2027 Speakers

 

Keynote Speaker: Ricardo A. Herrera, George Washington Leadership Institute

Ricardo A. Herrera is Senior Historian, George Washington Leadership Institute, George Washington Presidential Library, and Professor Emeritus of Military History, U.S. Army War College. An award-winning historian, Rick Herrera is the author of Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778; For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861, and most recently The New York Campaign, 1776. His forthcoming book, an edited collection, is the tentatively titled A Most Uncommon Soldier: The Life, Letters, and Journal of Edward Ashley Bowen Phelps, 1814-1893. A graduate of Marquette University (Ph.D., 1998) and the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A., 1984), Herrera has also taught at Mount Union College and Texas Lutheran University. Before becoming a historian, Herrera spent five years in sales and served three years as an armor and cavalry officer in the U.S. Army.

 

Kate Carté, Southern Methodist University

Kate Carté is a professor of history and Altshuler distinguished teaching professor at Southern Methodist University. She specializes in religion in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. She is the author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021); editor of, Revolutionary Turns: Religion & America’s Founding Era (University of Virginia Press, 2026), and co-author, with Matthew Avery Sutton, of One Nation, Divisible: A History of the American People (University Press of Kansas, 2027). She is currently studying the experiences of women and religion in Revolutionary Savannah, Georgia. 

Liz Covart

Liz Covart is an award-winning historian of early America who skillfully blends academic research, public history, and digital innovation. A native New Englander with a PhD in history from UC Davis, she’s best known as the creator and host of the acclaimed Ben Franklin’s World podcast, launched in 2014, which has garnered more than ten million downloads and won the 2017 Best History Podcast Award. She also founded Scholar.DIY, a public-benefit company empowering scholars to build engaging digital narratives, and serves as the digital projects editor at the Omohundro Institute. Her work has earned prestigious recognition, including fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the 2022 Franklin New Media Award from the DAR.

 

Lauren Duval, University of Oklahoma

Lauren Duval is an associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on women, gender, and families during the era of the American Revolution. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina, 2025), which among other prizes, received the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Prize in American History, awarded to a distinguished book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present. Her work has appeared in several edited volumes on the American Revolution and she has also published an award-winning article in the William and Mary Quarterly. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including most recently, as a 2024–2026 Gibson Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. 

Jeffrey Engel, Southern Methodist University

Jeffrey A. Engel is the David Gergen Director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and a senior fellow at the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies. A graduate of Cornell University with advanced degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he has taught American history, international relations, and grand strategy at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Texas A&M, and more. Engel is the author or editor of fifteen books on U.S. foreign policy, including When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War and The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea, and is a frequent commentator for outlets such as CNN, NPR, and The New York Times. His work has earned numerous honors, including the Paul Birdsall Prize and the Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize. He is currently writing Seeking Monsters to Destroy: How America Goes to War.

Brian Franklin, Southern Methodist University

Brian Franklin is the associate director of the SMU Center for Presidential History and a regular lecturer in the Clements Department of History and the University Honors Program. Franklin’s research focuses on the religious, political, and regional history of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current book manuscript, America’s Missions, explores the role of Protestant mission societies in shaping the early American republic. He has published widely on topics such as the history of missions, church-state relations in early America, and religion and westward expansion in the early republic. He teaches courses on Texas history and American history and has organized and taught in seminars for secondary teachers supported by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Humanities Texas. 

 

Benjamin Jenkins, Southern Methodist University

Benjamin Jenkins, MLIS, Ph.D., is the University Archivist at Southern Methodist University. He works in DeGolyer Library, where he acquires historical documents, processes them into collections, and facilitates outreach, all to document the history of SMU. Jenkins’s work includes leading classes, designing webpages, and installing exhibits about the university. Jenkins has written multiple academic articles on history and digital culture, as well as two books on the railroad and citrus industries in California. Jenkins received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Riverside. Before joining SMU, he was an archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration at the George W. Bush Presidential Library.

 

Christopher Jones, Brigham Young University

Christopher Cannon Jones is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on early American history, American religious history, slavery and the slave trade, family and law in American history, and family history and genealogy. He is the author of Methodist Connections: Early American Religion in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2027) and the co-editor (with David Golding) of Missionary Interests: Protestant and Mormon Missions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cornell University Press, 2024). He is currently the editor of the Journal of Mormon History.

Patience LeBlanc, Gilder Lehrman Institute Master Teacher

Patience LeBlanc is the Gilder Lehrman Institute Master Teacher for America’s First Principles. She has over twenty-seven years of experience in teaching social studies. She has taught at both the middle school and high school level. With a BA in History from Texas A&M University and an MA in History from Texas Woman’s University, LeBlanc is a knowledgeable teacher in her field. She is currently the secondary social studies coordinator for Frisco ISD. Her awards include the Humanities Texas Outstanding Teacher of the Year 2020, Gilder Lehrman Texas History Teacher of the Year in 2018, the American Lawyers Auxiliary Teacher of the Year in 2013, Texas Lawyers Auxiliary Teacher of the Year 2011, James Madison Foundation Fellowship winner in 2010, and the Leon Jaworski Award Winner for Excellence in Law Focused Education in 2005. She has been a consultant for many educational programs including Law-Related Education through the State Bar of Texas, the Center for Civic Education and the We the People program, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, where she has written curriculum and presented across the state and nation. 

Susan Penman, Southern Methodist University

Susan Penman joined the Center for Presidential History as assistant director in the summer of 2024 after receiving her PhD in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her area of research is southern studies, with her doctoral work specifically focused on law and politics in New Orleans in the late twentieth century. Her book Uncertain Justice: Harry Connick Sr., Politics, and Prosecution in New Orleans (LSU Press, 2027) studies the office of Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., exploring how local ideas about crime and punishment shifted during the three decades that he served as DA. Penman, who received an MA in Southern Studies and an MFA in Documentary Expression (both from the University of Mississippi), is an experienced oral historian who has contributed to a variety of projects, primarily for UNC’s Southern Oral History Program. At the Center for Presidential History, she oversees all of CPH’s oral history projects.