Karl Gunther is a historian of the English Reformation. He earned his B.A. in Philosophy and History from Wheaton College (IL) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. Gunther’s first book, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525-1590 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) was a finalist for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize and the Runner-up for the American Society of Church History’s Brewer Prize. He has published articles in Past & Present, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Reformation, History Compass, and in volumes on Freedom of Speech, 1550-1850 (2020) and Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation (2021). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2015 and served as President of the Southern Conference on British Studies from 2015-2017. Before joining the Hamilton School in 2023, he was an Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami, where he taught for fifteen years, serving as the department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, the co-convener of the UM Medieval and Early Modern Studies Research Group, and the chair of the UM Faculty Senate’s Student Affairs Committee.

Mark Power Smith is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. He is a political and intellectual historian, with a focus on the Civil War era. His first monograph – Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism before the Civil War (University of Virginia, 2022) – examines how a coalition within the Democratic Party, known as “Young America,” reshaped ideas about American nationalism during the middle of the nineteenth century. He has also published articles in the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of the Early Republic, and American Nineteenth Century History on household government during the sectional crisis, a diplomatic incident in 1853 known as the Koszta Affair, and spiritualism as an element of popular culture in New York during the 1860s. Power Smith has previously been a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University, and then a Junior Research Fellow and lecturer at the University of Oxford.