Historian Beverly Gage nominated to National Council on the Humanities

President Joe Biden has nominated Yale historian Beverly Gage ’94 B.A. to the National Council on the Humanities, a board of 26 distinguished private citizens who advise the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the White House announced on April 28.

Gage, a professor of history and American studies and the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy, is one of four individuals nominated to the council, which meets three times a year to review grant applications and advise the NEH chair. National Council members bring expertise and leadership in a range of humanities fields and serve staggered six-year terms. The U.S. Senate confirms the appointments of the president’s nominees.

Gage specializes in 20th-century U.S. political history and is director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, an interdisciplinary program that connects the academic study of history and the humanities with the practice of politics, statecraft, and social change. She is the author of “The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror,” which examines the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. She is currently completing “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century,” a biography of the long-serving FBI director. Gage also writes widely as an essayist and public intellectual, and is a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, for which she has explored subjects ranging from the history of civil-service “independence” to current dilemmas in U.S. foreign policy. Her research on Hoover and the FBI has been featured in documentary films including “MLK/FBI,” “The Bombing of Wall Street,” and “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.”

As director of undergraduate studies, Gage has led an effort to redesign the history major, working with both students and faculty to ensure the vibrancy of study and scholarship in the field at Yale. In 2018, she was elected to serve as the inaugural chair of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate, where she worked to create an effective voice for faculty on campus. She was awarded Yale College’s Sarai Ribicoff Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching in 2009.

The NEH supports research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. Biden’s other nominees to the National Council on the Humanities are Daryl Baldwin, a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma who is executive director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and co-director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages; Genine Macks Fidler, a lawyer, philanthropist, and former Brown University trustee who initiated a virtual summer program for Brown students during the COVID pandemic; and Lynnette Overby, a professor of theater and dance at the University of Delaware and artistic director of Sharing Our Legacy Dance Theatre, who also works with several local, national, and international organizations developing community engagement programs and projects designed to address racial justice issues.