Co-Founder 

Jerrold Keilson, a historian by training, is a development professsional with more than 40 years of experience in the field.  He’s held senior positions managing large portfolios of USAID-funded projects in education, training and capacity building, and public diplomacy and exchange programs. He’s managed business development divisions for major USAID contractors and NGOs. For fifteen years he taught international development management at American University, and co-edited a book, The Practice of International Development, with Dr. Mike Gubser. Early in his career Jerrold was a State Department foreign service officer who served six years overseas.

Director, Research and Collections

Hunter Swanigan is a Masters student at the University of Arkansas studying Agricultural Economics and International Rural Development. He brings over four years of Business Development experience for U.S. Government and private sector funding opportunities, including large-scale bids for USAID, CDC, MCC, and DoD. His work spans health systems strengthening, nutrition, and food security. He has also conducted field-based evaluations and feasibility studies with Catholic Relief Services in Rwanda and Benin, and supported donor strategy and pipeline research at Church World Service, iDE, and Share Our Strength.

Hunter’s academic background includes a B.S. in Agricultural Business Management with a minor in International Economic Development from the University of Arkansas, with additional research on the economics of food security in Mozambique and sugar cane production in Eswatini. Hunter has additional training in USAID compliance and nutrition-sensitive agriculture.

Co-Founder

Michael Gubser is a professor of history at James Madison University. His research focuses on international development, intellectual history, and modern Europe. He is also an international development practitioner who has worked as a program evaluator and proposal writer for several foreign aid organizations. He is currently completing a book entitled Their Future: A History of Ahistoricism in International Development; and he co-edited the book The Practice of International Development (Routledge, 2018) with Jerrold Keilson. He is also the author of two books of European history: The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe (Stanford: 2014) and Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Wayne State, 2006).

When he is not doing the things mentioned above, he is usually working on his next musical or musical theatre project: https://www.mikegubser.com/

Director, Research and Collections

Penelope Kogan is a Masters student studying International Development with a concentration in refugees, forced migration, and belonging. During her undergraduate career, she studied the social psychology of genocide, collective victimization, resistance, and social change. 

Her previous experience includes interning in the Seminars department at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies, assisting the creation of the Upstander Project’s educators guide to teaching about the genocide of Indigenous Americans, and working in the Executive Office at InterAction.