Lloyd Kramer is the Director Carolina Public Humanities and a Professor of History.  He joined the UNC faculty in 1986 and has often presented lectures on historical subjects at seminars for “Adventures in Ideas.”   He has also served on the CPH Faculty Advisory Board, participated in Carolina Public Humanities’ long-range strategic planning, led Executive Seminars on the Humanities at off-campus venues, and directed the History Department’s “Project for Historical Education”—a longtime program of seminars for history teachers in the public schools.  He became Director of Carolina Public Humanities in July 2014.

Professor Kramer’s teaching and research focus on Modern European History with an emphasis on nineteenth-century France. He is particularly interested in historical processes that shape cultural identities, including the experiences of cross-cultural exchange and the emergence of modern nationalism. Other research and teaching interests deal with the roles of intellectuals in modern societies and the theoretical foundations of historical knowledge. One recurring theme in all of his research and teaching stresses the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in modern world history.

Ashley Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Government from Harvard University, and also holds a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University. Most recently, she served as a post-doc in the UNC Political Science department with funding from the Carolina Post-Doctoral Program for Faculty Diversity. A specialist in comparative politics, her research interests include contentious politics, authoritarian regimes, and political institutions.

Currently, Ashley is working on a book project on variation in union responses to political movements in authoritarian regimes, with a particular emphasis on how varied strategies of labor incorporation in North African regimes lead to divergent patterns interest articulation, organizational development and anti-regime contention among union federations. In addition to this work, newer research projects examine the dynamics of opposition movements in authoritarian regimes more broadly, with applications to state-mobilized contention and Islamist party success.

Michael Gerhardt joined the Carolina Law faculty in 2005 and serves as the Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence. His teaching and research focuses on constitutional conflicts between presidents and Congress. Gerhardt is the author of seven books, including Lincoln’s Mentors (Harper Collins, 2021), and leading treatises on impeachment, appointments, presidential power, Supreme Court precedent, and separation of powers. He has written more than a hundred law review articles and dozens of op eds in the nation’s leading news publications, including SCOTUSblog, The New York Times, and Washington Post. His book, The Forgotten Presidents (Oxford University Press 2013), was named by The Financial Times as one of the best non-fiction books of 2013. He was inducted into the American Law Institute in 2016. Gerhardt attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated order of the coif and served as a research assistant to both Phil Kurland and Cass Sunstein and as one of the two student editors of The Supreme Court Review. After law school, he clerked for Chief District Judge Robert McRae of the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Tennessee and Judge Gilbert Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He served as Deputy Media Director of Al Gore’s first Senate campaign, practiced law for three years for two boutique litigation firms in Washington and Atlanta, and taught for more than a decade at William & Mary Law School before joining Carolina Law.

Gerhardt’s extensive public service has included his testifying more than 20 times before Congress, including as the only joint witness in the Clinton impeachment proceedings in the House; speaking behind closed doors to the entire House of Representatives about the history of impeachment in 1998; serving as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee for seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices; and as one of four constitutional scholars called by the House Judiciary Committee during President Trump’s impeachment proceedings. During the Clinton and Trump impeachment proceedings, Gerhardt served as an impeachment expert for CNN. In 2015, he became the first legal scholar to be asked by the Library of Congress to serve as its principal adviser in revising the official United States Constitution Annotated. In 2019, the Order of the Coif named Gerhardt as its Distinguished Visitor for 2020, an award given to only one law professor each year for outstanding legal scholarship.

Becki Gray is Senior Vice President at the John Locke Foundation. She provides information, consultation, and publications to elected officials, government staff and other decision makers involved in the state public-policy process.

Gray taps her experience in the legal field, at the North Carolina General Assembly and as a lobbyist in the private sector as well as the full resources and staff of JLF to fulfill requests for information and analysis from policymakers.

She offers commentary on television and radio shows across North Carolina and is a regular panelist on NCSpin. Gray writes a monthly column for Carolina Journal and her op-eds have been published in newspapers across the state. She frequently speaks to civic and political groups about public policy and legislative issues.

She earned an Art degree at Queens College in Charlotte, a Paralegal Certificate from Meredith College and has completed graduate work at UNC-Charlotte and UNC-Greensboro.

Gray is a member of the first class of the John Locke Foundation’s E.A. Morris Fellows, a statewide leadership program. She serves on the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees.

Daniel Kreiss is the Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Associate Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher of the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Kreiss’s research analyzes the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice.

He is the author of three books, Recoding the Boys’ Club: The Experiences and Future of Women in Political Technology (Oxford University Press, 2020), Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Taking our Country Back: the Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University.

Ted Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and the Director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights. Shaw teaches Civil Procedure and Advanced Constitutional Law. His research areas include the Fourteenth Amendment, affirmative action, housing policies regarding fair housing. Among his scores of honors are the 2012 Harlem Neighborhood Defenders Office W. Haywood Burns Humanitarian Award and the 2012 Office of the Appellate Defender Milton S. Gould Award for Outstanding Advocacy. Shaw has published many book chapters, articles and essays on civil rights, including the introduction to The Ferguson Report: United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division.

Shaw attended Columbia University Law School as a Charles Evans Hughes Fellow. He then practiced as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C. In 1982 Shaw joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). He worked for over 26 years, including litigating cases related to elementary, secondary and higher education, housing, voting rights and capital punishment. He also directed LDF’s education docket. In 1987, under the direction of the LDF’s third Director-Counsel, Julius Chambers, Shaw established LDF’s Western Regional Office in Los Angeles. In 1993, Shaw returned to LDF and in 2004, became its fifth Director-Counsel.

Shaw previously taught at the University of Michigan Law School, where he played a key role in initiating a review of its admissions policy that was later upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 by the Supreme Court. He also taught at Columbia University School of Law, CUNY School of Law at Queens College and Temple Law School. He is currently a faculty member of the Practicing Law Institute.