About the Program

Distinguished Visiting Scholars are invited by the Librarian of Congress to be in residence at The John W. Kluge Center and to make use of the Library's unparalleled collections. Drawing from a wide-range of disciplines, visiting scholars offer novel and timely perspectives based on their work as researchers, writers, and public intellectuals.

Distinguished Visiting Scholars

Dana R. Fisher - 2022

Fisher is a Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Maryland and the President-Elect of the Eastern Sociological Society. Her research focuses on questions related to democracy, civic engagement, activism, and climate politics — most recently studying political elites' responses to climate change, the emergent US Civilian Climate Corps, and activism around climate, systemic racism, and the American Resistance. Professor Fisher has authored over sixty-five research papers and book chapters and has written six books. She currently serves as a Contributing Author for Working Group 3 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Review (IPCC AR6) writing about citizen engagement and civic activism.

Thomas Rid - 2022

Rid is a political scientist best known for his work on the history and risks of information technology in conflict. He is Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

Julia Azari - 2019

Azari is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. She holds Ph.D., M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in political science from Yale University, and a B.A. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include the American presidency, American political parties, the politics of the American state, and qualitative research methods.

Jesse Holland - 2019

Holland is an award-winning journalist and novelist and the author of the first novel featuring comics’ most popular black superhero, “Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther?” At the Kluge Center, Holland is working on his book project, “Sanctuary: The Story of Freedman’s Village,” about the town of freed African Americans that was located where Arlington National Cemetery sits today. Holland is the author of “Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, D.C.” (2007) and “The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House” (2017).

Melvin Rogers - 2019

Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. A political theorist with specialties in democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political and ethical philosophy, Dr. Rogers’s work includes The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2008). He currently serves as the co-editor of the Oxford University Press New Histories of Philosophy series.

Susan Schneider - 2019

Schneider leads the Florida Atlantic University Initiative on the Future Mind and serves as William F. Dietrich Professor of Philosophy at FAU. Schneider writes about the nature of the self and mind, especially from the vantage point of issues in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology.

Peter Shinkle - 2019

Shinkle worked for 19 years as a reporter at various news organizations, including most recently the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He covered the federal court system and also wrote investigative stories on subjects ranging from improper disposal of radioactive waste to the political influence of the payday loan industry. Shinkle is the author of "Ike's Mystery Man: The Secret Lives of Robert Cutler."

Jennifer Victor - 2019

Victor is associate professor of political science at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. She studies the U.S. Congress, legislative organization and behavior, political parties, campaign finance, organized interest groups and lobbying. She is the lead co-editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Political Networks” (2017) and co-author of “Bridging the Information Gap: Legislative Member Organizations in the United States and the European Union” (2013).

Patricia O'Toole - 2019

O’Toole is a former professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. She is the author of five books, including acclaimed biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, and the most recent, “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made” (2018).

Marvin Overby - 2018

Marvin Overby joined the faculty of PSU-Harrisburg in January 2020 as professor of political science and director of the School of Public Affairs.

A native of Fredericksburg, VA, Overby earned his bachelor’s degree at Davidson College and his Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma, where he was a fellow at the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. Between undergraduate and graduate school, he served as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Brussels, Strasbourg, Dublin, and Belfast.

Adam Rothman - 2018

Adam is a professor in the history department at Georgetown University. He studies the history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, and the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world.

Adam's most recent book is "Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery." The book tells the story of three slave children who were taken from New Orleans to Cuba by their owner during the U.S. Civil War, and their mother's effort to recover them. It has been named a Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and has received the Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum, and the Margaret T. Lane/Virginia F. Saunders Memorial Research Award from the American Library Association. Adam's first book, was "Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South."

Martin Hilbert – 2018

Martin Hilbert is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of California, Davis. He pursues a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the role of information and knowledge in the development of complex social systems. Before joining UC Davis, he created and coordinated the Information Society Programme of United Nations Regional Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (http://www.cepal.org/SocInfo). In his 15 years as United Nations Economic Affairs Officer he performed hands-on technical assistance in the field of digital development to presidents, government experts, legislators, diplomats, NGOs, and companies in more than 20 countries. As a distinguished visiting scholar at the Kluge Center Hilbert is researching his current project, "Information Theory for the Information Age."

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William deBuys – 2018

Writer and conservationist William deBuys is the author of nine books, which range from memoir and biography to environmental history and studies of place. In the 1970s, the writer and social critic Robert Coles brought him to New Mexico as a research assistant, initiating deBuys's deep relationship with the cultures and landscapes of the Southwest. He was named a Lyndhurst Fellow for 1986-1988, a Carl and Florence King Fellow at SMU in 1999-2000, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008-2009. Today he lives on the farm he has tended since 1976 in the remote village of El Valle in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. As a distinguished visiting scholar at the Kluge Center deBuys worked on a biography of Stewart L. Udall (1920-2010).

Wayne Wiegand – 2017

Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus at Florida State University and former director of the Florida Book Awards. Often referred to as the "Dean of American library historians," he is author and editor of many books, including "Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey," and over one hundred scholarly articles. As a distinguished visiting scholar at the Kluge Center Wiegand researched a history of the American public-school library.

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• Lecture: “A History of School Librarianship”