About the Director Daniel Goldhaber is a director, writer, and producer based in Los Angeles and New York. The child of climate scientists, Daniel started making movies in high school, and worked as an editor on the Sundance documentary Chasing Ice. He went on to graduate from Harvard University where he studied Visual and Environmental Studies. He directed the Netflix horror film, CAM, which won Best First Feature at the 2018 Fantasia Film Festival. Daniel went on to be named as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Film 2018.” He is passionate about finding ways to tell provocative, challenging stories in thrilling and accessible ways. His new film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, premiered in the Platform Section of the 2022 Toronto Film Festival.
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About the Participants DR. JOAN DONOVAN is a leading public scholar and disinformation researcher, specializing in media manipulation, political movements, critical internet studies, and online extremism. She is the Research Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the Director of the Technology and Social Change project (TaSC). Through TaSC, Dr. Donovan explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. She is the co-author of Meme Wars, and she has appeared on The Problem with John Stewart on Apple+. MATTHEW WILDING is the Director of Interpretation & Education at Revolutionary Spaces, and curator of the upcoming exhibit "Impassioned Destruction: Politics, Vandalism & The Boston Tea Party" at the Old State House.
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ELI MERRITT is a political historian at Vanderbilt University who specializes in the founding era of the United States and the intersection of demagogues and democracy. He has written for the American Journal of Legal History, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, among other publications. The editor of How to Save Democracy: Inspiration and Advice from 95 World Leaders, he also writes an online newsletter called American Commonwealth that explores the origins of the United States’ political discontents and solutions to them.
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CHARLOT LUCIEN is a Haitian storyteller, poet, visual artist, lecturer, and the founder of the Boston-based Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts. He uses his art and writing to promote Haitian culture and advocate for many civil rights, public health, and humanitarian issues through his involvement with various cultural and civic organizations. Lucien has been a long-term public health manager for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is a lecturer on Haiti-US historical connections with the OLLI Institute at the University of Massachusetts. He frequently participates as a guest speaker on Haiti’s culture and history in various academic and cultural venues in the US. He holds membership with various civic/humanitarian organizations, including the think-tank Groupe of Reflection and Action for a New Haiti (GRAHN-USA), the West African Research Association (WARA), Société des poètes francophones, the Haitian Americans United Inc (HAU), The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Haiti Projects. He is the recipient of several awards acknowledging his cultural contributions from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Boston, the Haitian Roundtable 1804 Haitian Americans Changemakers List, and various cultural and academic institutions. JOSEPH BOCCHICCHIO is an activist and community organizer having facilitated Poverty, Creative Writing and Theater of the Oppressed Workshops for the indigent and working poor. Bocchicchio worked for 24 years in Community Mental Health in Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, and did grass roots organizing for opiate addiction treatment and suicide prevention for the Last Letter Project in Akron, Ohio. He now works part time for Revolutionary Spaces, where he researches and does presentations on various historical topics. His poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Ovunque Siamo, Cut-Throat, Up-street, Jawbone, Entropy, Panning for Poems, Enclave, and The Daily Clout. LYNN SMITH is a volunteer Board Member for the Friends of Linden Place, which oversees the operations of an 1810 Federal style mansion in Bristol, RI that was built from the profits of the DeWolf Family slave trading business. Smith is an interpreter there and helped Linden Place with re-evaluation and re-interpretation of its history, with input from leading scholars from the African American and Indigenous communities. She is currently mapping the neighborhood founded by the 1850 free black population of Bristol, called Goree. Most of her professional career was spent in commercial banking, first in Boston and then in New Haven. While living in Brockton, MA she helped found a number of neighborhood associations designed to increase citizen engagement, one of which was the Frederick Douglass Neighborhood Association.
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JACQUELINE BEATTY is Assistant Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania where she teaches courses on early American, women's, and public history. Her book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America, was published with NYU Press in April, 2023. Her previously published work includes "Privileged in the Patriarchy: How Charleston Wives Negotiated Financial Freedom in the Early Republic" (South Carolina Historical Magazine, July 2018), "Complicated Allegiances: Women, Politics, and Property in Post- Occupation Charleston" in Holly Mayer, ed., and Women Waging War in the American Revolution. She received a BA from Boston College in 2010, an MA from Villanova University in 2012, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2016. DANIEL CARPENTER is the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Chair of the Department of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Carpenter's research on petitioning appears in his book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870, which was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize of the American Political Science Association, the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize of the American Political Science Association and the James P. Hanlan Book Award of the New England Historical Association. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1989 with distinction in Honors Government and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1996. He taught previously at Princeton University (1995-1998) and the University of Michigan (1998-2002).
