Team

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…

Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She is a Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South. Films she has produced include the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (PBS, 2013-2018),…

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of History, Race and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s…

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as many other honors. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in…

Jung H. Pak is a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at the Brookings Institution and the author of Becoming Kim Jong Un: A CIA Analyst’s Insights into North Korea’s Enigmatic Young Dictator (Ballantine, forthcoming April 2020). She focuses on the national security challenges facing the United States and East Asia,…

Caitlin Parker is a historian of the 20th century US, with a focus on politics and urban development. She earned her BA from Amherst College and her MA and CPhil at UCLA. Her research focuses on the administration of Tom Bradley, the first African-African mayor of Los Angeles, and she has conducted a series of…

Annie Powers is a twice Primetime Emmy-nominated historical researcher, writer, and producer of documentary and scripted TV and film. After receiving her MA in history, she began her career on history programs like Drunk History and the genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are?  Since then, she has specialized in producing stories at the…

Ruby C. Tapia is Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies and Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She works at the intersections of photography theory, feminist and critical race theory, and critical prison studies. She is co-editor of Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United…