Remaking Revolution

Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (PhD, Stanford University) is a professor of history at California State University, San Marcos, where she is a past winner of the statewide CSU Wang Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching. She is a scholar of the French and Haitian Revolutions and of depictions of slavery and of colonialism in film and in video games. Her previous publications include The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (UC Press), Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge), and Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (UP Mississippi). Her most recent projects are about the video game Blackhaven (2021), which centers on an HBCU student interning at a plantation museum, and Carolyn Lougee’s The Would-Be Gentleman (1985), a pioneering computer game focused on 17th-century France. 

Dr. Jennifer Tsien grew up in in the New Orleans area and attended Tulane as an undergraduate before completing her PhD at Princeton. She is now professor of French literature at the University of Virginia. She is the author of two books about Enlightenment aesthetics: Voltaire and the Temple of Bad Taste and The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France. More recently, Tsien has turned to Louisiana as an area of research. Her latest book, Rumors of Revolution: Song, Sentiment, and Sedition in Colonial Louisiana, demonstrates the ways in which people on both sides of the Atlantic protested imperial policies. Currently, she is writing a book entitled Secrets of New Orleans, which deals with misrepresentations of the city in popular culture and how some Louisiana-based creators such as Anne Rice and Beyoncé have taken back control of the narrative. Aside from academic work, Tsien has also created one graphic novel, The Life of the Marquise de Pompadour, and is currently working on a graphic history of early New Orleans. 

Dr. Ted Widmer is the author of The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text (Library of America, 2026), Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington (Simon and Schuster, 2020), and eight other works of American history. A former presidential speechwriter in addition to a historian, he has taught at the City University of New York, Brown, Harvard, and Washington College, where he was the founding Director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. In 2025–26 he was a visiting fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022.