David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. In 2020, he was appointed chair of the Yale and Slavery Working Group, with whom he authored Yale and Slavery: A History (2024), a narrative study of the university’s involvement with slavery and its aftermaths. He served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 2024 to 2025 and previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University, and Amherst College.

Blight has authored or edited a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018); American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2024); Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001); and annotated editions of the first two autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, whom he has studied much of his professional life. Blight is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, Abraham Lincoln Prize, and Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. He writes frequently for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other journals. In 2020, Blight was elected to the American Philosophical Society and awarded the Gold Medal for History by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Blight has always been a teacher first. Early in his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. His Yale lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era is available to the public online.