.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled, "Aron Gridinger and I survived."

Augusta Dell'Omo is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in U.S. foreign policy and race in international relations from the late Cold War to the present. Focusing on political extremism, religion, African politics, and public history, Augusta is a graduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security and the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). She is an Ernest May Predoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for 2020–2021. She has published columns for The Washington Post, appeared on news programs like CNN International, and produced two podcasts – 15 Minute History and Right Rising.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled, “Anius Meanwhile, Climbs the Rock”.

Ruth Hargrove is a professor at California Western School of Law. She runs a pro bono practice representing domestic violence victims, students in disciplinary matters, and tenants in landlord/tenant claims. She retired from teaching in 2018 to have more time to fight President Trump's most destructive policies. Her pro bono practice now concentrates on asylum law, working with Jewish Family Services of San Diego, the Immigration Justice Project, and the Board of Immigration Appeals Pro Bono Project.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem "I Remember when I was Four".

Jillian Smith is a junior at the University of Texas at Austin.

Eli Alter is a senior at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.

Zachary first sets the scene with his poem titled "Water Balloons".

Professor Paul Stekler holds the Wofford Denius Chair in Entertainment Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a nationally recognized documentary filmmaker whose critically praised and award-winning work includes George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire; Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style; Vote for Me: Politics in America, a four-hour PBS special about grassroots electoral politics; two segments of the Eyes on the Prize II series on the history of civil rights; Last Stand at Little Big Horn (broadcast as part of PBS’s series The American Experience); Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics (broadcast on PBS’s P.O.V. series); Getting Back to Abnormal (which aired on P.O.V. in 2014); and 2016’s Postcards from the Great Divide, a web series about politics for The Washington Post and PBS Digital. Overall, his films have won two George Foster Peabody Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, three national Emmy Awards, and a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Herbst ich erinnere mich", or "Fall I Remember".

Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Berin, Germany. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin, and was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of numerous books, including: Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, and Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. Her most recent book is: Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. The paperback edition of the book includes a new epilogue on the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Cross of Gold".

Hannah Gurman teaches U.S. history and American Studies at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is the author of The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond (2012), editor of A People's History of Counterinsurgency (2013), and co-editor of Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (2020).

Kaeten Mistry is a historian of the U.S. and the world and teaches at the University of East Anglia. He has authored Waging Political Warfare: The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War (2014) and edited Reforms, Reflection and Reappraisals: The CIA and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1947 (2011) and, with Hannah Gurman, Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (2020).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Do Not Turn from the Bruises that We Bare."

Ali Soufan is a former FBI special agent and lead investigator on some of the world’s most complex international terrorism cases. He is the chairman and CEO of The Soufan Group, founder of The Soufan Center, and has been featured in books, films, television series, newspaper articles, and documentaries across the globe. He is the author of two widely-read books: Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State and  The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. The latter book was recently re-published with the addition of detailed sections, formerly withheld by the CIA. 

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Dream."

Lata N. Reddy is senior vice president of  Inclusive Solutions at Prudential Financial and chair of The Prudential Foundation.

In these roles, Reddy harnesses the power of capital markets to drive financial and social mobility. By combining diversity strategies, impact investments, philanthropy, corporate contributions and employee engagement with Prudential’s full business capabilities, she helps position the company to promote inclusive economic opportunity and sustainable growth.

Reddy originally joined Prudential in 1997. Prior to joining Prudential, she was a civil rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Education. Her dedication to promoting equity has spanned her career in the nonprofit, public and private sectors.

Reddy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Emory University School of Law.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "By Allergy and Allegory."

Stephen I. Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, constitutional law, national security law, and military justice. Professor Vladeck has argued multiple cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal courts; has served as an expert witness both in U.S. and foreign tribunals; and has been repeatedly recognized for his influential and widely-cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession. Vladeck is the co-host, together with Professor Bobby Chesney, of the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is an executive editor of the Just Security blog and a senior editor of the Lawfare blog.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, ”Speaking of the Hurricane.”

Nataly (Natalia) Yagur, born and raised in Belarus, has been a US resident since 2010. She holds a BS in Economics from Belarusian State University and an MS in Statistics from Texas A&M University. She has been the Community Coordinator for Belarusians in Austin since 2014 and is a Lead for Belarusians in Texas since 2017. 

Michael has an MA in Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the Lukashenko regime's use of anti-western propaganda, especially propaganda invoking national trauma connected to the devastation Belarus experienced during the Second World War. He lived in Belarus for an extended period of time. 

Matthew Orr is pursuing dual master’s degrees in Global Policy Studies and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.A. in Russian language and literature from George Washington University and lived in Russia for three years, including a year teaching English through the Fulbright program. He is a co-host and a producer of The Slavic Connexion podcast at UT.

Thomas Rehnquist is a cyber security fellow at the Strauss Center. Tom is in his third year at the University of Texas at Austin, completing a dual Master’s in Russian Studies and Global Policy. Tom’s attraction to cybersecurity buds from the growing use of non-military levers to conduct geo-political warfare, a strategy assumed to proliferate in the coming years. Tom is a co-host and producer of the The Slavic Connexion podcast at UT.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Ghost of JFK."

Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Professor of History, Harvard University. Logevall is the author or editor of ten books, most recently JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956. His previous book, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2013 Francis Parkman Prize, as well as the 2013 American Library in Paris Book Award and the 2013 Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations. His other recent books include America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (with Campbell Craig), and Choosing War: The Lost Chance For Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam.

Zachary sets the stage with his poem, "The Wise Man Addresses the Masses."

Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History project. A political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the far-right, Hemmer is author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is co-founder and co-editor of Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post. She is also a columnist for Vox and The Age in Melbourne. She co-hosts Past Present, a weekly podcast where three historians discuss the latest news in American politics and culture, and is the producer and host of A12: The Story of Charlottesville, a six-part podcast series on the white-power terrorism in Charlottesville in 2017. Hemmer’s historical analysis has appeared in a number of national and international news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Politico, U.S. News & World Report, New Republic, PBS NewsHour, CNN, NPR, and NBC News.

Steven Olikara is a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is the Founder and President of the Millennial Action Project. Internationally, Steven has advised two multi-platinum recording artists on youth issues and sustainable energy efforts, including the Akon Lighting Africa initiative that has electrified over 1 million homes in Africa with solar power. Previously, he worked at the World Bank and served as Harry Ott Fellow on Coca-Cola’s Environment Team, developing public-private water projects with USAID in Africa. Steven is a frequent speaker on next generation leadership at venues such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, the White House, Harvard Institute of Politics, Yale College, SXSW, and the United Nations.

To set the scene, Zachary reads his poem entitled, "The Greeks have Seceded from the Continent."

Ian Buruma is a leading writer about recent history, politics, human rights, democracy, and international affairs. He is a prolific author of major books, including, among many others: Year Zero; Occidentalism; and The Wages of Guilt. Ian's most recent book is: The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit.

To set the scene, Zachary reads his poem entitled, "The Pained Footsteps."

Dr. Lisa Tetrault is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the history of gender, race, and American democracy—with an emphasis on memory and social movements. She is the author of the prize-winning book, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898. A frequent commentator on the suffrage centennial, Tetrault also serves as an historical consultant for Nineteenth Amendment projects launched by the National Constitution, the Woodrow Wilson House, the Schlesinger Library, and Ancestry.com, as well as the documentary, “The Vote” ( PBS’s American Experience). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress, she is currently at work on a genealogy of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Michael Stoff is Associate Professor of History and UT Regents and University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Oil, War and American Security, co-editor of The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age, series co-editor of The Oxford New Narratives in American History, and co-author of five American history textbooks. He has lectured widely about American political culture and US foreign policy, the presidency, the Second World War, and the atomic bomb. He is currently at work on a book about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Ben Wright is a curator and researcher at the Briscoe Center. Previously he worked as a journalist and then as a press secretary at the Texas state capitol. He has a Master’s Degree in Modern History from King’s College London and is pursuing his PhD in the history department here at UT. Originally from Leicester, England, he has been in Texas since 2003.

These three authors are co-editors of an important new book, Flash of Light, Wall of Fire: Japanese Photographs Documenting the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can read a preview of the book in the New York Times.

To set the scene, Zachary shares his poem entitled, "The Difference Between the One and the Other."

Michele Deitch is an attorney with more than 30 years of experience working on criminal justice and juvenile justice policy issues with state and local government officials, corrections administrators, judges and advocates. An award-winning teacher and Soros Senior Justice Fellow, she holds a joint appointment as a senior lecturer at the LBJ School and the School of Law at The University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of specialty include independent oversight of correctional institutions, prison conditions, the management of youths in custody, and juveniles in the adult criminal justice system. She co-chairs the American Bar Association’s Subcommittee on Correctional Oversight and helped draft the ABA’s Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners. She has written numerous articles about correctional oversight, including a 50-state inventory of prison oversight models, as well as many reports on juvenile justice that have received national attention. Her TEDx talk “Why are we trying kids as adults?” was named a TEDx Editor’s Pick in January 2015. Prior to entering academia, she served as a federal court-appointed monitor of conditions in the Texas prison system, as the policy director of Texas’ sentencing commission, as general counsel to the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee, and as an independent consultant to justice system agencies across the country.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, entitled "Still."

Stephen I. Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) is the A. Dalton Cross Professor in Law at the University of Texas School of Law and a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, constitutional law, national security law, and military justice. Professor Vladeck has argued multiple cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal courts; has served as an expert witness both in U.S. and foreign tribunals; and has been repeatedly recognized for his influential and widely-cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession.

Vladeck is the co-host, together with Professor Bobby Chesney, of the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Just Security blog and a senior editor of the Lawfare blog.

Vladeck published an important article in the Washington Post on July 25 about the contemporary constitutional issues surrounding the use of federal force in American cities: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/25/are-trump-administrations-actions-portland-legal-are-they-constitutional/

To set the scene, Zachary reads his poem entitled, "The Sour Grapes."

Julian E. Zelizer is one of the leading experts on modern American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Zelizer is the author and editor of 19 books on American political history, including: Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975; The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society; and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, co-authored with Kevin Kruse. Most recently, Zelizer published Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, entitled "Where the River Once Unfurled."

