David C. Ward is an historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others. With graduate degrees from Warwick University and Yale, he is the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (2004) and (with Jonathan D. Katz) Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010). His exhibition Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets opened at the NPG in Autumn 2012. His pamphlet of poems Internal Difference was published by Lintott Press in 2011 and his verse was anthologised in New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011).