top of page

Meet The Team

Adam Domby.jpg

Adam Domby

Adam Domby is a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His first book, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020), examines the role of lies and exaggeration, in the creation of Lost Cause narratives of the war, as well as their connections to white supremacy. Looking at pPost war pension fraud, Confederate monument dedications, and other myths reveals that much of our understanding of the Civil War remains influenced by falsehoods and racism. Domby Adam has written on a variety of topics including prisoners of war, guerrilla warfare, and genealogy. His current book project At War with Itself, focuses on southerners fighting their neighbors during the American Civil War and examines the legacy of those local fights that civil wars inevitably create. His research centers on the role these conflicts played in three divided southern communities during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Close examination of the social dynamics of these southern communities reveals new insights into why the Confederacy lost, why Reconstruction ended the way it did, and the distinctiveness of southern society, culture, and politics.

Adrian Miller.jpg

Adrian Miller

Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Adrian received an A.B in International Relations from Stanford University in 1991, and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1995. From 1999 to 2001, Miller served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton with his Initiative for One America – the first free-standing office in the White House to address issues of racial, religious and ethnic reconciliation. Miller went on to serve as a senior policy analyst for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. From 2004 to 2010, he served on the board for the Southern Foodways Alliance. In June 2019, Adrian lectured in the Masters of Gastronomy program at the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche (nicknamed the “Slow Food University”) in Pollenzo, Italy. He is currently the executive director of the Colorado Council of Churches and, as such, is the first African American, and the first layperson, to hold that position.

HATm-1920w.png

Agnes Arnold-Foster

Agnes Arnold-Forster is a writer, researcher, and historian. She has written, researched, and presented on everything from women's health in today's Britain to the history of cancer; from the 1918 flu pandemic to the well-being of surgeons in twenty-first-century America. She is an expert in the history of Europe, the USA, and Canada, and my research spans the eighteenth century to the present day. She explores societies, cultures, medicine, science, technology, emotions, and the world of work. She is currently writing a book about the history of nostalgia, due to be published by Picador in April 2024.

HATm-1920w.png

Akiko Takenaka

Akiko Takenaka specializes in social and cultural history of modern Japan. Her research involves memory and historiography of the Asia-Pacific War, gender and peace activism, and history museums. Her teaching interests include gender, war and society, nationalism, memory studies, and visual culture. Prior to coming to UK, she has taught as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Professor Takenaka's first book, entitled Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (University of Hawai'i Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University), explores Yasukuni Shrine as a physical space, object of visual and spatial representation, and site of spatial practice in order to highlight the complexity of Yasukuni’s past and critique the official narratives that postwar debates have responded to. Her second book project Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Postwar Japan is under advance contract with the University of Hawai'i Press. Her research has been funded by long-term research fellowships by Fulbright and the Japan Foundation. Find her on twitter at @ata225.

Alan Malfavon.jpg

Alan Malfavon

Alan Malfavon is assistant professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is a historian of late-colonial and early independent Latin America. His first book, Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Making of Mexico, under contract with the University of Alabama Press, focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its hinterland of Sotavento (Leeward) and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period.

Alejandra Dubcovsky_edited_edited_edited

Alejandra Dubcovsky

Alejandra Dubcovsky is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the inaugural fellow in the Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a partnership of The Huntington and UC Riverside that aims to support the future of the humanities. She received her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley. She also has a Masters in Library and Information Science from San Jose State. Her first book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (HUP 2016), won the 2016 Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Her most recent book, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South was released by Oxford University Press in May 2023.

HATm-1920w.png

Alexis Coe

Alexis Coe is an American presidential historian and fellow at New America, where she studies the presidency in anticipation of America's 250th. She is the New York Times bestselling author of You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington, now out in paperback. Alexis is the first woman historian to write a biography of Washington in over a hundred years and the only woman in over four decades. She served as a consulting producer on and appeared in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Washington series the History Channel. Her first book, the award-winning Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis, has been optioned. She is working on a third book on young John F. Kennedy for Crown. She frequently appears on live television and in documentaries on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, History, BBC, and PBS. She hosted the podcast "No Man's Land" and co-hosted "Presidents Are People, Too!"

HATm-1920w.png

Anna Waymack

Anna Waymack is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's Medieval Studies Program, and was selected as a fellow in Olin Library's Summer Graduate Fellowship for Digital Humanities in 2016. As part of that fellowship, Anna developed digital humanities expertise and produced a public website focused on an aspect of her research, Geoffrey Chaucer and the charge of raptus brought forth by Cecily Chaumpaigne.

Annette Gordon-Reed.jpg

Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs, 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her most recent book is On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing, 2021). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation. A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Gordon-Reed served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2010 to 2018. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Bathsheba Demuth_edited.jpg

Bathsheba Demuth

Bathsheba Demuth is a writer and environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern places and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she trained huskies for several years. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, and ecologies intersect. In addition to her prize-winning book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is currently writing a biography of the Yukon River watershed. Demuth is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.

Bill Tsutsui_edited.jpg

Bill Tsutsui

Bill Tsutsui is an award-winning scholar and teacher, an experienced academic leader, and an outspoken supporter of the public humanities, international education, and more inclusive, accessible colleges and universities. He researches, writes, and speaks widely on Japanese economic and environmental history, Japanese popular culture (especially the Godzilla movies), Japanese-American identity, and issues in higher education. He is highly opinionated about BBQ, proud to have once driven the Zamboni at an NHL game, and slightly embarrassed to be Level 40 in Pokemon Go. Find him at https://www.billtsutsui.com/

HATm-1920w.png

Blake Scott Ball

Blake Scott Ball is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Alabama. He joined the Huntingdon faculty in the fall of 2017 after completing his doctoral degree. He has previously taught as an assistant professor at Miles College, as an adjunct professor at the University of North Alabama, and as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. He served as assistant director for the New Summersell Center Public History Initiative at the University of Alabama, and as a graduate assistant for the Alabama Historical Association. An avid writer, he served as editor for the Southern Historian graduate history journal and as a contributor and assistant editor for The Historian behind the History, a collection of oral stories documenting historians’ graduate training and insights into the historical profession, published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014. His book, “Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. You can find him on twitter at @bsb1945

Brett Rushforth.jpg

Brett Rushforth

Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery. He recently completed, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804. It will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Brian DeLay.jpeg

Brian DeLay

Brian DeLay is a scholar of 18th- and 19th-century North America, specializing in transnational, borderlands, and Native American histories. Most of his writing explores connections between U.S., Latin American, and Indigenous histories in order to better understand power and inequality in the Western Hemisphere. His first book, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War recovers the forgotten, transnational story of how Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Navajos and other Indigenous peoples shaped the transformative era of the U.S.-Mexican War. He is now working on three interconnected projects about the history of the international arms trade. The first is a book called Aim at Empire: American Revolutions through the Barrel of a Gun, 1750-1825. The book explains how the international arms trade made anticolonial rebellion a practical possibility in British North America; how arms dealers from the newly-independent United States equipped the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish American Wars for Independence; and how privileged control over war material empowered U.S. empire in the trans-Appalachian West. Aim at Empire will be published by W.W. Norton in 2024. The second project is another book under contract with W.W. Norton: Means of Destruction: Guns, Freedom, and Domination in the Americas before World War II.

Charles Pierce.jpg

Charles P. Pierce

Charles P. Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He's been the main political commentator for Esquire since 2011. He lives near Boston and has three children. He's awesome.

bottom of page