Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Jeffrey Ding teaches in the Political Science Department at George Washington University. He was previously a fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, part of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He has also conducted research at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and Oxford's Centre for the Governance of AI. 

Ding received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is an expert on great power competition and cooperation in emerging technologies, the political economy of innovation, and China's scientific and technological capabilities.

Professor Ding will deliver the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies' 2025 Arthur Adams Family Distinguished Lecture on International Affairs. 

In his book "The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It," Corey Brettschneider, constitutional law and political science professor at Brown University, articulates how John Adams waged war on the national press of the early republic, overseeing numerous prosecutions of his critics. In the lead-up to the Civil War, James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans. A decade later, Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to guarantee a white supremacist republic after the Civil War. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts that flowed from his corrupt ideas about presidential power. 

But Brettschneider also shows that these presidents didn’t have the last word—citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of “We the People.”  His book ultimately is about citizens—Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more—who fought back against presidential abuses of power. 

Their examples give us hope about the possibilities of restoring a fragile democracy.

Adapted from https://vivo.brown.edu/display/cbrettsc

Professor Brettschneider will deliver the 2024-2025 Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World's Lofgren Lecture Program on American Constitutionalism.

Edward F. O’Keefe is the CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation. He previously spent two decades in broadcast and digital media at ABC News, CNN, and NowThis, during which time he received a Primetime Emmy Award for his work with Anthony Bourdain, two Webby Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award, and a George Foster Peabody Award for ABC’s coverage of 9/11. 

A former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, he graduated with honors from Georgetown University. 

Mr. O'Keefe's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont McKenna College.

Adapted from https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Loves-of-Theodore-Roosevelt/Edward-F-OKeefe/9781982145682