Ilan Stavans is one of today’s preeminent essayists, cultural critics, and translators. He is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College-Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native from Mexico, Dr. Stavans received his Doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University. Stavans’ books include The Hispanic Condition (HarperCollins, 1995), On Borrowed Words (Viking, 2001), Spanglish (HarperCollins, 2003), Dictionary Days (Graywolf, 2005), The Disappearance (TriQuarterly, 2006), Love and Language (Yale, 2007), Resurrecting Hebrew (Nextbook, 2008), Mr. Spic Goes to Washington (Soft Skull, 2008), and Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (Palgrave, 2010). Most recently, Dr. Stavans published a book-long poem The Wall, which won the Massachusetts Book Award and other prizes. He has also published: Latino USA: A Cartoon History.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, entitled "Sonnet for the Sunbelt."

Michelle Nickerson is associate professor of history at Loyola University of Chicago.  She teaches the history of American politics, women and gender, cities, and religion.  Nickerson is NOT from the Sunbelt.  She was born and raised in New Jersey, where she got her undergraduate degree at Rutgers University.  She moved to the Sunbelt after she received her Ph.D. at Yale in American Studies, first to do research in Los Angeles, and then in Dallas, where she taught at the University of Texas at Dallas.  Nickerson’s first book was a volume of essays she co-edited, Sunbelt Rising:  The Politics of Space, Place, and Region.  This project grew out of her research and highly regarded book on women and right-wing politics: Mothers of Conservatism:  Women and the Rise of the Postwar Right.  That book examines how activist women in Los Angeles shaped American conservatism.  

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Chasing Windmills."

James K. Boyce is an author and senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent books are The Case for Carbon Dividends (published by Polity Press in 2019) and Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (published by Anthem Press, also in 2019).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Today the Pedestals are Empty."

Professor Richard J. Reddick is the inaugural associate dean for equity, community engagement, and outreach for the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a professor in the Program in Higher Education Leadership in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy (ELP) at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has served as a faculty member since 2007. Additionally, Dr. Reddick serves as the Assistant Director of the Plan II Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Reddick is a faculty member by courtesy in the Department for African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and a fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. Dr. Reddick co-chairs the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity (CREED), serves on the Signature Course Advisory Committee (SCAC), and was named to the inaugural cohort of the Provost's Distinguished Service Academy.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Soiled.”

John McWilliams is the Head of School at Montgomery Academy, in Montgomery, Alabama. The Montgomery Academy is a K–12, co-ed, nonsectarian day school serving the River Region community since 1959. John graduated from Montgomery Academy in 1996 and he is the first alumnus to lead the school. He received his B.A. degree in history from Yale University, and he also holds a master’s degree in liberal studies from Dartmouth College. Upon his graduation from Yale, John returned to Montgomery Academy to teach in the history department and coach Speech & Debate before becoming Middle School Director in 2011. He has acted in various capacities since then, including Associate Head of School, Acting Interim Head of School, and Upper School Director.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “They Were Supposed to be Us, We Were Supposed to be Them.”

Paul Edgar is the Associate Director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security at the University of Texas-Austin. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Texas at Austin. Before entering academia, Paul served more than 22 years as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. Among many other missions, Paul deployed to Iraq during the 2006-2007 surge, serving as an infantry battalion operations and executive officer, conducting counterinsurgency and combat operations in both Fallujah and South Babil Province. In 2008-2009, as an infantry brigade operations officer, he deployed to Afghanistan and conducted counterinsurgency operations in Paktika, Paktia, and Khost provinces. After returning from Afghanistan, Paul served as the executive assistant to the commander of the Kingdom of Jordan’s Special Operations Command. He then commanded the 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry in The Old Guard where he supported official ceremonies and provided security for the President of the United States and other senior civilian, military, and foreign officials. In his final assignment for the Army, Paul was the political advisor for Israeli affairs to the United States Security Coordinator in Jerusalem. Paul is fluent in Modern Israeli Hebrew and is trained to read and conduct research in Akkadian, Hittite, Middle Egyptian, Classical Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Syriac, Sumerian, and German.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, ” Delivering Freedom, Save the Post Office.”

Richard R. John is a professor of history and communications at Columbia University, where he teaches in the Ph. D. program in communications at the Columbia School of Journalism. He teaches courses in the history of communications since 1450, networks, and the history of capitalism. His publications include Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010; paperback, 2015 forthcoming) and Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Harvard University Press, 1995; paperback, 1998).

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Actualizing Emerald City.”

Ken Greenberg is an urban designer, teacher, writer, and former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto. For over four decades he has played a pivotal role on public and private assignments in urban settings throughout North America and Europe. He is the author of two influential books: Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder and Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges. You can read more about his work at: https://www.kengreenberg.ca. See also, “Density Done Right:” https://www.citybuildinginstitute.ca/portfolio/density-done-right/.

Zachary presents his scene-setting poem, “Painting Ourselves Green.”

Yong Suk Lee is an East Asia specialist with 22 years of service in the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Lee started his career in 1997 as an analyst and served in multiple leadership roles as a Senior Intelligence Service officer, including as a briefer on the President’s Daily Briefing staff from 2007 to 2009. His last assignment was as CIA’s Deputy Assistant Director for the Korea Mission Center from 2017 to 2019.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Since ’65.”

Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts and is Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “And to Dust, We Shall Return.”

Dr. Gordon H. “Nick” Mueller is a distinguished historian and former Vice-Chancellor at the University of New Orleans. He was the Founding President and CEO of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

Dr. Robert Citino is Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National WWII Museum. Dr. Citino is an award-winning military historian and scholar who has published ten books including: The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War; Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942; and The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “A Superpower Scorned.”

