Kevin D. Roberts
Matthew B. Crawford
Joseph Pearce
Kevin D. Roberts was named President of The Heritage Foundation in October 2021. He succeeded former Heritage President Kay C. James as the seventh President in the organization’s 50-year history. In September 2023, Roberts was named President of Heritage Action for America and serves both organizations in a joint role.
Roberts previously served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an Austin-based nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute and the largest state think tank in the nation. Under Roberts’ leadership, TPPF more than doubled in size. He also expanded the Texas think tank’s influence nationwide, opening an office in Washington, D.C., so that TPPF research might better inform federal policy debates.
A lifelong educator, Roberts earned his PhD in American History from the University of Texas. After several years of teaching history at the collegiate level, Roberts in 2006 left the university to found John Paul the Great Academy, a co-ed, K-12 Catholic liberal arts school in Lafayette, Louisiana. Roberts served as the academy’s president and headmaster for seven years.
Matthew B. Crawford is a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author of Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (HarperCollins, 2020); The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015); and Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009), which has been translated into seven languages.
Crawford studied physics at UC Santa Barbara before turning to political philosophy, earning a PhD from the University of Chicago. In addition to his books, he has published many articles on ancient Greek philosophy, neuroscience, and the philosophy of science. His shorter writings have appeared in First Things, The Wall Street Journal, The New Atlantis, The Hedgehog Review, UnHerd, Compact, and on his Substack, Archedelia.
He is often described as a philosopher/mechanic—a PhD who owned his own motorcycle shop. Despite his impressive academic résumé, he has been working on cars since the age of fifteen. In his writings and talks, he offers insightful perspectives on the challenges and pleasures of working with one’s hands.
Joseph Pearce is a native of England and the internationally acclaimed author of many books, which include bestsellers such as The Quest for Shakespeare, Tolkien: Man and Myth, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, C. S. Lewis and The Catholic Church, Literary Converts, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. His books have been published and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Croatian and Polish.
He has hosted two 13-part television series about Shakespeare on EWTN, and has also written and presented documentaries on EWTN on the Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. His verse drama, Death Comes for the War Poets, was performed off-Broadway to critical acclaim. He has participated and lectured at a wide variety of international and literary events at major colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Europe, Africa and South America.
He is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire). He is editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative and Crisis Magazine.