Dr. Denver Brunsman, George Washington University

Dr. Brunsman is Associate Professor of History at George Washington University, specializing in the politics and social history of the American Revolution, early republic, and British Atlantic world. He earned his BA at St. Olaf College and his MA/PhD at Princeton. His book The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2013) won the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize. He also co-authored Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People and Leading Change: George Washington and Establishing the Presidency, and has edited several volumes on early America, including The American Revolution Reader. He regularly teaches “George Washington and His World” at Mount Vernon.

Dr. Elaine Marie Nelson, University of Kansas

Dr. Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Kansas, specializing in the North American West, Women and Gender, Native American and Indigenous, and U.S. history. A South Dakota native, she joined KU in 2020 after appointments at the University of Nebraska Omaha and the University of Minnesota Morris. She teaches courses on U.S. history, women and gender, and the American West, and advises graduate students in history. Her publications include chapters and articles on Indigenous resistance, the Black Hills, Native performers, and women in the Great Plains, most recently in Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanism (2022).

Dr. Gautham Rao, American University

Dr. Rao is Associate Professor of History at American University and Editor-in-Chief of Law & History Review. A legal historian of early America, he is the author of National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016) and numerous award-winning articles on slavery, law, and statecraft. He has held fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia, NYU School of Law, and EHESS in Paris. Rao is currently working on books about slavery in American law and about The West Wing. He also contributes to historians’ amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases and teaches courses on U.S. history, law, government, and race.

Amy Greenberg, Penn State University

Dr. Greenberg is a historian of antebellum America (1800–1860), specializing in U.S. foreign relations, politics, and gender in the decades before the Civil War. She is the author of five books, including Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk (2019), A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (2012), and Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005). Her research often explores the intersections of gender, politics, and empire. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of Penn State’s George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, she is also President-Elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.