Sheena Chestnut Greitens will join the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin in August 2020. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings Institution, an affiliate with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of the Digital Freedom Forum at the Center for a New American Security. Prior to joining UT, she was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri. Her work focuses on American national security, East Asia, and authoritarian politics and foreign policy, with special emphasis on China and the Korean peninsula.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Noticing Each Other.”

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Most recently, he is the author of a widely-read article: “Americans Are Not as Divided About the Pandemic as It Seems” in THE DISPATCH: https://thedispatch.com/p/americans-are-not-as-divided-about.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Where did the books go?”

Lawrence Wright is one of the leading writers in America today, and the author of a major new novel about a pandemic, THE END OF OCTOBER. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, a musician, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and God Save Texas, and one previous novel, God’s Favorite. His books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas, where Lawrence plays in a local band, WhoDo.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “For the Healers.”

Dr. Stephen M. Sonnenberg is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Dell Medical School and a Professor of Instruction at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and the School of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is director of the Humanities, Health Care, and Advocacy Track and Fellow of the Frank M. and Dorothy H. Conklin Endowment for Medical Ethics in the Plan II Honors Program within the UT College of Liberal Arts.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Linked.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Silence and Sound.”

Richard Mack is a lieutenant in the New York Police Department, where he has served for almost twenty-five years. He is currently a Platoon Commander in the Strategic Response Group for the New York Police Department. Richard is also an adjunct professor at John Jay College in New York.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Hologram Semester.”

Dr. Paul von Hippel is an associate professor of public policy, sociology, statistics and data science at the University of Texas at Austin, best known for his work on summer learning, summer weight gain, research design, and missing data. He works on evidence-based policy, education and inequality, and the obesity epidemic. Before his academic career, he worked as both a church music director and a data scientist, using predictive analytics to help banks prevent fraud. Currently, he is trying to pick up jazz piano.

Paul recently published an important article in Education Next: 

https://www.educationnext.org/how-will-coronavirus-crisis-affect-childrens-learning-unequally-covid-19/

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Carpet Bombing Disease.”

Neta C. Crawford is Professor and Chair of Political Science, Boston University. She is the author of numerous books, including: Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Argument and Change in World Politics (2002). Neta has written more than two dozen peer reviewed articles on issues of war and peace.2.

Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Lutz is the author of numerous books, including: War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (ed. with A. Mazzarino, 2019), The Bases of Empire (ed., 2009), and Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (2001). Catherine and Neta are co-directors of the “Costs of War” project at Brown University.

They recently published: “Fighting a Virus with the Wrong Tool,” The Hill, 28 March 2020.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “The Pockets of the People.”

Miha Vindis is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on leadership and entrepreneurship. When not teaching, Miha works as a consultant helping organizations create and implement strategic planning processes and train their next generation of leaders. He also serves as a board member for Habitat for Humanity Texas. Prior to moving to Texas, Miha worked for Shell Oil in The Netherlands and also worked with entrepreneurs in Europe, a passion which he has continued in Texas. He is originally from Slovenia and has lived in Thailand, Germany, Poland, and The Netherlands. Miha earned his master’s degree in Global Policy Studies and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lance McNeill is a Program Manager with the City of Austin’s Small Business Program. In this role, he coaches and teaches small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs. He also oversees the City of Austin’s Challenge Studio Program, which incubates social entrepreneurs working toward solutions to local and regional challenges. Lance was born and raised in Austin, Texas. After graduating from Texas State with a MBA, he joined the Peace Corps and worked as a small business adviser in Namibia where he taught entrepreneurship at a rural secondary school and consulted small businesses in the community. After coming back to the U.S, he attended the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Fallen.”

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He is a leading economic historian and expert on the contemporary global economy. He is the author of numerous prize-winning book: Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006), The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931  (2014), and Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018). Tooze frequently comments on current affairs for the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. You can follow him on Twitter: @adam_tooze.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “The Ones Who Live.”

Zachary kicks it off with his original poem, “The Pestilence Depression.”

Poetry by Zachary, “Invisible Fires.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Eulogy.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Dear Governor.”

Teresa A. Sullivan, university professor and president emerita of the University of Virginia, is currently serving as the interim provost at Michigan State University, her alma mater.

As president of UVA, Sullivan led a team that stimulated the revitalization of the UVA Health System, raised faculty salaries, launched an ambitious program of faculty hiring, raised both the numbers and quality of applications, reached new fundraising records, and launched the university’s bicentennial celebration.

Earlier, she was the executive vice president and provost at the University of Michigan, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs for the University of Texas System, and vice president and graduate dean at the University of Texas at Austin.

In her academic career as a demographer, Sullivan developed analytic techniques for the use of U.S. Census Public Use Sample. She was an investigator on a large international sample survey, and with law colleagues Elizabeth Warren and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, she led several original large-scale data collections of consumer bankruptcy records. The first book-length analysis of the bankruptcy records, As We Forgive Our Debtors, received the Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association. The second book, The Fragile Middle Class, received the Writing Award of the American College of Financial Services Lawyers.

Sullivan has held faculty positions at the Universities of Chicago, Texas, Michigan, and Virginia and has received five major teaching awards. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As usual, Zachary kicks things off with his original poem, “Supposed to Forget.”

