Rana Mitter OBE (Chair)
ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School
Rana Mitter OBE FBA is ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (US title: Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II) (2013) which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His writing on contemporary China has appeared recently in Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Business Review, Spectator, The Critic, and Guardian. He has commented regularly on China in media and forums around the world, including at the World Economic Forum at Davos. His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the UK Historical Association. He taught at Oxford for more than twenty years.
Nicole Eustace
Professor of History, New York University
Nicole Eustace studies culture, politics and power in the early modern Atlantic World, with a focus on settler colonialism in 18th-century North America and the early United States. A member of New York University’s faculty since 2002, Professor Eustace directs the Atlantic History Workshop and is past director of the NYU Women and Gender Program. Presently, she is the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of History. Eustace holds a BA in history, with distinction, from Yale University and a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History. In addition, the book was a 2021 Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, shortlisted for the 2022 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and winner of the 2022 Francis Parkman Prize. Additionally, Eustace is the author of 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Penn Press, 2012) and Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American Revolution (UNC Press 2008) and has published numerous articles, reviews, and edited volumes.
Moses Ochonu
Professor of African History, Vanderbilt University
Moses Ochonu is Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in History and Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University. He holds a PhD in African History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Graduate Certificate in Conflict Management from Lipscomb University, Nashville. He is the author/editor of five books: Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria’s Modernity (2022); Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (2014); Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria (2014), which was named finalist for the ASA Best Book Prize in African Studies; Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (2009); and Entrepreneurship in African History (2018). He is a two-time recipient of the fellowship of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) and his research has also been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Library, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. His ongoing book project focuses on African aristocratic exile during the years of colonial conquest. He is also working on a project that frames Boko Haram, the Nigerian militant Islamist group, within and against a broader history of religious upheaval in that region of Africa.
Rebecca L. Spang
Distinguished Professor of History, Indiana University Bloomington
Rebecca L. Spang is Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington, where she currently serves as Dean (Interim) of the Hutton Honors College. Her book The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture was very widely reviewed and has been translated into Japanese, Turkish, Greek, and Portuguese; a second edition, with a foreword by Adam Gopnik, was published in 2020. Spang’s Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (2015) was a Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’ and recipient of the Gottschalk Prize for the best book in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her other publications include a co-authored paper that uses topic modeling to answer the question “How surprising was the French Revolution?,” numerous reviews in the TLS, and essays about revolution, money, and politics for The Atlantic. Spang previously taught at University College London and has held visiting appointments at Yale SOM’s International Center for Finance and the University of Tübingen. She was a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2023 New America National Fellow.
Stephanie Nolen
Global Health Reporter, The New York Times
Stephanie Nolen is the Global Health Reporter for The New York Times. She has reported from more than 80 countries around the world. Her best-selling book 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa has been published in 11 countries and seven languages and won the 2007 PEN ‘Courage’ Award. She is an eight-time winner of Canada’s National Newspaper Award, and a 19-time nominee. She has been recognized for coverage of Africa’s AIDS pandemic; public health across the developing world; conflicts in Sudan, Uganda, Somalia, the DR Congo and the Brazilian Amazon; and the perils faced by migrant children in Central America. Nolen won the Amnesty International Media Award in 2003, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2015, 2018, and, in 2020 for an investigation into disappearances and mass graves in Mexico. Nolen was awarded the prestigious Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy in 2020, and spent a year investigating the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on social inequities. She is the 2024 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University, and the author of Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race (2002); Shakespeare’s Face (2002), and Out of India (2013). A native of Montreal, Nolen holds a Bachelor of Journalism (Hons) from the University of King’s College in Halifax and a Master of Science in development economics from the London School of Economics in England.
