Anthony Cary, Executive Director of the Queen's-Blyth Educational Programs
Anthony Cary, who holds an MA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford Business School served in the British Diplomatic Service from 1973-2011, in Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, Washington DC, as British Ambassador to Sweden, and finally as British High Commissioner to Canada from 2007 to 2010. In London, his posts included the Policy Planning Staff, and he was Head of the European Union Department. He was twice seconded to the European Commission in Brussels, where he was chef de cabinet to Chris Patten, as Commissioner for External Relations. He was made a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1997. He is currently Executive Director of the Queen's-Blyth Educational Programs.
Catherine Desbarats, Associate Professor, Department of History, McGill University
Catherine Desbarats is professor of Canadian colonial history at McGill University and the director of the French Atlantic History Group. She holds a doctorate in Economics (D. Phil) from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in History from McGill University. Her research and writing centres on two principal areas: historiography and the finances of the colonial and pre-industrial French state. Currently, she is working on a study of the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix's writings on the history of the new world, as well as on a study of the economic culture of state debt in the French colonial empire of the eighteenth century.
Ramachandra Guha, Author, Columnist and Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics
Ramachandra Guha is a columnist for the newspapers The Telegraph, Khaleej Times and The Hindustan Times. Mr. Guha has won awards for some of his works. His essay, Prehistory of Community Forestry in India, was awarded the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society for Environmental History for 2001, A Corner of a Foreign Field was awarded the Daily Telegraph Cricket Society Book of the Year prize for 2002 and he won the R. K. Narayan Prize in 2003. Between 1985 and 2000, Mr. Guha taught at various universities in India, Europe and North America, including the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Stanford University, Oslo University and at the Indian Institute of Science. He is the author of India after Gandhi, published in 2007.
Stuart Schwartz, Professor, Department of History, Yale University & Winner of the 2008 Cundill International Book Prize in History
Professor Schwartz, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1968, specializes in the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of Early Modern expansion. Among his books are Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (1973), Early Latin America (1983), Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (1992), as editor, A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil (1979), Implicit Understandings (1994), Victors And Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (2000), Cambridge History Of Native Peoples Of The Americas. South America (1999), and All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008) - for which he was awarded the first Cundill Prize in History. He is presently working on several projects: a history of independence of Portugal and the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, 1620-1670; and a social history of Caribbean hurricanes.
Jeffrey Simpson, The Globe and Mail's national affairs columnist
Jeffrey Simpson, The Globe and Mail's national affairs columnist, has won all three of Canada's leading literary prizes (Governor-General's Award, National Magazine Award and National Newspaper Award). He also won the Hyman Solomon Award for excellence in public policy journalism. Mr. Simpson has published eight books - amongst them, Struggling for a Canadian Vision; Star-Spangled Canadians; and his latest book, with Mark Jaccard and Nic Rivers, is entitled Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge. He has written articles for Saturday Night, The Report on Business Magazine, The Journal of Canadian Studies and The Queen's Quarterly. Mr. Simpson has taught as an adjunct professor at the Queen's Institute of Policy Studies and the University of Ottawa Law School. He is now senior fellow at the University of Ottawa's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Confirmed Jury Members for 2012
Adam Gopnik, Author and Contributor, The New Yorker
Adam Gopnik has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction and humor pieces, book reviews, profiles, reporting pieces, and more than a hundred stories for The Talk of the Town and Comment. Gopnik became The New Yorker's art critic in 1987. In 1990, he collaborated with Kirk Varnedoe, the former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, on the exhibition "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," and co-wrote the book of the same name. In 1995, Gopnik moved to Paris and began writing the Paris Journal column for the magazine. An expanded collection of his essays from Paris, "Paris to the Moon," appeared in 2000. While in Paris, he also wrote an adventure novel, "The King in the Window," which was published in 2005. Gopnik has edited the anthology "Americans in Paris," for the Library of America, and has written introductions to new editions of the works of Maupassant, Balzac, Proust, and Alain-Fournier. His most recent book, "Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York," (2006), collects and expands his essays about life in New York and about raising two children here. It includes the essays "Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli," about his daughter's imaginary friend, and "Last of the Metrozoids," about the life of Kirk Varnedoe and the year before his death, in 2003. Gopnik has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism three times, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. He lives in New York.
Lisa Jardine, Director, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters and Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary, University of London
Lisa Jardine CBE is Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters and Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge. She holds honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and the Open University. She is a Trustee of the V&A Museum and was for five years a member of the Council of the Royal Institution. She is Patron of the National Council on Archives. For the academic year 2007-8 she was seconded to the Royal Society as Advisor to its Collections. In 2008 she became Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the arms-length body that regulates assisted reproduction in the UK. She was the 2009 winner of the Cundill Prize.
Charles R. Kesler, Professor of Government, Claremont McKenna College
Charles R. Kesler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Kesler also teaches in the Claremont Institute's Publius Fellows Program and Lincoln Fellows Program. He received his A.B. in Social Studies (1978) and his A.M. and Ph.D. in Government (1985) from Harvard University. From 1989 to 2008, Dr. Kesler was director of CMC's Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World. Dr. Kesler is editor of Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding (Free Press, 1987), and co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought (HarperCollins, 1988). He has written extensively on American constitutionalism and political thought, and his edition of The Federalist Papers (Signet Classics, 2003) is the best-selling edition in the country. Dr. Kesler contributes regularly to the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. His articles on contemporary politics have also appeared in The Washington Times, Policy Review, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, among other journals.