John Sipher retired in 2014 after a 28-year career in the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service. At the time of his retirement, he was a member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, the leadership team that guides CIA activities globally. John served multiple overseas tours as Chief of Station and Deputy Chief of Station in Europe, Asia, and in high-threat environments. John also served as a lead instructor in the CIA’s clandestine training school and was a regular lecturer at the CIA’s leadership development program. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal.

As always, Zachary kicks things off with his poem entitled, “With an Unspoken Doubt.”

Christopher S Rose is a historian of early modern and modern Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. He is currently (2019-2020) a Postdoctoral Research fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of “Implications of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic (1918-1920) for the History of Early 20th Century Egypt,” forthcoming in the Journal of World History. He is also currently working on a book project titled Home Front Egypt: Famine, Disease, and Death During the Great War, 1914-1919, which examines the impact of World War I on the Egyptian peasantry, focusing on food shortages and disease.

As always, Zachary kicks things off with his poem entitled, “Two Images.”

Professor Jeffrey Tulis is a leading scholar of American politics and the presidency in particular. He is the author of numerous books, including: The Rhetorical Presidency, The Presidency in the Constitutional Order, and The Legacies of Losing in American Politics.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem “Excuse Us.”

Alan McPherson is a professor of history at Temple University, where he directs the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous books on U.S.-Latin American relations and U.S. foreign relations. His most recent book is: Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice.

Once again, Zachary sets the scene with his poem “Picturing America’s Working Class.”

Michael Lind is a professor of practice at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, poetry and children’s literature, including several that were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His studies of U.S. history, economics and foreign policy include The Next American Nation (1995), The American Way of Strategy (2006), Land of Promise:  An Economic History of the United States (2012) and, most recently, The New Class War:  Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (2020).

As always, Zachary sets the scene with his poem “An Adaptation of Alan Ginsburg’s ‘A Supermarket in California for a Nation on the Brink of War’.”

Clay Katsky is a historian of Congress’ role in American foreign policy. He is completing a dissertation on Congress’ efforts to oversee policy and presidential actions after the Vietnam War. Clay is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin and a teaching assistant this semester for Professor Suri’s course on US History since the Civil War.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Protagonists Prospective.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Lessons from the 19th Century.”

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Her multiple award winning second monograph The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction. It was named the book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication and one of three great History books of 2016 in Bloomberg News. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including two yearlong research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2018, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot and was elected to the Society of American Historians. She is a member of the Board of the Society of Civil War Historians and of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library. She taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for over twenty years, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed on faculty. She is currently writing a book on the “greater reconstruction” of American democracy after the Civil War, which is under contract with Basic Books.

As always, Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Money Have Mercy.”

Brett Hurt is the CEO and co-founder of data.world, a Public Benefit Corporation (and Certified B Corporation®) that is the platform for modern data teamwork and the world’s largest collaborative data community. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, data.world was honored on the “Best for the World” list by B Lab, placing the company in the top 10% of all B Corps globally. Brett is also the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments (HFI), alongside his wife, Debra. HFI are involved in 73 startups, 21 VC funds, and multiple philanthropic endeavors.

In 2017, Brett was given the Best CEO Legacy Award by the Austin Business Journal. Brett Hurt began programming at age seven and doing so on the Internet at age eighteen. Brett finished his free book, “The Entrepreneur’s Essentials”, in August 2019.

Zachary’s sets the scene with his poem, “America in the Face.”

Miha Vindis is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on leadership and entrepreneurship. When not teaching, Miha works as a consultant helping organizations create and implement strategic planning processes and train their next generation of leaders. He also serves as a board member for Habitat for Humanity Texas. Prior to moving to Texas, Miha worked for Shell Oil in The Netherlands and also worked with entrepreneurs in Europe, a passion which he has continued in Texas. He is originally from Slovenia and has lived in Thailand, Germany, Poland, and The Netherlands. Miha earned his master’s degree in Global Policy Studies and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Berlin: 30 Years.”

Robert Hutchings is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Chair in National Security and professor of public affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and he served as dean of the school from 2010 to 2015. Before coming to UT, he was a diplomat in residence at Princeton University, where he also served as assistant dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and as faculty chair of its Master in Public Policy program. His combined academic and diplomatic career has included service as Director for European affairs with the National Security Council, special adviser to the secretary of state with the rank of ambassador, and chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Ambassador Hutchings served earlier in his career as deputy director of Radio Free Europe and on the faculty of the University of Virginia. He is author or editor of six books, including American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War, along with many articles and book chapters on U.S. foreign policy and European affairs. His most recent book, written and edited with Jeremi Suri, is Modern Diplomacy in Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2020). He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Images of Turkey.”

David Judson spent many years in Turkey. He first went there as a high school and later college student in the 1970s. He was to return in 2000, joining Turkey’s largest media group in 2003. First, he was managing editor of the Dogan Media Group’s Turkish language business daily, Referans. In 2006, he became editor in chief of Hurriyet Daily News, the group’s English language newspaper founded in 1961. In 2013 he left Turkey to return to the United States as editor in chief of Stratfor Geopolitical Forecasting, based in Austin. Judson left Stratfor in 2018 and now divides his time between the San Francisco-based forecasting firm Global Foresight where is a senior advisor and an Austin-based media start-up focused on the emerging role of cities as geopolitical actors. From the late 1980s to 2000, Judson was a political correspondent in Washington D.C., for Gannett Newspapers, America’s largest newspaper chain. He is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “To Puerto Rico.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Nothing.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “A Voice Calling in the Desert.”

