David Young was formerly the US ambassador to the Republic of Malawi (2022-2024) and for 35 years a Foreign Service Officer with the US State Department. He focused much of his career on issues of democracy, human rights, and rule of law. In that capacity he helped lead US embassies in Africa as Charge d’Affaires in Zambia (2020-2021), South Africa (2019), and Zambia (2013-2014). He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Nigeria (2016-2019) and briefly Acting Deputy Chief of Mission in Sudan (2012). He also served in Vietnam, Guatemala, and Panama; as desk officer for Myanmar, Oman, and Bahrain; in the State Department Operations Center; and as a fellow in the US House of Representatives.

An ordained United Methodist minister and a former journalist before becoming a diplomat, he earned a bachelor’s degree in news-editorial journalism from the University of Missouri, a diploma in ecumenical studies from Trinity College/University of Dublin, and master’s degrees in divinity (social ethics) and international relations.

David and his wife Diane have two children, Paul and Sarah. David is a rabid sports fan (especially of the Kanas City Chiefs football team and men’s and women’s basketball). He loves travel, Marvel movies, and U2 and Coldplay. He is a junkie of the American electoral college system and volunteers for political campaigns as a canvasser.

Kinder Institute Senior Fellow, lawrence.goldman@spc.ox.ac.uk
Lawrence Goldman was born in London and graduated in History from the University of Cambridge (Jesus College). He studied American History at Yale as a Harkness Fellow and returned to Britain to do his doctoral work at Cambridge’s Trinity College, focusing on the history of social science in the Victorian period. He spent 29 years as a university lecturer at the University of Oxford where he was Fellow and Tutor in History at St. Peter’s College and where he taught modern British and American History. He was then Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. From 2004-2014 he was the Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a compendium of the most significant figures throughout British history and the longest work in the history of the English language, and he has authored books on Victorian social science, the history of workers’ education in Britain, and the life of political thinker and historian R.H. Tawney, among other topics. He most recently edited, Welfare and Social Policy in Britain Since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris. He is a Senior Research Fellow of St. Peter’s College and joins the Kinder Institute as a Senior Fellow in the new M.A. program in Atlantic History and Politics.

Kinder Institute Distinguished Faculty Fellow, argc5f@missouri.edu
Alan Gibson is Professor of Political Science at California State University, Chico. His focus is American political thought, especially that of the American founding. Gibson has held fellowships from the International Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville, Virginia, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published articles in, among other journals, American Political Thought, Polity, History of Political Thought, and The Review of Politics. Gibson is the author of two books on the historiography of the American founding, both published by University Press of Kansas, and he is currently working on a study of the political thought of James Madison, tentatively titled James Madison and the Creation of an Impartial Republic. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame.