Poet, scholar, and cultural advocate; a nationally recognized thought leader on race, justice, and American society and president of the Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities in the United States.
World-renowned Aboriginal Australian opera singer, composer, playwright and creator of Australia’s first Aboriginal opera.
McDonald is not only the islands’ best-known practitioner of the art of Hawaiian lei making, but she is also its primary scholar.
Maxine Hong Kingston chronicles the lives of Chinese Americans facing the ghosts of the past in present-day America.
“When I decided to become a historian,” recalls Darlene Clark Hine, “the last group I intended to study was black women.” That these words come from arguably the most influential scholar of African-American women’s history reflects the intertwined evolution of a career and field of study shaped by a struggle for recognition and legitimacy.
Irish academic and writer
This actor, playwright and director is also an amalgam of several disparate cultures.
Intan Paramaditha, Indonesian of Sumatran-Sundanese heritage, anticolonial feminist academic and writer based in Australia, is one of the co-founders of Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (The School of Women’s Thought).
Lebanese-Australian poet
No historian has done more to recover the stories of enslaved African-Americans than Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as wide acclaim.