Tom Mueller is the author of a new book, Crisis of Conscience, on the history of whistleblowing and fraud in the United States. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere, and have been included in anthologies like Best American Science Writing and Best American Travel Writing. He was educated at Oxford (DPhil, Rhodes Scholar), Harvard (BA, summa cum laude), and Alief Hastings High School in rural east Texas, home of the Fighting Bears.

Zachary introduces the episode with his poem, “To the Rest of Humanity.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power is a leading voice internationally for principled American engagement in the world. One of TIME’s“100 Most Influential People,” she is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, war correspondent, and the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School. Her latest book, The Education of an Idealist, chronicles her years in public service and reflects on the role of human rights and humanitarian ideals in contemporary geopolitics.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Exclusion is a Funny Word.”

Professor Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin He is the author of numerous ground-breaking and prize-winning books and papers, including: How to Write the History of the New World; Puritan Conquistadors; and Nature, Empire, and Nation.  The core of his intellectual project has been to demonstrate the deep formative role of “Latin America” to the colonial history of the USA and to the history of “Western” modernity as a whole, not just slavery, globalization, and capitalism but also science, abolitionism, and democracy.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “The War of the Botox.”

Paul Stekler is a nationally recognized documentary filmmaker whose critically praised and award-winning work includes George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire; Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style; Vote for Me: Politics in America, a four-hour PBS special about grassroots electoral politics; two segments of the Eyes on the Prize II series on the history of civil rights; Last Stand at Little Big Horn (broadcast as part of PBS’s series The American Experience); Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics (broadcast on PBS’s P.O.V. series); Getting Back to Abnormal (which aired on P.O.V. in 2014); and 2016’s Postcards from the Great Divide, a web series about politics for The Washington Post and PBS Digital. Overall, his films have won two George Foster Peabody Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, three national Emmy Awards, and a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

https://rtf.utexas.edu/faculty/paul-stekler

As always, Zachary kicks off the discussion with his poem, “Ghosts of 9/11/2001.”

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Images of Madison 2011.”

Yvonne Flores is the President of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees AFSCME Local 1624 Representing the City of Austin and Travis County employees.

Jackie Jones is the Chair of the Department of History at UT, and the Incoming President of the American Historical Association, and a Leading Expert on the history of unions in the United States.

This week, Zachary kicks off the episode with his poem, “The Only Ones.”

Matthew Kim is a junior in high school and the president of the Austin chapter of Students for Climate Action and a member of the Austin Youth Council.

Alison Alter was elected in 2016 as the City Council representative for District 10 in Austin, Texas.

Zachary reads his poem, “Ode to My School.”

Zachary presents his poem, “Hanging Between.”

Shery Chanis is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is completing her dissertation on the identity formation of the southern maritime province of Guangdong in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hong Kong is her hometown.

Zachary’s poem for the week is simply titled, “So Many.”

Hilary Rand Whitfield is a volunteer state leader for the Texas chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Stay-at-home mother of 2 (16yo boy and 13yo girl), and Austin resident for the last 12 years.

Ed Scruggs is a Realtor, Community Organizer, former journalist and 27 year Austin resident who ran for Austin City Council in 2014. He is currently an appointed member of the City of Austin’s Public Safety Commission. Ed joined the board of Texas Gun Sense in 2015 and currently serves as Vice Chair and Media Representative.

Dr. Charlie Laderman is a lecturer in international history at King’s College, London. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and his new book is: Sharing the Burden: Armenia, Humanitarian Intervention and the Search for an Anglo-American Alliance, 1895-1923 (Oxford University Press.)

As always, Zachari sets the scene with his poem, “So Wrong.”

Carl Forsberg is an expert on the Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy. He is completing a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin on the evolution of foreign policy in the region since the 1960s, drawing on original research in multiple Middle Eastern societies.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Work to Be Done.”

Stephen Ciullo (Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Texas State University. Before joining the faculty at Texas State, Stephen taught special education in Binghamton, NY. He then went on to earn his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. Stephen teaches classes that focus on providing educators with effective strategies for teaching students with learning disabilities. He is serving as Principal Investigator on a federally-funded project that focuses on investigating the writing instruction and support being provided to students with disabilities in fourth grade. The long-term goals of his research and teaching activities are to improve professional development for teachers, provide teachers with effective practices to support their students and to improve the long-term outcomes of students with learning disabilities.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Knowledge.”

Renee Gadsden has been a leader in higher education for nearly a decade. She has worked in admissions for three different private liberal arts colleges, directing and implementing recruitment initiatives and college access programming for students of color, first-generation students, and students from low-income families. Renee recently completed a Masters in Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she served as an executive board member of the Public Affairs Alliance for Communities of Color and as an elected Student Representative of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

As always, Zachary kicks things off with his scene-setting poem, “Ambitions and Reality.”

