Amanda Ripley is the New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World, High Conflict, and The Unthinkable. She writes for The Atlantic, Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Peter Ricchiuti is the business professor you wish you had back in college. His humor and insight have twice made him the top professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business. In a worldwide competition, Peter’s teaching delivery skills placed him atop a field of professors from 500 universities representing 43 countries. Peter is a graduate of Babson College, started his career at the investment firm of Kidder Peabody & Co and later served as the assistant state treasurer for Louisiana.
Carol McMichael Reese is the Favot IV Professor in the Tulane University School of Architecture, where she offers courses on architectural and urban history and theory. In Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts, she co-directs the Urban Studies Minor program and teaches urban studies courses. Her books and articles focus on modern architecture and urban planning in the Americas. She has written on the relationship of visual imagery and the production of urban identities in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires and Mexico City.
Lawrence N. Powell teaches southern history, race relations, and Holocaust studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1976. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has published books and articles on Reconstruction history and Louisiana politics, including New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction, which has just been reissued by Fordham University Press, and the text for the Louisiana Capitols: The Power and the Beauty.
Sister Helen Prejean is known around the world for her tireless work against the death penalty. She has been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on capital punishment and in shaping the Catholic Church’s vigorous opposition to all executions. Born on April 21, 1939, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she joined the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1957. After studies in the USA and Canada, she spent the following years teaching high school, and serving as the Religious Education Director at St.
Dr. Mark Plotkin is a renowned ethnobotanist who has studied traditional indigenous plant use with elder shamans (traditional healers) of Central and South America for much of the past 30 years. As an ethnobotanist—a scientist who studies how, and why, societies have come to use plants for different purposes—Dr. Plotkin carried out the majority of his research with the Trio Indians of southern Suriname, a small rainforest country in northeastern South America, but has also worked with elder shamans from Mexico to Brazil. Dr.
Born in the windy city of Chicago, Illinois, Tyrell Plair knew the wind would blow his way, even ifhe had to create the breeze. He took an interest in reading and writing at a young age, which ledhim to begin writing poetry for his classmates.Over the years, Tyrell honed his skills as a writer by ghostwriting novels, penning screenplays,and adding film directing to his repertoire. In 2019 he released his debut novel “StolenInnocence” as an independent author. In 2021 Tyrell and his co-author Elizabeth Johnsonreleased their first youth novel “Just Like My Dad”.
Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, and Senior Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (Monticello). A specialist in the history of the early American republic, Onuf was educated at Johns Hopkins University, where he received his A.B. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1973, and has taught at Columbia University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Southern Methodist University before arriving in Virginia in 1990.
Elisabeth (Liz) McMahon is an associate professor of African history at Tulane University. Her first book, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (2013), uses Qadi and probate court records on Pemba Island to explore the gendered social dynamics of emancipation. She co-authored, with Corrie Decker, The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (2020).
Cappy McGarr is president of MCM Interests. He has been involved in investing for the last 40 years. McGarr is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He serves on the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He is only one of a few people that have been appointed to The Kennedy Center by two different Presidents. He also serves on MD Anderson Cancer Center Board of Visitors, the Foundation for the National Archives Trustee's Council, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, and Ken Burns’ Better Angels Society.
