David W. Blight

Co-Investigator

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, and serves as Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Other appointments include: Amherst College; as William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University, UK; as Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA; and as a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, of the New York Public Library.

His pathbreaking books Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom (2018) and Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (2001) have received extensive honors including the Pulitzer Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Douglass Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. Blight works in many aspects of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies and as advisor to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; his induction address was entitled “The Pleasure and Pain of History.”