Yesenia Barragan
Assistant Professor of History | Rutgers University
Yesenia Barragan is a historian of race, slavery, emancipation, and social movements in Afro-Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Americas and an ethnographer of late capitalism. She is an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Yesenia is the author of Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Cambridge, 2021), which explores the process of gradual emancipation in the majority-Black Pacific lowlands of Colombia, and Selling Our Death Masks: Cash-for-Gold in the Age of Austerity (Zero, 2014), a surrealist ethnography of cash-for-gold shops in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. Freedom’s Captives is the winner of the 2022 Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history from the American Historical Association and the 2022 Best Book Award for the 19th Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Michael Jiménez Prize for the Colombia Section of LASA. She is the Principal Investigator of “The Free Womb Project,” a multilingual digital collection of gradual emancipation laws across the eighteenth and nineteenth century Atlantic World, and convener of the interdisciplinary “Slavery and Freedom Studies Working Group” of the Scarlet and Black Research Center at Rutgers University. With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yesenia is currently embarked on her next book project, A Country of Their Own: African Americans and the Promise of Antebellum Latin America.
Christopher Bonner
Associate Professor of History | University of Maryland
Christopher Bonner specializes in African American history and the nineteenth-century United States. He is the author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. Prof. Bonner is currently at work on a project considering how enslaved people navigated commercial networks as they sought to purchase freedom in the early nineteenth century.
John Clegg
WEB Du Bois Fellow | Hutchins Center for African & African American Research | Harvard University
John Clegg holds a PhD in Sociology from NYU and was a member of the University of Chicago’s Society of Fellows. He works on the roots of mass incarceration in the United States and the comparative political economy of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world.
Reena N. Goldthree
Assistant Professor of African American Studies | Princeton University
Reena Goldthree is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she is also a faculty affiliate with the Program in Latin American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University and her B.A. from Columbia University. A historian of the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, she studies social movements, labor, gender, and migration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her forthcoming book, Democracy Shall be no Empty Romance: War and the Politics of Empire in the Greater Caribbean, reveals how the crisis of World War I transformed Afro-Caribbeans’ understanding of, and engagements with, the British Empire. Goldthree currently serves as Chair of the Caribbean Studies Section of the Conference on Latin American History and has previously been on the Executive Board of the Coordinating Council for Women in History.
Alexander Gourevitch
Associate Professor of Political Science | Brown University
Alex Gourevitch is a political theorist who works on the relationship between work and freedom. He is currently working on a book on the right to strike and a book on the idea of shared labor socialism. His first book was From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth.
Sean Griffin
Adjunct Assistant Professor | Manhattan College
Sean Griffin received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2017. His forthcoming book, The Root and the Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790-1860, offers a critical re-evaluation of the relationship between the early labor movement and the abolition of slavery, and unearths new evidence highlighting the radical origins of political antislavery. He has won numerous awards, including fellowships from the NEH-Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Antiquarian Society. He currently teaches history at Baruch College and Manhattan College in New York City.
Sarah Gronningsater
Assistant Professor of History | University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Gronningsater is an assistant professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with a particular interest in slavery and abolition. She works at the intersections of legal, political, constitutional, and social history.
Elizabeth Herbin-Triant
Associate Professor of Black Studies and History | Amherst College
Elizabeth Herbin-Triant is an associate professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College and a 2022-23 Radcliffe Institute fellow. Her research combines the fields of African-American history and the history of capitalism. Herbin-Triant’s book project “Spindles and Slavery: Abolitionists, Anti-Abolitionists, and the Business of Manufacturing Cotton Grown by the Enslaved” examines antebellum Lowell, Massachusetts—a place deeply tied to the South’s “peculiar institution” and shaped by competing currents of antislavery activism and anti-abolitionism. Through an examination of the economic, political, and social ties connecting investors in Lowell’s textile factories to enslavers in the South, this project explores how some northerners helped to support the institution of slavery even as others—including fugitives from slavery residing in Lowell—worked to bring an end to slavery. Herbin-Triant is the author of Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods (Columbia University Press, Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism, 2019).
Anton Jäger
Postdoctoral Researcher | KU Leuven
Anton Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Philosophy at the Catholic University of Belgium. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, and is currently working an intellectual history of the late nineteenth-century Populist movement.
Matthew Karp
Associate Professor of History | Princeton University
Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard, 2016) explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. This Vast Southern Empire received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, the James Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Karp is now at work on a book about the emergence of anti-slavery mass politics in the United States, and in particular the radical vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s.
