Distinguished Lecturer Edward (Ted) Ladd Widmer, PhD, is a historian, writer, librarian, and musician who served as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House. His latest book is Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington (Simon & Schuster, 2020), and in 2022, he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

Widmer earned an AB in the history and literature of France and the United States, an AM in history, and a PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard University. While at Harvard, he was an editor at the Harvard Lampoon. He was appointed lecturer on history and literature at Harvard from 1993 to 1997.

From 1997 to 2001, Widmer served in the White House as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, foreign policy speechwriter, and senior advisor for special projects, a role that involved advising on matters related to history and scholarship. He later conducted extensive interviews with Clinton during the writing of the former president’s autobiography.

From 2001 to 2006, Widmer was the first director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and served as an associate professor of history at Washington College. While there, he created the George Washington Book Prize, an annual award for the best book on the Founding Fathers. In 2022, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship recognizing his career of exceptional work as a historian, writer, researcher, and educator.

In 2006, Widmer was appointed director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, where he led digitization efforts and raised funds to help preserve Haitian libraries following the 2010 earthquake. From 2012 to 2013, he served as a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Between 2010 and 2015, he helped create and frequently contributed to The New York Times’ “Disunion,” a digital history of the Civil War. In October 2016, Widmer was appointed director of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.