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Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. Featuring: Felicia Ellsworth, Mark Perry, and Edwina Clark
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DR. MEGAN VICTOR is an anthropologist who specializes in historical archaeology from the 17th through the 19th century. In particular, they are interested in commensal politics, drinking spaces, trade and exchange, informal economy, and gendered spaces. Dr. Victor has worked extensively on archaeology of the English Colonial World in North America, including excavations at the fishing village and trading post on Smuttynose Island within the Isles of Shoals, Maine (1623-1780s), Virginia’s colonial capital of Williamsburg, including the eighteenth-century Raleigh Tavern (a favorite of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson), and sites throughout the 17th and 18th-century Chesapeake Bay. It is within the Atlantic World and the English Colonial World that much of their current research takes place – the Molly House Project. The other geographic focus of Dr. Victor’s research is that of the American West, with an eye to the mining frontiers of the 19th century. It is within this sphere their second ongoing research project, the Highland City Project, takes place. Dr. Victor received their B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan (2010), their M.A. in 2012 and their Ph.D. in 2018, both from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Dr. Victor is currently an Assistant Professor at Queens College-CUNY. DR. MICHAEL BRONSKI is an independent scholar, journalist, and writer who has been involved in social justice movements since the 1960s. He has been active in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, publisher and theorist since 1969. He is the author of numerous books including A Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press) which won the 2011 American Library Association Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Best Non- Fiction. In 2014 he published You Can Tell Just by Looking and Twenty Other Myths about LGBT Life and People. In 2019 he published A Queer History of the United States for Young People. He is Professor of the Practice in Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. DR. KARA FRENCH is director of the Gender and Sexuality studies program and chair of the History Department at Salisbury University. She holds a B.A. in History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. Her book, Against Sex: Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America, was recently published in the University of North Carolina Press’ Gender and American Culture series. She has also presented work on the history of asexuality as a sexual identity. Dr. French is currently writing a biography entitled Democratic Queen on the life of first lady Harriet Lane Johnston, niece of James Buchanan, and the queer family dynamics of America’s only bachelor president. At Salisbury, she teaches courses on women’s and gender history, LGBTQ studies, and the history of sexuality.
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ANDREW LEONG is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Dept. in the College of Liberal Arts at UMass Boston where he teaches legal studies, Latino and Asian American Studies. His specialty is on law, social justice, and equality pertaining to disenfranchised communities, with a focus on Asian Americans. He has been active in community and civil rights work, having served on the board of trustee of numerous Asian American and civil rights-related organizations. PENNY LEE is a documentary producer and film & video editor. She has over 25 years experience in editing documentaries, reality television series, promotional and educational video projects. Some of Lee’s clients include Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Travel Channel, as well as military and government agencies and corporate companies like Deloitte. Her first doc that she directed and edited was a short film called “Through Chinatown’s Eyes: April 1968”. Her passion projects are stories about the immigrant experience in the US with a primary focus on the Chinese American voices. LISA MAO is the director, writer and co-producer of A Tale of Three Chinatowns. As a development executive and producer of non-fiction television, Lisa is responsible for the creation and launch of more than 500 hours of programming for channels including History Channel, National Geographic Channel, HGTV, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, and Travel Channel. Her credits include Travel Channel’s “Man Vs. Food Nation,” ID’s “Extreme Forensics” and “Deadly Shootouts” on Reelz. In addition to her television work, she also wrote and produced the award-winning short documentary “Through Chinatown’s Eyes: April 1968.” Lisa is committed to helping people share their stories to reveal the complex fabric of the human condition. She resides in Washington, DC with her husband and son. Opening Remarks: CYNTHIA YEE is an educator, writer, artist and artistic collaborator. She writes creative, nonfiction essays from the viewpoint of an American-born Taishanese girl coming of age in Boston’s Chinatown and Combat Zone through the 1950s and ’60s. She continues exploring the themes of what makes for thriving community life and child development, how structural racism oppresses, how feminism can be nurtured, and how social justice can look in America. Her poem “My MaMa’s Back,” a tribute to Chinatown women garment workers, is now living outside Mayor Michelle Wu’s office.
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