Kate Masur
Board of Visitors Professor of History | Northwestern University
Kate Masur is the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history, won the John Nau Book Prize, and was named a New York Times critics’ pick for 2021. She recently completed, with a team of students and staff at Northwestern, the web exhibit, “Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice”, which is part of the Colored Conventions Project. Masur has written extensively about the Reconstruction era and has collaborated with museums and other public institutions including the National Park Service, for which she coauthored a major study. Her first book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C., was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. She has won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She currently co-edits the Journal of the Civil War Era and is working with illustrator Liz Clarke on a graphic history of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., region.
Isadora Moura Mota
Assistant Professor of History | Princeton University
Isadora Moura Mota is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2017 and has also taught at the University of Miami. Her scholarship focuses on slavery in Brazil and the Atlantic world, abolitionism, literacy, and the African diaspora to Latin America. Mota’s book Freedom’s Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her work appears in the Hispanic American Historical Review and Slavery & Abolition, among others.
James Oakes
Distinguished Professor and Graduate School Humanities Professor | The Graduate Center, CUNY
James Oakes in the author of numerous books and articles on slavery, antislavery, and emancipation in the United States. He received his Ph.D. from Berkeley and has taught at Purdue, Princeton, Northwestern before joining the faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently writing a general history of the American Civil War.
Ariel Ron
Glenn M. Linden Assistant Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era History | Southern Methodist University
Ariel Ron is the Glenn M. Linden Assistant Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era at Southern Methodist University. He is a historian of nineteenth-century U.S. politics and economic development, paying particular attention to the dynamics of northern agriculture and the political economy of slavery in the decades of the Civil War era. Ron examines these topics within the broader frameworks of nationalism, state formation, party politics, systemic racism and the history of economic thought. Ron’s new book, Grassroots Leviathan: Northern Agricultural Reform in the Slaveholding Republic, will be out in fall 2020 with Johns Hopkins University Press.
Manisha Sinha
James L. And Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History | University of Connecticut
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2022. She received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She received the Chancellor’s Award from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and featured in The New York Times 1619 Project. Her recent book, the multiple award winning The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) was long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. She is the recipient of numerous awards including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and two from the Mellon Foundation. In 2018, she was a visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot and in 2021, she received the Pennington award from the University of Heidelberg. She is currently writing a book on the reconstruction of American democracy and capitalism under contract with Liveright (WW Norton).
Amy Dru Stanley
Professor of History | University of Chicago
Amy Dru Stanley is a history professor at the University of Chicago, where she works on the history of slavery and emancipation, law, political economy, human rights, labor, and gender. She is especially interested in the historical experience of moral problems. She is completing a book titled The Antislavery Ethic and the Spirit of Commerce: An American History of Human Rights (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She was the jury chair for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in history. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Jacobin, The Nation, and Dissent Magazine as well as in academic journals, such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. Her book From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, the Avery O. Craven Award, and the Morris D. Forkosch Award. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, from institutions including the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Museum of American History.
Lenora Warren
Assistant Professor | Cornell University
Lenora Warren is a scholar of Early American and Early African American Literature with a focus on literatures of abolition, insurrection, and the politics of resistance. Warren received her B.A. at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and her PhD at New York University. Her book Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, And Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1798-1886 was published with Bucknell University Press in 2019. Fire on the Water tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Her work has also appeared in Atlantic Studies, XVIII, New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, Literary Imagination, and Readex Report. She is currently working on a book on the legacy of Phillis Wheatley in works of Black women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between artmaking, joy, and resistance.
Wendy Warren
Associate Professor of History | Princeton University
Professor Wendy Warren specializes in the history of colonial North America and the early modern Atlantic World. Professor Warren’s first book, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America explored the lived experience of chattel slavery in seventeenth-century New England. She is currently writing a book about colonial prisons.
Sean Wilentz
George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History; Professor of History | Princeton University
Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written numerous award-winning books and articles including, most notably, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Peter Wirzbicki
Assistant Professor of History | Princeton University
Peter Wirzbicki is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. He is an intellectual historian of Nineteenth-Century United States. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between American intellectual life, political movements, and cultural expression. Wirzbicki ‘s first book, Higher Laws: Black and White Transcendentalists and the Fight Against Slavery examines how Transcendentalist ideas influenced the political strategies, ideologies, and struggles of the abolitionist movement. He is currently working on a second book project that will examine how American intellectuals in the 18th and 19th centuries debated the relationship between democracy and slavery. It will examine ideas of democracy as they developed in the crucible of a slave-nation.
Corinna Zeltsman
Assistant Professor of History | Princeton University
Corinna Zeltsman is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, which explores how printers’ negotiations with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship. She is currently working on her second book, a political, material and environmental history of paper in 19th- and 20th-century Mexico.
Angela Zimmerman
Professor of History | George Washington University
Angela Zimmerman is a professor of history at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on revolutions and empires in the United States, West Africa, and Europe. She is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (2001) and Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010). She has also edited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (2016). She is currently writing a history of the American Civil War as an international revolution.