Setting Down Liberty: Washington and the Black Experience in the Founding Era (Westport, Connecticut)

Ramin Ganeshram

Ramin Ganeshram is an award-winning journalist and historian and the Executive Director of the Westport Museum for History & Culture in Westport, Connecticut. Ganeshram’s area of study is enslaved and mixed-race people in colonial and Early Federal American history. She spent ten years researching and writing The General's Cook, about Hercules Posey, the chef enslaved by George Washington. 

In 2019, Ganeshram uncovered new evidence about the chef’s post-emancipation, solving a 218-year-old historical mystery. She continues that work today. Ganeshram was a 2022/23 Fellow at the Fred W. Smith Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Saveur. 

She is the author of the upcoming biography on Hercules Posey, Stirring Liberty: How George Washington’s Enslaved Chef Transformed American Cuisine and Cooked His Way to Freedom (Simon & Schuster).

Christina Stetler-Rodriguez

Christina Stetler-Rodriguez is an English Instructor at the Carver Center for Arts and Technology and an adjunct professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County. She earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Goucher College, pursued additional graduate coursework at Towson University, and studied American Culture and Literature through the Harvard University Summer Teacher’s Institute and Extension School. 

She was recently named Maryland's Revolutionary Era Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Center for History and Culture and The Society of the Cincinnati and Institute of the American Revolution. She was a 2025 Teacher Fellow at the George Washington Teacher Institute at Mount Vernon and serves as a Regional Ambassador for Mount Vernon 250, partnering with local museums, historical societies, school districts, and professional organizations to promote study of the American Revolution and the founding era in the Mid-Atlantic region.