Dr. Yohuru Williams is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and Founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. He received his PhD from Howard University in 1998.

Dr. Williams is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (Blackwell, 2006), Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement (Routledge, 2015), and Teaching beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies (Corwin Press, 2008). He is the editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present Documents and Essays (Kendall Hunt, 2002), and is co-editor of The Black Panthers: Portraits of an Unfinished Revolution (Nation Books, 2016), In Search of the Black Panther Party, New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Duke, 2006), and Liberated Territory: Toward a Local History of the Black Panther Party (Duke, 2008).

Dr. Williams has appeared on a variety of local and national radio and television programs, most notably ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Aljazeera America, BET, CSPAN, EBRU Today, Fox Business News, Fresh Outlook, Huff Post Live, and NPR. He was featured in the Ken Burns PBS Documentary Jackie Robinson and the Stanley Nelson PBS Documentary The Black Panthers. He is also one of the hosts of the History Channel’s web show Sound Smart. A regular political commentator on the Cliff Kelly Show on WVON, Chicago, Dr. Williams also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post and is a contributor to Progressive Magazine.

Dr. Abby Reisman is an associate professor of teacher education in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division at Penn Graduate School of Education. Prior to her arrival at Penn GSE, Dr. Reisman was a visiting professor at Teachers College-Columbia University, and a researcher at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA. She received her PhD from Stanford University, where she directed the “Reading Like a Historian” Project in San Francisco, the first extended history curriculum intervention in urban high schools. Dr. Reisman began her career in education as a classroom teacher in a small, progressive high school in New York City.

Dr. Reisman’s work has appeared in Cognition and Instruction, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Teachers College Record, Journal of Teacher Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education. Her 2011 dissertation won the Larry Metcalf Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and an article that emerged from it won the 2013 William Gilbert Award from the American Historical Association. Dr. Reisman was awarded the 2015 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and the 2019 Middle States Council for the Social Studies Harry J. Carmen Award for outstanding achievement in social studies research and teaching.

Dr. Kenneth Pomeranz is a University Professor of Modern Chinese History and College Faculty Director at the University of Chicago. He previously taught at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), which won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the AHA, and shared the World History Association book prize; The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (1993), which also won the Fairbank Prize; The World that Trade Created (with Steven Topik, 1999); and a collection of his essays, recently published in France. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other sources.

Molly Sinnott is a member of the Climate Project editorial team at The OER Project. She was previously a classroom reading and writing teacher, specializing in supporting students in executive-function skills development. She focuses on building approachable and inclusive content for a diverse range of students.

Dr. Trevor R. Getz is Professor of African and World History at San Francisco State University. His work focuses on history education—especially in the field of world history—as well as the social history of Africa. He is the author or co-author of 11 volumes, including Abina and the Important Men, which won the 2014 James Harvey Robinson Prize. His work has been published by Duke University Press, Oxford University Press, Ohio University Press, Bloomsbury, Prentice Hall, Westview, and James Currey. It has also appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of West African History, Slavery and Abolition, African Economic History, and Ghana Studies. Trevor has also written or produced a number of documentaries and historical films that have garnered festival prizes, and has held visiting professorships at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2020 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award.

Resources for Trevor's talk:

• Tool 
• Intro Activity
• History and Memory 
• Graphic Biography
• Big History Graphic Biography List
• World History Graphic Biography List
• OER Project Community