Institute Staff and Instructors

David Paul Nord - Indiana University
David Paul Nord is professor emeritus of journalism and adjunct professor of history and American Studies at Indiana University. He has written three books: Newspapers and New Politics: Midwestern Municipal Reform, 1890-1900 (1981), Communities of Journalism: a History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (2001), and Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (2004). Nord is also editor of the fifth and final volume in the Society’s A History of the Book in America. He was the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society in 2008.

James David Moran - Director of Outreach, AAS
James David Moran has served as the Society’s director of outreach since 1994. He is responsible for the creation and administration of all programs serving non-academic audiences, including public lectures, performances, and an innovative fellowship program for creative and performing artists and writers. Moran inaugurated the American Antiquarian Society’s programs for K-12 teachers in 1997. Under his leadership the Society participated in 14 federal Teaching American History Projects, including three with the Worcester Public Schools that reached all U.S. History teachers and fundamentally changed the way the discipline was taught across the district.

Kayla Hopper - Outreach Coordinator, AAS
Kayla Hopper is AAS outreach coordinator and works closely with Moran to develop and administer all public and K-12 programing. Additionally, Hopper is in charge of producing the Society’s newsletter, the Almanac, and its annual report, as well coordinating and editing the AAS blog, Past is Present, and Facebook page. Before coming to the Society, Hopper earned her M.A. in American history and public history and worked in the outreach departments of several historic sites, including Historic New England and the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Guest Faculty

Vincent Golden - Curator of Newspapers and Periodicals, AAS
Vincent Golden oversees the Society’s collection of two million newspapers, as well as the extensive collection of magazines, illustrated newspapers, and specialized publications such as amateur newspapers created by children and publications produced by military units. Golden is also an accomplished printer and he will interpret the original eighteenth-century press owned by the Society’s founder, Isaiah Thomas, which is on display in the library.

Lauren B. Hewes - Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, AAS
Lauren Hewes curates the Society’s more than 200,000 graphic arts and ephemera items, including political cartoons, maps, lithographs, portraits, photographs, and paintings. The collection of ephemera includes such diverse items as menus, trade cards, watch papers, currency, valentines, merit awards, diplomas, railroad tickets, playbills, calendars, membership certificates, and games.

David Henkin - University of California-Berkeley
David Henkin is a specialist in the history of print media and communication in nineteenth-century America. He is author of The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006) and City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998).

Joshua Brown - City University of New York
Joshua Brown is a specialist in the history of American visual culture and his most recent work focuses on the rise of illustrated magazines. He is author of Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (2002).

Megan Kate Nelson - Harvard University
Megan Kate Nelson is an expert in using visual materials in social and cultural history. She is author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012).