Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. A historian of modern America, he has written extensively on the intersection of economics and politics and on the tangled relationship between race and nationality. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books, most recently The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford, 2022). He is at currently at work on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century (Penguin Press, 2027). Gerstle is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read the full bio.

Dr Nicholas Guyatt is a Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and a leading historian of North America, with expertise in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His research explores race, citizenship, belonging, nationalism, and intellectual history. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Providence and the Invention of the United States and Bind Us Apart, and is editor of the forthcoming New Oxford Illustrated History of the United States. A frequent contributor to major publications and media outlets, he also teaches and supervises MPhil and PhD students at Cambridge.

Professor Ella McPherson is the Professor of the Sociology of New Media and Digital Technology as well as the Anthony L. Lyster Fellow in Sociology at Queens’ College. She is also Deputy Head of Cambridge’s School of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

At CGHR, Ella leads the Human Rights in the Digital Age theme. Her research is concerned with symbolic struggles surrounding the media in times of transition, whether democratic or digital, and most recently focusing on the empirical case of human rights fact-finding in the digital age.  The latter is a case study for understanding how truth-claims are created, evaluated and contested, as well as what effects related norms and practices have on equal access to speaking and being heard in public.