In October 2008, David Jaffee will lead the forum on teaching with images of Jacksonian America. Professor Jaffee is the author of Craftsmen and Consumer in Early America, 1760-1860 (forthcoming) an examination of the innovative producers and consumers who reworked craft production in small shops and constructed a new system of goods in rural households and People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860 (1999) a cultural history of the frontier which examines the twin processes of town founding and local history writing in the expansion of New England. Jaffee has also researched and written extensively on the scholarship of teaching and learning.

In Fall 2008, Peter C. Mancall, Professor of History at University of Southern California will lead this forum on using colonial era images in teaching. Peter C. Mancall is an historian of early America, the early modern Atlantic world, and early Native American Indian history (c. 1492-1840). He is the author of Hakluyt's Promise (2007), At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (with Eric Hinderaker, 2003), Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (1995), and Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna (1991). His edited books include Envisioning America (1995), Land of Rivers (1996), Three Worlds Meet (volume one of the multiple-prize winning Encyclopedia of the United States), and Travel Narratives from the Age of Exploration (2006). He works regularly with teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District through a Teaching American History program.

In March 2009, Barbara Melosh, Professor Emerita of George Mason University will lead the discussion on teaching with images of the Great Depression and New Deal. Barbara Melosh is the author of Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (1991) and Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (2002). She is co-editor of Gender and American History since 1890 (1993).

In Spring 2009, art historian Kirk Savage will moderate this forum on images of slavery. During the past 20 years Kirk Savage has written extensively on public monuments within the larger theoretical context of collective memory and identity. His book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America won the 1998 John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book published that year in American Studies. Since then Savage has become interested in issues of traumatic memory, and has written on the “therapeutic memorial” before and after 9/11. Hiscurrent book in progress on the memorial landscape of Washington, D.C. reconsiders the key public monuments and spaces of the capital within a narrative of nation building, spatial conquest, ecological destructiveness, and psychological trauma.

In Fall 2009, Alice Fahs, will lead a discussion on images of the Civil War. Alice Fahs is the author of The imagines Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (2001) and co-editor of The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (2004). Her current project, a study of the Northern literary marketplace during the Civil War, is titled "Publishing the Civil War: the Literary Marketplace and the Meanings of the Civil War in the North, 1861-1865." In it I explicitly connect commerce with culture, as I seek to analyze the ways in which the practices of the literary marketplace had a fundamental impact upon the available political and literary meanings of the war in the North--and therefore upon long-term memories of the war.

In Fall 2009, Catherine Lavender will lead the forum on using images of the American West in teaching. Catherine Lavender is the author of Scientists and Storytellers: Feminist Anthropologists and the Construction of the American Southwest, (2006) and co-editor of The Western Women's Reader (2000). Her current research is on the murder of Henrietta Schmerler, a Columbia University anthropology doctoral student murdered in Arizona in 1931.