Bob Campbell is a friend and business leader who has effectively straddled the public and private sectors in the US for over 45 years.  Close to home for me, Bob was a very early graduate of the LBJ School of Public Affairs where I teach, a Distinguished Alumnus Award winner, and a Chairman of the Board. Bob spent 39 years with the global firm Deloitte where he was a partner; led the public sector practice advising leaders at the Federal, state, and local levels; and served as a Vice-Chairman of the firm. Since retiring from Deloitte, Bob serves on corporate and non-profit Boards, runs his own consultancy, advises private equity groups, and is an active angel investor. He also is on the global Board Executive Committee of the East-West Institute focused on international conflict avoidance and resolution. He is a speaker and writer on public management issues and has served on Federal and state commissions and task forces.

Zachary presents his poem, ” Who Are You.”

Patrick Iber is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, which was published by Harvard University Press in October 2015 and won the 2017 Luciano Tomassini book prize from the Latin American Studies Association. He is a member of the editorial board of Dissent magazine and writes regularly there, as well as in The Nation, The New Republic, and other publications.

Today, Jeremi speaks with Ashlyn Hand, a Ph.D. candidate in the LBJ School, to discuss religion in foreign and domestic politics.

This week Zachary recites a poem titled “Life and Death.”

Ashlyn is an expert on religion and politics in the United States. She is currently researching and writing a dissertation on religion and American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

As always, Zachary recites an original poem, this week is “Overdue.”

Celso Baez, III is the Assistant Director of Community Engagement and External Communications for the Austin Independent School District.

Professor Peniel Joseph is the Founding Director for the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at UT.

Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. Prior to joining the UT faculty, Joseph was a professor at Tufts University, where he founded the school’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race and democracy affect people’s lives. In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy, and civil rights, Joseph wrote the award-winning books Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. His most recent book, Stokely: A Life, has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “black power.” Included among Joseph’s other book credits is the editing of The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.

Jeremi sits down with Professors Tatjana Lichtenstein and Michael Stoff to talk about World War II and its lasting implications on our democracy.

As always, Zachary kicks things off with his poem, “Jerusalem.”

Tatjana Lichtenstein holds degrees from the University of Toronto (Ph.D.), Brandeis University (MA), and the University of Copenhagen (BA/MA).  Before coming to UT in 2009, she was a Schusterman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish studies at American University in Washington, D.C.  Since September 2017, she is director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies here at UT. Dr. Lichtenstein’s research focuses on minorities, nationalism, state-building, war, and genocide in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.  Her monograph, Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging, was published by Indiana University Press in 2016.  It explores how Zionist activists attempted to transform Jewish culture and society in ways that would allow Jews to claim to belong in the new multinational state.

Michael B. Stoff received his B.A. from Rutgers College and Ph.D. from Yale University. He is currently an Associate Professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor, and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.  For over a decade, he has been the director of the nationally acclaimed Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Oil, War and American Security, co-editor of The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age, series co-editor of The Oxford New Narratives in American History, and co-author of five American history textbooks. He has been honored many times for his teaching, most recently with the UT system-wide Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2015, he was recognized for his contributions to induction into the Philosophical Society of Texas. He is at work on a book about Nagasaki and the meaning of the atomic bomb.

Zachary presents his poem, “Waiting Room.”

Today’s guest is Steven Olikara, Founder and President of the Millennial Action Project. Internationally, Steven has advised two multi-platinum recording artists on youth issues and sustainable energy efforts, including the Akon Lighting Africa initiative that has electrified over 1 million homes in Africa with solar power. Previously, he worked at the World Bank and served as Harry Ott Fellow on Coca-Cola’s Environment Team, developing public-private water projects with USAID in Africa. Steven is a frequent speaker on next generation leadership at venues such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, the White House, Harvard Institute of Politics, Yale College, SXSW, and the United Nations.

Zachary's poem today is, "Can't feel the raindrops, a song for Pittsburgh 10/27/18."

Today's guest on the podcast is Renee Lafair, Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League in Austin, Texas. As Director of the Austin regional office of the ADL, Renee Lafair consistently reaches out to diverse populations within Austin to build a community that values diversity, equity and dignity for all. She directs local strategy to accomplish ADL’s mission in Austin, leads an active board of directors consisting of business and community leaders, and convenes the Austin/Travis County Hate Crimes Task Force along with City Council and the DA’s Office.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Indian Soul."

From 1996 to 1999 Sumit Guha was Professor in the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and moved to the USA in 2000 as S.P. Das Distinguished Professor at Brown University. In 2004 he joined the Department of History in Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and came thence to the University of Texas at Austin in 2013.

He began his research as an economic historian with interests in demography and agriculture. These widened into the study of environmental and ethnic histories. My first book was The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan 1818-1941(1985) followed by Environment and Ethnicity in India, c. 1200-1991 (1999) and Health and Population in South Asia from earliest times to the present(2001). His most recent book is Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present.  His next book The Social Frame of Historical Memory: South Asian Practices in Global Context, c.1200-2000 will be published by the University of Washington Press this year.

Jeremi has a conversation with Michael Cotey Morgan about human rights on a global scale.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Dream."

Michael Cotey Morgan specializes in modern international and global history. His first book, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2018), examines the origins and consequences of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the most ambitious diplomatic undertaking of the Cold War and a watershed in the development of human rights. At UNC, he teaches courses on the history of diplomacy and international politics, the Cold War, and the history of human rights. Before coming to UNC, he taught at the US Naval War College and the University of Toronto, where he was the inaugural holder of the Raymond Pryke Chair.

