Professor Treul Roberts is the faculty director of the Program for Public Discourse and a Bowman and Gordon Gray Term Professor of political science at UNC. She specializes in American political institutions, with an emphasis on the U.S. Congress. She earned her B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Wellesley College and her M.A and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Sarah’s current work examines the role of previous political experience and anti-establishment rhetoric on the success of congressional candidates and vote choice in the electorate. Other ongoing projects analyze the role of experience and ideology on legislative effectiveness in Congress, how extreme ideological primary challenges influence congressional behavior and the effect of public opinion on congressional outcomes.

Sarah is the recipient of UNC’s Tanner Award for Teaching Excellence, the Chapman Family Teaching Award, Honors Carolina’s Manekin Award for Teaching Excellence, and the department of political science’s Robson Award for Excellence in Graduate Instruction.

Kevin Marinelli (Ph.D., University of Georgia) serves as Executive Director of the Program for Public Discourse and teaches in the Department of Communication. He teaches courses in rhetorical studies, and his scholarship centers on public argument. He has published essays in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Argumentation and Advocacy, including his most recent essay on the emergence of Black Lives Matter. Kevin also leads the Agora Fellows, a group of undergraduate students committed to the study and practice of public discourse in contemporary democracy. Currently, Kevin is investigating practices of rhetorical citizenship.

Carissa Byrne Hessick is the Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland “Buck” Ransdell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she also serves as the Director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project. Her teaching and research interests include criminal law, the structure of the criminal justice system, criminal sentencing and child pornography crimes. Hessick is the author of multiple law review articles, essays and op eds on plea bargaining, prosecutors, Sixth Amendment sentencing rights and criminal statutes. Her work has appeared in the California Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the L.A. Times, the UCLA Law Review and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She founded the Prosecutors and Politics Project in 2018 and also currently serves as the Reporter for the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s Sentencing Standards Task Force.

Hessick received her B.A. from Columbia University. While obtaining her undergraduate degree, she won the 1999 American Parliamentary Debate Association National Championship. Hessick is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and winner of the Potter Stewart Prize for the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals. After graduating from law school, Hessick clerked for Judge Barbara S. Jones on the Southern District of New York and for Judge A. Raymond Randolph on the D.C. Circuit. She also worked as a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City. Before joining the faculty at Carolina Law, Hessick taught on the faculties at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. She also spent two years as a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School.

Christopher “Chris” Clemens is Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has a passion for collaborating and building great things with others. Clemens came to UNC in 1998 from Caltech, where he was a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellow in Astronomy. Previously he was a NASA Hubble Fellow at Iowa State University and received his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin (1994) and a Bachelor of Science in Astrophysics from the University of Oklahoma (1985).

He is a dedicated mentor of graduate students and in 2012 received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring. He leads an active research program in stellar astrophysics, exoplanetary astronomy, and astronomical instrumentation. He led a research team of graduate and undergraduate students to build the facility spectrograph for the 4.1 meter SOAR telescope in Chile, which is operated by UNC in collaboration with national and international partners. Recently, his research team has been using the spectrograph to measure the elemental abundances of exoplanetary debris that falls onto compact stellar remnants known as white dwarf stars. His graduate students were the first to detect and measure Lithium abundances in 10 Billion year old exoplanetary material, providing a new way to trace the cosmological history of that element, which is one of only three formed in the Big Bang.

Donna Gilleskie is a professor in the Economics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned B.A.s in Economics and Mathematics from UNC in 1989, an M.A. in 1992, and her Ph.D., 1994, in economics from the University of Minnesota.

Donna’s research focuses on the health, health insurance decisions, and medical and non-medical care utilization of individuals and how these behaviors impact employment and education decisions and subsequent health over time.

Donna was awarded the international Health Economics Association’s Kenneth Arrow Award for the best published paper on health economics in 1998, Econometrica, 1998. She received the Faculty-to-Graduate Student Mentoring Award from the Carolina Women’s Leadership Council in 2014 and a University-wide Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction in 2019. She served as President of the Southern Economic Association in 2019 and is currently serving as chair of the Economics Department.

Nora Hanagan is a teaching assistant professor of political science. She teaches courses on American political thought, contemporary democratic theory, and environmental political thought. Prior to joining UNC, she served as Managing Director of the Duke Program in American Values and Institutions and taught at both Duke and the University of Wisconsin.

In her research, Professor Hanagan investigates the ethical obligations that accompany democratic citizenship while considering how citizens might fulfill these obligations in societies that are imperfectly democratic. Much of her work puts historical American thinkers—such as Jane Addams and Martin Luther King Jr.—in dialogue with contemporary democratic theorists.

Christian Lundberg is an associate professor in communication and Co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies. His teaching and research interests include theories of the public and public discourse, public speaking, rhetorical theory, debate and deliberation, critical theory, and Cultural Studies. Dr. Lundberg also teaches the First Year Seminar “Think, Speak, Argue,” which focuses on debate and public speaking skills as pedagogical tools and as critical components of democratic life.

Professor Lundberg’s current research focuses on theories of the public as a social and discursive form, and on the animating principles for public discourses and identities. In addition, he has written a number of pieces that unpack forms of discourse constituting specific publics, with special attention to the intersection between public and religious discourse in Islam and Evangelical Christianity.

At the level of specific practices of public discourse and pedagogy, his work focuses on rhetorical theory, and on debate and public speaking as critical democratic forms.

Mark McNeilly is a professor of the practice of marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. He teaches in the areas of marketing and organizational behavior in both the MBA and online MBA@UNC programs. McNeilly served as a global marketing executive and has several years of experience with both IBM and Lenovo in the IT industry. His business background includes branding, strategy, marketing, market intelligence, management, manufacturing and personnel.

McNeilly has authored three books with Oxford University Press, one of which is George Washington and the Art of Business: Leadership Principles of America’s First Commander-in-Chief. He has presented his views on strategy and marketing to corporations; businesspeople in the United States, Europe and Asia; as well as the U.S. Air Force Command and Staff College. He has discussed his ideas on strategy on the BBC, C-SPAN, CNBC’s “Power Lunch” and other TV and radio programs. McNeilly appeared on a History Channel Special on Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” He has been an expert blogger for Fast Company magazine.

McNeilly received his MBA with honors from the University of Minnesota and his BS in finance from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.

Molly Worthen is an associate professor of history at UNC and a freelance journalist. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost, is a behind-the-scenes study of American diplomacy and higher education told through the lens of biography. Her current book project focuses on the history of charisma in America.Her most recent book, Apostles of Reason, examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures.

Worthen teaches courses on North American religious and intellectual culture and global Christianity, and she won the 2017 Tanner Award for Teaching Excellence. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has written about religion and politics for The New Yorker, Slate, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and other publications.

Hayden Graham is a Special Programs Assistant for the UNC Program for Public Discourse. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Political Science, and a minor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.