ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- The organization that operates one of the presidential homes in the area has added two new trustees to its board.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced Monday that Dr. Danielle Allen of Harvard University and the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, a former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge for the Fourth Circuit are new board members.

“At Monticello, we challenge a diverse public to better understand our country through rich, rigorous, site-based history and the experience of civic engagement,” said Dr. Jane Kamensky, who left Harvard to become president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation earlier this month. “Our new trustees are students of the nation’s founding and champions of democracy. They have spent their careers dedicated to scholarship and public service. Their track records of working across political divides make their engagement with Monticello’s work especially welcome as we embrace the generational opportunity of 2026: the 250th anniversary of the founding of this great nation.” 

According to a release, Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard where she teaches political philosophy, ethics and public policy.

She is also the director of the Democratic Knowledge Project and of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation.

Allen is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Her most recent book is Justice by Means of Democracy.

Allen and Kamensky have worked together in the past on Educating for American Democracy, with the aim of transforming the teaching of history and civics across the country.

Luttig is a University of Virginia School Law graduate who was appointed to a federal bench in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush.

Along with serving in the U.S. Attorney General’s Office during that Bush presidency, he also served under President Ronald Reagan and was a law clerk for then-Judge Antonin Scalia.

Luttig currently works as a special adviser to the Coca-Cola Company, and he previously worked for the Boeing Company.