David M. Kennedy
David M. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford University, is a native of Seattle and a 1963 Stanford graduate. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1968. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1967.
Professor Kennedy has long taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of the twentieth-century United States, American political and social thought, American foreign policy, American literature, the comparative development of democracy in Europe and America, and the history of the North American West. Graduating seniors have four times elected him as Class Day speaker. In 1988 he received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2005 the Hoagland Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He has also received the Stanford Alumni Association's Richard W. Lyman Award for faculty service, and the Organization of American Historian’s Distinguished Service Award. In 2008 the Yale University Graduate School presented him with its highest honor, the Wilbur Cross Medal.
Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history, and for its engagement with the question of America’s national character. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999) recounts the history of the American people in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II. With Lizabeth Cohen and Margaret O’Mara, Kennedy is also the co-author of a textbook in American history, The American Pageant, now in its eighteenth edition.
Birth Control in America was honored with the John Gilmary Shea Prize in 1970 and the Bancroft Prize in 1971. Over Here was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1981. Freedom From Fear was a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman Prizes, as well as the English-Speaking Union’s Ambassador’s Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California’s California Book Award Gold Medal, all in 2000.
In 1976-77, Professor Kennedy served as Visiting Professor at the Facoltá di Scienze Politiche (Istituto Cesare Alfieri), Universitá di Firenze, Italia, where he taught a year-long course (in Italian) on the history of American political thought. He has lectured on American history throughout Italy, as well as in Germany, Turkey, Scandinavia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Russia, and China. At Stanford he has served as chair of the History Department, and as director of the Program in International Relations, as well as Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and founding Faculty Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He has served on the Advisory Board for the Public Broadcasting System's "The American Experience" and for the History Channel’s “History of US,” as well as other historical documentaries. His film, “American Creed,” made jointly with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was released on PBS in 2018. He has chaired the Test Development Committee for the Educational Testing Service's Advanced Placement Program in American History. He has also served as a director of the CORO Foundation, and as chair of the Board of Directors of the Stanford University Bookstore, and for four decades on the board of Environmental Traveling Companions (ETC), a service organization for people with disabilities. In 1995-96, he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Philosophical Society. In 2002 he joined the Board of the Pulitzer Prizes (chair, 2010-2011), in 2008 the Board of the New York Historical Society, and in 2013 the Board of the California Academy of Sciences. Since 2000, he has served as the Editor of the Oxford History of the United States. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack appointed him in 2014 to the Advisory Council for the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail.
Dave Karger
Dave Karger is an award-winning television host, interviewer, and entertainment commentator. Since 2018 he’s been a host on Turner Classic Movies, where he introduces classic films and conducts interviews with stars and filmmakers of the past and present. He has also made over 200 live appearances on NBC’s Today show over the past 25 years. He has been called “this generation’s mass-media cinematic ambassador” by The Wrap and a “beloved entertainment guru” by The Hollywood Reporter. His first book, “50 Oscar Nights,” from TCM and Running Press, was published in 2024.
In 2015 Dave received the Publicists Guild Press Award honoring the year’s outstanding entertainment journalist. In 2014 he was named one of OUT Magazine’s “OUT 100,” acknowledging the most influential people in the LGBTQ+ community.
From 2012 to 2016 Dave served as Chief Correspondent at Fandango, where he created and hosted the original video series “The Frontrunners,” which received a Webby Award nomination for Best Variety Series. Before that, Dave spent 17 years at Entertainment Weekly, working his way up from intern to senior writer and eventually writing over 50 cover stories for the magazine, on subjects including George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Elton John, Taylor Swift, Johnny Depp, Denzel Washington, and Carrie Underwood.
In 2018 Dave co-hosted ABC’s Live from the Red Carpet on Oscar night. In 2012 he was named the Academy’s official red-carpet greeter, only the third person ever to hold that post. He also co-hosted the 2011 Oscars Digital Experience (produced by The Academy and ABC), which won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Entertainment.
Dave has served on the juries of the TriBeCa, South by Southwest, Florida, Napa Valley, and Los Angeles film festivals. He is a graduate of Duke University.
Alka Joshi
Alka Joshi is the internationally bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy: The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris. Her debut novel, The Henna Artist, immediately became a New York Times Bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub Pick, an LA Times Bestseller, a Toronto Star Bestseller, an Indie Bookstores Bestseller, a Cosmopolitan Best Audiobook, and an Amazon and Goodreads favorite. It was Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and has been translated into 29 languages. It’s currently in development as an episodic series.
In 2023, Forbes selected Alka as one of 50 Women Over 50 who are shattering age and gender norms. Alka was born in India and came to the U.S. with her family at the age of nine.
She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts. Her fourth novel, Six Days in Bombay (4/15/25), is a sweeping travelogue of a young Indian woman’s journey from 1937 India to a turbulent Europe as she comes into her own. It’s Alka’s first standalone novel and will be followed by a fifth in 2026.
Alka has spoken to over 900 book clubs, literary festivals, colleges and corporations about her writing journey.
Scott James
Scott James is a veteran journalist, bestselling author, television news executive, producer, novelist, and newspaper columnist.
His most recent book is Trial by Fire, which reopens the case of the Station nightclub disaster, one of the deadliest fires and largest criminal cases in American history. 100 people died in just 90 seconds when a rock band ignited fireworks inside a crowded club. James’ decade-long investigation questioned whether the wrong people were convicted. As a result of the book, two men were publicly exonerated.
Trial by Fire won the top prize for nonfiction from the New England Society of New York, one of America’s oldest culture organizations, started by founding fathers. The book was adapted for television by CBS News for the program “48 Hours.” The first airing was viewed three million times and remains available on streaming services.
