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About the Speakers
Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist. He is the co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the basis for the 2023 film Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan. His current project is a biography of Roy Cohn, to be published by Scribner. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, published in 2021. In 2017 he was appointed Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer of CUNY Graduate Center's Leon Levy Center for Biography. The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames was a New York Times best-seller. He chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, which was a Finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and William Bundy. He won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin). His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. Bird and Sherwin also won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History.
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In 1997 he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; won a 1998 Pfizer Award (for Image and Logic) as the best book that year in the History of Science; in 1999 received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize, and in 2018, the Abraham Pais Award in the History of Physics. His other books include How Experiments End; Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps; and Objectivity (with Lorraine Daston). Among his films are Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma (with Pamela Hogan); with Robb Moss, he directed and produced Secrecy and Containment, about the need to guard radioactive materials for the 10,000 year future. His current research is on the history and philosophy of black holes and, in a second project, on the changing relation of technology to the self.
Elaine Scarry is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her books include Thermonuclear Monarchy, On Beauty and Being Just, and The Body in Pain. She has delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University and the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and in Palo Alto. A member of the American Philosophic Society, she recently received the Zabel award for original writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an honorary degree from Uppsala University in Sweden.