David Blight

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, Yale President Peter Salovey appointed him as chair of the Yale and Slavery Working Group. With his Working Group colleagues, Blight authored the book "Yale and Slavery: A History," a narrative study of Yale’s historic involvement and associations with slavery and its aftermaths, published by Yale University Press in February of 2024. He is the immediate past president of the Organization of American Historians (2024-2025).

Blight previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University, and Amherst College. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom"; "American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era"; "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory"; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the 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. His lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era at Yale is available online.

Blight has always been a teacher first. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan.