About Clay
Clay Jenkinson is a public humanities scholar, a writer, a master interviewer and moderator, documentary filmmaker, and a historical impersonator (a Chautauquan). He is the author of 13 books spanning topics from Thomas Jefferson, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Theodore Roosevelt, the literature of pandemics, and his beloved North Dakota. He is frequently featured as an expert commentator on historical documentaries, collaborating with the likes of Ken Burns and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
As a public humanities scholar, Clay travels the country extensively, giving lectures, leading seminars and colloquia, performing historical characters, and participating in documentary film projects. He teaches online humanities courses and leads historically grounded cultural tours in the U.S. and abroad.
As one of the pioneers of the modern Chautauqua movement, Clay portrays Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Steinbeck, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Wesley Powell, among others, for audiences across the nation. For nine years he was the director of the Great Plains Chautauqua (a traveling humanities tent show) and for 17 years of the Great Basin Chautauqua in Nevada. He has performed for wide-ranging audiences, from Supreme Court justices and members of U.S. Congress to elementary school students and incarcerated individuals in the prison system. For his work in the public humanities, Clay has won humanities scholar of the year awards in Kansas, Nevada, and North Dakota, as well as the coveted National Humanities Medal, then known as the Charles Frankel Prize.
He is the creator and host of the widely acclaimed nationally syndicated public radio program and podcast The Thomas Jefferson Hour, which provides the grounding for the new Listening to America initiative. He is the host and moderator of the annual Theodore Roosevelt public humanities symposium at Dickinson State University in western North Dakota, the editor of the Lewis and Clark quarterly journal We Proceeded On, and the founding scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, which is gathering and processing all of the Roosevelt papers in what will become the nation’s first comprehensive digital presidential library. Clay also serves as an editor-at-large for the distinguished online journal Governing.com.
Trained in English Renaissance literature at the University of Minnesota and Oxford where he was a Rhodes and Danforth scholar, Clay is an expert on Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, John Donne, Steinbeck, the tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Great Plains literature, the history of the Nonpartisan League, North Dakota, Homer, and the U.S. Constitution. He has a deep interest in such plains figures as Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, John Neihardt, Mari Sandoz, and Eric Sevareid, who was also one of the inventors of the modern news roundup.
Clay has climbed Mount Whitney and hiked the entire course of the Little Missouri River (Devils Tower to west central North Dakota) twice. He is happiest making loopy auto trips through the American West, hiking, camping, visiting small towns, and exploring not just the Blue Highways but the gravel roads that lead off into the middle of nowhere.
He lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, because he loves the stark Great Plains with its badlands, buttes, spectacular plains rivers, and its silhouetted ridgelines.
Books and CDs by Clay
The Language of Cottonwoods: Essays on the Future of North Dakota (2021)
Donald Trump and the Death of American Integrity: An Autopsy and a Path Forward (2020)
Repairing Jefferson’s America: A Guide to Civility and Enlightened Citizenship (2020)
Bring Out Your Dead: The Literature and History of Epidemics (2020)
Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist in the Arena edited by Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson (2020)
For the Love of North Dakota and Other Essays: Sundays with Clay in the Bismarck Tribune (2012)
The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness (2011)
Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains(2011)
A Free and Hardy Life: Theodore Roosevelt’s Sojourn in the American West (2011)
Becoming Jefferson’s People: Re-Inventing the American Republic in the Twenty-First Century (2005)
Talking Out of Tights: CD of Clay’s Live Comedy Performance at the Roper Theater, Norfolk VA. (2020)
Thomas Jefferson’s America
Cultural Tours
Join scholar and author Clay Jenkinson in exploring America and abroad with our humanities-focused cultural tours and retreats. All tours are customized for small groups to Clay’s exacting specifications, allowing access to experiences unmatched by larger travel companies. Clay provides just the right amount of historical commentary to make the tours richly satisfying, with a continuous effort to put our guests “in the landscape.” From Lewis and Clark’s Montana and Idaho to Jefferson’s Virginia (or France), and more, these tours focus on a central theme while drinking in local culture. We take pride in the fact that many of our tour guests are repeat travelers, returning for another one-of-a-kind adventure with Clay again and again.
Contact Clay
Book or hire Clay for your event or project.