Author Bios

Edward Humes is an American investigative journalist and author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1989 for his work at the Orange County Register and has subsequently built a career as one of the most important writers on American criminal justice, environmental issues, and institutional failure. His books are works of deep…

John Lewis was an American civil rights leader and United States Congressman whose life represented one of the most complete expressions of moral courage in modern American history. Born in 1940 in Pike County, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, he grew up under the full weight of Jim Crow segregation and determined, as a young…

Alfred Lansing was an American journalist and author who wrote one of the greatest survival narratives in the English language, a book that has remained continuously in print since its publication in 1959 and that has defined the literary standard for the genre. Born in 1921 in Chicago, he worked as a journalist and magazine…

Thomas Asbridge is a leading British historian of the Crusades and of medieval history, a scholar who has devoted his career to bringing the history of the Crusading movement to both academic and general audiences with a combination of archival rigor and genuine narrative skill. He is a professor of medieval history at Queen Mary…

Richard Hall was a British journalist and author who devoted much of his career to the history of Africa, particularly the history of Central and East Africa during the colonial and post-colonial periods. He worked as a journalist in Africa for many years, reporting for British newspapers and developing the firsthand knowledge of the continent’s…

Dava Sobel is an American science writer who transformed the market for popular science history in the 1990s with a series of short, elegant books that demonstrated that the history of scientific and technological ideas could be told with all the drama and narrative pleasure of the best commercial fiction. Born in 1947 in New…

Kyle Harper is an American historian of ancient Rome and an expert on environmental history, epidemiology, and the long-term forces that shaped the trajectory of classical civilization. He is a professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, where he served as provost, and his scholarly work has occupied the intersection of environmental…

Mary Beard is the most prominent classicist writing for a general audience in the world today, a scholar whose combination of genuine academic authority, combative intelligence, and gift for communication has made her the public face of classical scholarship in Britain and beyond. Born in 1955 in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, she was educated at Newnham…

Mike Duncan is an American author and podcaster who has made the history of political revolutions accessible to a vast global audience through a combination of meticulous scholarship, clear narrative, and a genuine gift for making complex historical processes intelligible to general listeners and readers. He is the creator and host of The History of…

Jon Meacham is one of the most prominent American presidential historians and public intellectuals of the early twenty-first century, a writer and commentator whose work engages with the long arc of American democracy and the character and performance of the presidents who have led it. Born in 1969 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he was educated at…