Team

Heather Ann Thompson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a renowned storyteller and expert on the history, politics, and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. She earned her PhD from Princeton University, and has consulted on numerous documentaries, motion pictures, and tv series. Her writing can be found in the New York Times, Newsweek,…

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a National Book Award Finalist in Nonfiction and an expert in African American history and culture from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Dunbar received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University.…

Allyson Moralez received her B.A. from the University of Michigan in 2021 and currently serves as Executive Director of the Urban History Association. She has worked closely under Dr. Heather Ann Thompson and with the University of Michigan Carceral State Project, diving deep into research on mass incarceration and conditions of confinement. She was a…

Becky Nicolaides is an expert on the history of the 20th century, and the author of several award-winning studies of suburban life in America.  After receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia University, she became a tenured faculty member at UCSD, then moved into full-time consulting for film, television, documentaries, cultural resources and public history projects. She…

Jim Downs is the author of Sick From Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction; Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation and Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery and War Transformed Medicine. He served as the consulting editor for the New York Times Bestseller The Intellectual Devotional…

Evelyn Alsultany is a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media. She received her B.A. at the University of Michigan, M.A. at the New School for Social Research, and Ph.D. at Stanford University. She is the author of Arabs and Muslim in the Media: Race and Representation…

Elizabeth Hinton is a historian of American inequality and is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on policing and mass incarceration. She earned her B.A. from New York University and her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is a professor of history, African American Studies, and law at Yale. Hinton’s articles and op-eds can be…

Eric Avila is a professor affiliated with three departments at UCLA: History, Chicana/o Studies, and Urban Planning. His research and teaching focus on the history of Los Angeles and its rise as a global city over the span of two centuries. He also studies the history of American culture and the history of Hollywood in…

Dr. Tiffany M. Gill is the inaugural John and Patricia Cochran Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry, which received the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women…

Stephanie Jenkins has been making award-winning historical documentaries for over a decade. A long-time staff producer with Ken Burns, she enjoys nothing more than finding emotionally-driven stories and digging deep into film archives. Most recently she produced Muhammad Ali, an eight-hour biography of the famed boxer and activist that aired on PBS in September 2021. Her…