As a columnist, James covered California for The New York Times. Stories that became viral internet sensations included the tale of an ordinary local man who awoke one day to discover he’d been declared God by a British cult. Spoiler alert: he was not.
Earlier in his career James worked in TV news where he won three Emmy awards. In Rhode Island he headed an investigative team focused on government misuse of public funds. In a notoriously crooked state, “On a slow day you could do a corruption story,” he said.
James is also the author of two bestselling novels, The Sower and SoMa, honored as a finalist for debut fiction by the national Lambda Literary Awards. Both books take readers into the underground of San Francisco.
James has been with the Festival for 18 years, most often as an on-stage interviewer. Among his fondest memories is being backstage with Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt, who asked Scott for help with a bedeviling new gadget he’d just been given. A cell phone.
MORE INFO: www.scottjameswriter.com
Ambassador Christopher R. Hill
Ambassador Christopher R. Hill is a professional American diplomat who has served under seven presidents since entering the U.S. Foreign Service in 1977.
Hill is a five-time ambassador across multiple regions in Senate-confirmed positions, including as ambassador to Iraq, the Republic of Korea, Poland, North Macedonia and most recently to the Republic of Serbia until January 2025.
He was also Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Thomas Fuller
I am a Page One Correspondent at The New York Times, which means my primary role is writing the breaking news stories for the front page.
What I Cover
Often my job involves writing about the news of the day — wildfires in California, turmoil in the Middle East, protests, strikes, shootings across the United States. Other times I do longer-term reporting on themes, trends and curiosities. This could be gold panners in the Sierra Nevada, deaths of despair on the streets of Los Angeles, social housing in Paris or Indigenous burning practices in Australia.
My Background
I was raised in Tuckahoe, N.Y., but most of my life has been driven by an incurable case of wanderlust. I went to college in Paris and then reported from more than 40 countries for The Times and The International Herald Tribune, mainly in Europe and Southeast Asia. In my early 20s, I took a year off and traveled around the world on a 750cc motorcycle, writing travel articles along the way. In 2024, Doubleday published “The Boys of Riverside,” a book on the remarkable journey of the varsity football team at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, Calif. Amazon named it the best book of 2024. I am always in the market for a good story, so don’t hesitate to reach out.
Journalistic Ethics
As a Times journalist, I share the values and adhere to the standards of integrity outlined in The Times’s Ethical Journalism handbook. I take very seriously my responsibility to be fair, accurate and empathetic in my coverage. I have traveled enough across the United States and the wider world to know that the second hour of an interview will give me a better understanding about the first. I choose not to have any party affiliation, I don’t take part in political or legislative causes, and I don’t make political donations.
Julia Flynn Siler
Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her most recent book, The White Devil's Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a nonfiction finalist for the California Book Award.
Her other books are The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, a finalist for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting, and Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure.
She is a regular contributor to National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal books section and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
She spent this spring as an academic visitor at Oxford University as part of its Oxford Next Horizons Program.
MORE INFO: www.juliaflynnsiler.com
David Eagleman
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, an internationally bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Dr. Eagleman’s areas of research include sensory substitution, time perception, vision, and synesthesia; he also studies the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system, and in that capacity, he directs the Center for Science and Law.
Eagleman is the author of many books, including Livewired, The Runaway Species, The Brain, Incognito, and Wednesday is Indigo Blue. He is also the author of a widely adopted textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Brain and Behavior, as well as a bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which has been translated into 32 languages, turned into two operas, and named a Best Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble.
Dr. Eagleman writes for the Atlantic, New York Times, Economist, Time, Discover, Slate, Wired, and New Scientist, and appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss both science and literature. He has been a TED speaker, a guest on the Colbert Report, and profiled in the New Yorker magazine.
He has spun several neurotech companies out of his lab. He runs the top ranking science podcast Inner Cosmos and is the writer and presenter of The Brain, an Emmy-nominated television series.
Bob Dotson
Bob Dotson has crisscrossed America, more than four million miles, searching for people who are practically invisible, the ones who change our lives, but don’t take time to tweet and tell us about it. His long-running series, “The American Story with Bob Dotson,” became a regular feature on the TODAY Show until his retirement on the 40th anniversary of the day he joined NBC. Bob then taught storytelling for seven years at Syracuse University in New York.
He is the author of three books, including the New York Times best-selling “American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things.” (Penguin/Random House.) His classic “Make it Memorable” textbooks have been studied in classrooms around the world for a quarter of a century. A third edition was just published. (Bloomsbury)
Bob is one of the most honored storytellers of our time. He has earned 120 awards, including 6 Edward R. Murrow Awards for Best Network News Writing (a record) and 12 more for reporting. 10 National Emmys. Top honors from the Kennedy Center, DuPont Columbia and the William Allen White Foundation for journalistic excellence. Long-form programs Dotson wrote and produced have won seven International Film Festivals and documentary's highest honor, the CINE Grand Prize.
A half century of Bob’s American stories are now available to view for free on his website:
MORE INFO: www.myamericanstories.com
David Crane
David Crane is a lecturer in Public Policy at Stanford University and president of Govern for California. From 2004-2010 he served as a special adviser to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and from 1979-2003 he was a partner at Babcock & Brown, a financial services company.
Crane formerly served on the University of California Board of Regents and as a director of the California State Teachers Retirement System, California High Speed Rail Authority, Society of Actuaries Blue Ribbon Panel on Public Pension Plan Funding, the Volcker-Ravitch Task Force on the State Budget Crisis and other organizations.
MORE INFO: governforcalifornia.org