Professor David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. He is currently a Senior Scholar of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, is an Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School, and an Affiliated Professor in the Harvard Department of Government. Professor Armitage is an Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine’s College in Cambridge, an Honorary Professor of History at Queens University in Belfast, and an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Professor Armitage has authored 18 books, including The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. 

Julia Gaffield is an Associate Professor of History at the College of William & Mary and is the Interim Editor of the William & Mary Quarterly.  Her areas of academic study include the history of the Atlantic, Early America, and Haiti.  She focuses in particular on Revolution, Independence, International Law, Diplomatic History, and Abolitionism. Professor Gaffield’s first book, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015 and won the 2016 Mary Alice and Frederick Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society.  She is currently finishing her next book, I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom, a biography of the Haitian founding father, to be in bookstores this June from Yale University. Professor Gaffield is also the editor of The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context and Legacy, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2016.