Bruce Cole, the eighth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001. As NEH chairman, Dr. Cole has launched We the People, an initiative to encourage the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. Under his leadership, the Endowment is also spearheading the application of digital technology to the humanities through its new Office of Digital Humanities. Dr. Cole came to the Endowment from Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was Distinguished Professor of Art History and Professor of Comparative Literature. He has written fourteen books, many of them about the Renaissance. His most recent book is The Informed Eye: Understanding Masterpieces of Western Art. He has received nine honorary degreed, and this year was decorated Knight of the Grand Cross, the highest honor of the Republic of Italy.

Shearer West is Professor of History at the University of Birmingham and also the Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom. She is a specialist on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art and the author of a number of books and articles, including Portraiture with Oxford University Press.

Barbara Bays has been at the Endowment for five years and has worked on the Picturing America project since its inception. Before coming to NEH, she taught art history for many years at Ohio University and continues to teach summer classes for Ohio University in Italy on Ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque art. She will be speaking today on the Picturing America project.

Evelyn Welch is the programme director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council strategic programme, Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects. She is also Academic Dean of Arts, Queen Mary University of London, and Professor of Renaissance Studies. She is the author of Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale, 2005), and her current research concerns fashion and material culture in Renaissance Europe.

Wilfred M. McClay, Professor of History, has been SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga since 1999. He is Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program of Princeton University. He has served since 2002 as a member of the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of many books, including Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (published in 2007) and The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, which won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians.

Laurie Norton Moffatt is director and CEO of the Norman Rockwell Museum. She is a leading Rockwell scholar and authored the catalogue raisonné, Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue. During her tenure, Ms. Norton Moffatt oversaw the expansion of the Norman Rockwell Museum and has invited national reconsideration of Norman Rockwell in the American art history canon and initiated discourse on the role of American illustration in the nation’s visual culture. She is the founding vision behind the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, a scholars’ research program of the Norman Rockwell Museum. In recent years, Ms. Norton Moffatt has broadened the vision of the Museum beyond its gallery walls. The Norman Rockwell Museum is now the leading organizer of illustration exhibitions and has developed an active traveling exhibition program across the nation.

Gervase Rosser is the head of the department of art history in the University of Oxford and the Academic Partner of the Public Catalogue Foundation. Dr. Rosser was trained as a historian at the Universities of Oxford and London, and as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute. He has researched extensively in the fields of medieval history and of medieval and Renaissance art and visual culture. His current work is concerned with statues and pictures reputed to work miracles. In collaboration with Dr Jane Garnett he is writing a study of cults of miracle-working images in Italy and the Mediterranean world, from the Middle Ages to the present day. His research and publications have also been focused on the cultural history of medieval and Renaissance towns and cities, including aspects of architectural and religious patronage. A further research strand concerns ideas of sight in The Divine Comedy of Dante.