Nancy MacLean

Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and the award-winning author of several books, including Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan; Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace; The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents; and Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present. She also served the editor of Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism.

Her scholarship has received more than a dozen prizes and awards, and been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships Foundation.

Her most recent book, about which she will speak, is Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.  Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The Guardian said: “It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century.” Published this past June, Democracy in Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award, the winner of the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book of particular scholarly or journalistic quality and relevance to the current historical moment, and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs. The Nation magazine named it the “Most Valuable Book” of 2017.