Peter Frankopan (Chair)
Professor of Global History, Oxford University
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is also Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College. He has been Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton, Scaliger Visiting Professor at Leiden and Presidential Scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. His book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was described as ‘magnificent’ (Sunday Times) ‘dazzling’ (Guardian), and ‘not just the most important history book in years, but the most important in decades’ (Berliner Zeitung). A New York Times Bestseller, it was named one of the Sunday Times Books of the Decade (2010-19). Peter’s latest book, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was awarded the Carical Prize for Social Sciences in 2019, when Peter also won Germany’s Calliope Prize.
Anne Applebaum
Senior Fellow, Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she runs a project on 21st century disinformation. She is the author of several books, including Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Her newest book, Twilight of Democracy, will appear in July 2020. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and is a former member of the Washington Post editorial board, a former deputy editor of the Spectator, and a former Warsaw correspondent of the Economist. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs and many other publications. She lives in Warsaw and London.
Lyse Doucet
Chief International Correspondent, BBC
Lyse Doucet OBE C.M. is the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, and a senior presenter who anchors news programmes for BBC World News television and BBC World Service radio. She is regularly deployed to present special news coverage from the field and report across the BBC’s domestic and global outlets. Lyse spent 15 years as a BBC foreign correspondent with postings in Jerusalem, Amman, Islamabad, Tehran, Kabul and Abidjan. She is a regular visitor to the Middle East and has covered major stories in the region since 1994, when she established the BBC’s office in Amman, Jordan. Lyse was nominated to the Order of Canada in 2018 and received an OBE in the Queen’s Honours list in 2014 for her services to broadcasting. Born in eastern Canada, Lyse has thirteen honorary doctorates from leading British and Canadian Universities. She is a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, a trustee of the Intermediate charity for mediation and negotiation, an honorary patron of Canadian Crossroads International, and a member of Friends of Aschiana UK which supports working street children in Afghanistan.
Eliga Gould
Professor of History, University of New Hampshire
Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. He has written extensively on the American Revolution, emphasizing the entangled history that Americans shared with the rest of the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the wider world. His books include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (2000), winner of the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Peter S. Onuf (2005), and Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012), which won the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize, as well as being named a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. He has held long-term fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University, and the Fulbright-Hays Program to the United Kingdom.
Sujit Sivasundaram
Professor of World History , University of Cambridge
Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and College Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College. He is also Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge and until recently, he was editor of The Historical Journal. His latest book, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire, is out now. It revisits the age of revolutions from the Indian and Pacific Oceans and from the perspective of indigenous and colonised peoples. His research spans the histories of oceans, culture, science, race, the environment and empires. He is the author of Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (2013) and Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (2005). In 2012, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History, given to distinguished early-career historians in the UK. He has held the Sackler Caird Fellowship of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and visiting fellowships in Sydney, Paris and Singapore. He is Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum and a member of the Advisory Committee of Cambridge University’s inquiry into the legacies of enslavement. He was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
