James G. Basker

James G. Basker is president and CEO of the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University. As president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute since 1997, Basker has overseen the development of major history education initiatives, including a national network of affiliate schools, teacher seminars, traveling exhibitions, digital archives, the Hamilton Education Program, and the National History Teacher of the Year Award.

Basker has served as project director for several history exhibitions, including Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America (2004–2005) and John Brown: The Abolitionist and His Legacy (2009–2010) at the New-York Historical Society, and Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation at the Morgan Library (2015). He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, a former fellow of the American Antiquarian Society, and a former trustee of the New-York Historical Society. He serves on the boards of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Board of Marymount School, and the Board of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars.

Basker was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He taught for seven years at Harvard University before coming to New York. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, Cambridge University, and Rogue Community College in Oregon. Since 1985 he has led academic programs for high school students at Oxford, most recently as academic director for “Oxford Academia,” based at University College.

His publications include Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (2002), Early American Abolitionists (2005), American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (2012), Black Writers of the Founding Era (2023), and The Witnesses: Fifty Historic Anti-Slavery Poems, 1695–1865 (2024).