Scholars

Dr. Lester Brooks began his teaching career at Anne Arundel Community College in 1982 after completing degrees in history from Ohio State University, Howard University and finally his doctoral degree at Indiana University.  Dr. Books was one of the first African American professors to integrate AACC and grew to be one of the most beloved and respected “elder statesmen” before his retirement in 2023.  Dr. Brooks has worked as a consultant with the Maryland State Department of Education since 1994, an early American scholar with the Maryland Council for Civic and History Education, a We the People state and national judge since 1998. and a scholar at the Governors’ Academy in American Government for six years. Dr. Brooks is currently serving as scholar in residence at the Center for Civic Education.  He continues to lecture teachers at the James Madison Legacy Project Institutes and the Civics Empowers All Students institutes.  

Dr. Francene Engel received her PhD in political science from the University of Southern California. She has taught courses in American constitutional law, civil rights and liberties, constitutional theory, women and the law, and American government at the University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Baylor University, and University of Southern California. She also was a Fulbright Scholar teaching in Poitiers, France. In addition to her many years of teaching and research, she has worked in civic and history assessments, including serving as the lead item developer for the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress Exam (NAEP) in Civics. Dr. Engel also has served as a civics education consultant for the Maryland State Department of Education, Virginia Civics, James Madison’s Montpelier, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Educational Testing Services, the American Institutes for Research, and the Center for Civic Education. She enjoys the challenge of making complex constitutional issues understandable to everyone.

Kelly Gray is a professor of History at Towson University, in Towson, Maryland, with a focus on 19th-century America. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary. At Towson, her courses focus on early America, methods of historical research and writing, the history of drug addiction and drug policy in America, and the U.S. Constitution. She has worked since 2021 with the Maryland Council for Civic & History Education, participating in faculty workshops about the U.S. Constitution.
Her book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776–1914 was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. She is currently working on a study of antebellum Baltimore.

Gilda Daniels is an expert on voting rights, has served as a deputy chief in the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Voting Section, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations. She has more than a decade of voting rights experience, bringing cases that involved various provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act and other voting rights statutes. Before beginning her voting rights career, Daniels was a staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights, representing death row inmates and bringing prison condition cases. She was a Root Tilden Scholar at New York University School of Law and her most recent publication is Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression in America.  Her areas of expertise and interest also include religion and democracy. Daniels has served as a scholar for MCCHE since 2024.