Gail Cornell

Gail Cornell is an architectural historian, whose research and lectures on the history of architecture have taken her to Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and North Africa numerous times. A graduate of Harvard University's graduate School of Design, Gail has led many tours to Europe for Smithsonian Journeys over the past 20 years. She is an Adjunct Faculty member of New York University and a lecturer on architecture, design and art at NYC's Museum of Modern Art.  As a resident of New York City, Gail volunteers her time as an architectural historian at New York City's historic City Hall.

Janet Duncan Jones

Janet Duncan Jones is Professor of Classics at Bucknell University. She received her B.A. in Latin from the College of William and Mary and her M.A. and Ph.D. in classical archaeology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Janet is an active field archaeologist specializing in Greek and Roman art and architecture, ancient urbanization, ancient technology with a focus on ancient glass production, and environmental history. Her publications focus on ancient technology and the impact of those technologies on ancient landscapes. Her current research focuses on the impact of the Moors in southern Spain on urbanism, architecture, technology, and intellectual history. Janet is full of stories from her extensive travels in the Mediterranean and Middle East and from over 20 years of archaeological field work in Greece at Athens and Corinth, in Turkey at Gordion and Gritille Hoyuk, in Tunisia at Carthage, and in Jordan at el-Lejjun, Humayma, and Aqaba.

Joanne Ferraro

Joanne Ferraro (PhD UCLA) is the Albert W. Johnson Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at San Diego State University.  Her courses cover the ancient Greek and Roman world as well as medieval, Renaissance, and early modern northern and southern Europe. She is especially interested in Europe’s cross-cultural and global connections with greater Asia and the Americas.  Joanne has published books with Cambridge, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins University presses with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Joanne is the General Editor for Bloomsbury Academic’s six- volume Cultural History of Marriage from Antiquity to the Present.  She has lectured on cruises to Northern and Southern Europe as well as the Caribbean for the past decade. Joanne has lived in Europe for extensive periods and has taught European history for 35 years. 

Jodi Magness

Jodi Magness (JodiMagness.org) holds a senior endowed chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism (since 2002).   She is an archaeologist and Past President of the Archaeological Institute of America. She has published 11 books, including Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton University Press, 2019), and dozens of articles. From 1992-2002, Professor Magness was Associate/Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology in the Departments of Classics and Art History at Tufts University, Medford, MA. Professor Magness received her B.A. in Archaeology and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1977), and her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania (1989). Professor Magness specializes in the archaeology of ancient Palestine (modern Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories) in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods. Her research interests include Jerusalem, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient synagogues, Masada, the Roman army in the East, ancient pottery, and ancient Diaspora Judaism. Since 2011, Professor Magness’ excavations at Huqoq in Israel’s Galilee have been bringing to light the remains of a Late Roman synagogue decorated with stunning mosaic floors (http://huqoq.web.unc.edu/).

Adam Tanner

A writer who spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent, Adam Tanner has long studied the impact of colonialism, empire and globalization as a foreign correspondent, author and lecturer, with a special focus on the enduring impact of Europe on the rest of the world. He is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University, where he has been since 2011 as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation, then a fellow at IQSS.

He served as a Reuters news agency correspondent from 1995-2011, including as bureau chief for the Balkans (2008-2011), San Francisco bureau chief (2003-2008), and correspondent in Berlin, Moscow and Washington D.C.  He is one of America's leading experts on privacy and the commercialization of personal information and author of What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data-Lifeblood of Big Business-and the End of Privacy as We Know It (2014) and Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Jan. 2017). 

He has appeared on CNN, Bloomberg TV, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, the BBC and VOA; written for magazines including Scientific American, Forbes, Fortune, Time, MIT Technology Review, the Boston Globe and Slate; and has lectured in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.