As always, Zachary kicks things off with his poem entitled, "Song of a Post Cold War Child."

Maya Patel is working to create a civically engaged campus as the President of TX Votes and the Chair of the Campus Vote Project's Student Advisory Board. Her work has led to 18-25-year-olds being the largest bloc of registered voters in Travis County, the PCL being opened as UT’s second polling location, and UT Austin receiving numerous national awards. Maya is also a Texas Orange Jacket and part of the Texas Friar Society.

Matt Maldonado is a Government and Russian studies double major. He’s a former Fulbright-Hayes GPA Fellow and Texas Civic Ambassador, who’s civic outreach work over the past two years has been centered around high school engagement in El Paso and Austin.

Lauren Nyquist is a Geography and International Relations and Global Studies double major at UT, where she works as a TA and research assistant, focusing on issues in sub-Saharan Africa. She is a member of Texas Votes and UT's Geography Society.

Jeremi sits down with Augusta Dell'Omo to talk about white supremacy and what it means for our democracy.

As always, Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Torches Burning."

Augusta Dell’Omo is a doctoral student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in U.S. foreign policy during the late Cold War, with a particular focus on U.S.-South African relations and race in American foreign policy. Her dissertation focuses on the intersections between the Reagan administration, televangelism, and the anti-apartheid movement during an ending Cold War. Interested in public history, Augusta contributes to UT’s public history forum, Not Even Past, and acts as an interview and technical director for 15 Minute History, UT’s podcast for students, educators and history buffs. A passionate teacher, Augusta serves as a Supplemental Instruction Supervisor, developing pedagogical techniques for graduate students. Currently, Augusta possesses reading proficiency in German and Italian, and is learning Afrikaans. She graduated with highest distinction and highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BA 2016) and received an MA in history from UT in May 2018. She tweets @Augusta_Caesar. 

Jeremi sits down with Dr. Charles Edel to discuss US foreign policy in a historical context.

Zachary kicks it off with his poem entitled, "An Old Forgotten Song."

Dr. Edel is the co-author (with Hal Brands) of a major new book, The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order. He is a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre. Previously, he was associate professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College, and served on the US Secretary of State's policy planning staff from 2015 to 2017. In that role, he advised Secretary of State John Kerry on political and security issues in the Asia Pacific region.

Dr. David P. Fields is the associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea and editor of The Diary of Syngman Rhee. He has published in the North Korea Review, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, SinoNK.com, and in the Working Papers Series of the Cold War International History Project.

Jeremi sits down with Aurin Bagchi and Lexi Marie Seay to discuss social media and its good and bad effects on young people.

Zachary kicks it off with his poem, "A Social Species."

Aurin Bagchi is a student at the University of Texas at Austin and is enrolled in Jeremi's History of the United States Since 1865 course.

Lexi Marie Seay is a student at Texas State University, but lives and works in Austin, TX.

Hanna Senko is a sexual assault survivor whose case was closed via exceptional clearance by the Austin Police Department. She now serves as a survivor speaker, writer, and advocate fighting for change in the understanding, reporting, and handling of sex crimes.

Alison Alter was elected in 2016 as the City Council representative for District 10 in Austin, Texas. Among many other things, she recently authored city legislation requiring the Austin Police Department to conduct an external audit of its procedures for handling sexual assault cases.

This week, Jeremi discusses the American Dream with Professor Samuel J. Abrams.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "After the Dreams."

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of a recent study on the topic of the American dream, summarized in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/opinion/american-dream.html

Zachary recites, "So Long."

Zachary delights with his absurdist poem, "Golden Toilet Sank the Titanic."

Paul Stekler is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker and founder of the Center for Politics and Governance at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. His film work includes “George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire,” “Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style,” two segments of the “Eyes on the Prize II” series on the history of civil rights, “Last Stand at Little Big Horn” (broadcast as part of PBS's series “The American Experience”), “Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics” (broadcast on PBS's “P.O.V.” series) and “Getting Back to Abnormal.” His films have won two Peabody Awards, three duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, three Emmy Awards and a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Stekler has a doctorate in government from Harvard University, where his work focused on Southern politics. He previously was a political pollster in Louisiana while teaching at Tulane University. His writing has appeared in the Texas Observer, Texas Monthly and the International Documentary Association’s magazine, among other places, and in the book, “Killing Custer," co-written with novelist James Welch. Stekler was named film school Mentor of the Year in 2014 by Variety magazine.

Jeremi sits down with Pam Bixby to discuss the issue of getting young people to the polls.

Zachary recites his poem entitled, "If Not For Tomorrow."

Pam Bixby is a communications professional whose current job as the Director of External Relations for the National Trauma Institute pays the bills. A passionate volunteer and nonprofit leader, she has served on numerous nonprofit boards in Austin and currently co-chairs the First Vote! program for the Austin Area League of Women Voters. First Vote! is a collaborative effort among the League, the Travis County Tax Office Voter Registration Division and Travis County Clerk Elections Division to educate and register eligible high school students. The League of Women Voters offers extensive information on elections, candidates, and issues at vote411.org.

Jeremi talks prison reform with Michele Deitch and how the current system can be improved.