David Allen is a historian of U.S. foreign relations. He was most recently a fellow in the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. David earned a PhD in History from Columbia University in 2019, with distinction. Before that, he took an MPhil in Historical Studies, with distinction, as well as a BA in History, with a double first, from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Previously, David has held appointments as an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center; an Eisenhower Roberts Graduate Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College; a History and Policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Project on Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft, appointed jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program and Belfer Center. David taught as a core Lecturer at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs in Spring 2021. David has published academic articles in the International History Review, the Historical Journal, the Journal of Cold War Studies, the state-of-the-field volume Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, and an edited volume on international organizations. His work has received grants and honors from the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Previously a resident tutor at Leverett House, Harvard University, he lives and works with his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Outside academia, David has been a freelance classical music critic at The New York Times since 2014. He tweets on music, mostly, at @fafnerthekite.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Moderator - Nina Yoshida Nelsen, Boston Lyric Opera Artistic Advisor and Mezzo-Soprano; Panelists - Paul Chihara, Composer; Michael Sakamoto, Choreographer; Erin Aoyama, Scholar, American Studies;
John F. Kennedy Library
Matthew Delmont, Dartmouth professor of history and author of Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad Renée Graham, associate editor and columnist at The Boston Globe
John F. Kennedy Library
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.
Old South Meeting House
The Beantown Swing Orchestra
John F. Kennedy Library
Ronald W. Bailey is a Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, serving as department Head from 2012 to 2022. He is a 1965 graduate of Evans County History School in Claxton, GA and a 1969 Phi Beta Kappa graduate with a BA in Liberal Arts (Cross-Cultural Studies) from Michigan State University’s Justin Morrill College. His undergraduate major included fluency in Russian and a certificate from Moscow State University. He holds an MA in Political Science from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Black Studies from Stanford, one of the first such degrees awarded in the United States. He has taught at Fisk, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Mississippi, and Northeastern, where he chaired the Department of African American Studies for eight years. He also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs at South Carolina State University and at Knoxville College, and as a senior scientist with the Education Development Center, Inc. Bailey’s publications include Introduction to Afro-American Studies: A Peoples College Primer; Remembering Medgar Evers . . . For a New Generation; Let Us March On: Civil Rights Photographs of Ernest Withers, Jr.; and Black Business Enterprise: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Social Issues, Journal of Negro Education, Agricultural History, Review of Black Political Economy, Black Scholar, Souls: Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and the Journal of African American History. NSF and NEH grants supported the development of two website projects he initiated: www.dignubia.org and www.nubianet.org. He was also a co-founder of ACT-Roxbury (Art, Culture, and Trade—Roxbury), an organization that now operates the Roxbury Center for the Arts @ Hibernia Hall and the Roxbury Film Festival. Bailey has consulted on museum, curriculum, and technology projects. He was also the principal investigator of a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to build capacity in six African American museums in the Savannah area. He is the current co-principal investigator of a six-year digital tools project called AFRO PUBLISHING WITHOUT WALLS, or AFRO PWW-2, funded for the past six years by the Mellon Foundation.
Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation
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.
Old South Meeting House
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.
Old South Meeting House
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.
Old South Meeting House
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).
Old State House
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