Presidential Scholars

The Presidential Scholars Program brings some of the most distinguished voices in the area of anti-racist scholarship and policy to Amherst for short-term residencies. During their time at Amherst, visiting scholars present a public lecture, hold seminars, and meet with students, faculty, and staff. 

Launched in conjunction with Amherst’s 2020 Anti-Racism Plan, the Presidential Scholars program brings exceptional thinkers to campus for short-term residencies. Presidential Scholars are nominated by faculty and other community members and hosted by the Center for Humanistic Inquiry and the President’s Office.

Carol Anderson

Historian, Educator and Author

October 11–14, 2023

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of seven books including White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, winner of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and a New York Times Bestseller; and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, which explores the anti-Blackness of the Second Amendment and the consequences for African Americans’ citizenship and lives. The Second was chosen as a New York Times Editor’s pick, Best Social Science Books of 2021 by Library Journal, and one of Writer’s Bone, Best Books of 2021.

Anderson has been elected into the Society of American Historians, named a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to numerous teaching awards, her research has garnered fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, the University of Chicago’s Pozen Center for Human Rights, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Professor Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee; the Pulitzer Prize Committee for History; and the National Book Awards Committee in Non-fiction. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.

Natasha Trethewey

United States Poet Laureate (2012-2014) and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

February 22–24, 2024

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Watch conversations with the four Presidential Scholars for 2022–23. In its second year, the program continued to bring preeminent scholars from a wide range of disciplines to Amherst to explore diverse themes and ideas, including the afterlife of slavery in modern American society; the role that theater, race, class, and sexuality play in shaping identity in America; and new initiatives in shaping gender and identity studies in higher education. This year also featured Jason Moran’s multidisciplinary concert program, James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters: The Absence of Ruin, Moran’s response to Orlando Patterson’s concept of the “absence of ruin”—a musical monument to a vanishing African American history.

During short-term residencies, visiting scholars presented public lectures in the President’s Colloquium on Race and Racism, visited classes, and met with students, faculty, and staff. Scholars were nominated by faculty and other community members and hosted by the Center for Humanistic Inquiry in partnership with the President’s Office.

Watch conversations with the four Presidential Scholars for 2021–22. In its first year, the program brought preeminent scholars from a wide range of disciplines to Amherst in order to deepen and enrich our campus-wide conversation about racial justice, racial history, and anti-racist scholarship, action, and policy. During short-term residencies, visiting scholars presented public lectures in the President’s Colloquium on Race and Racism, visited classes, and met with students, faculty, and staff. Scholars were nominated by faculty and other community members and hosted by the Center for Humanistic Inquiry in partnership with the President’s Office.