Love All: Panelists and Moderators

Sandy Alexandre’s research spans the late nineteenth-century to present-day black American literature and culture. Her first book, The Properties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching (Mississippi 2012), uses the history of American lynching violence as a framework to understand matters concerning displacement, property ownership, and the American pastoral ideology in a literary context. For example, in one chapter—on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)—she asks readers to consider the gendered implications of seeing lynching iconography itself as a form of owned property.

T. Dionne Bailey is an Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University, where she specializes in African American women's history, carceral studies, southern history, and feminist theory. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute. Her research on the history of crime and punishment in Parchman Prison earned her the Franklin L. Riley Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society. In addition to coediting the Southern Cultures special issue, “The Abolitionist South,” she is currently finalizing her first book-length manuscript, “Daughters of Jim Crow’s Injustice: Mississippi, Mass Incarceration, and the Business of Black Women’s Bodies at Parchman Penitentiary, 1890-1980.” Her work continues to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and the American carceral state.

Laura Baker is Senior Editor for the Julian Bond Papers Project. She has a PhD in American literature, writing and teaching about personal narrative, race, and labor in American literature. She's worked in higher education, educational publishing, and software development.

Prior to joining the Julian Bond Papers Project, she's contributed to several documentary editing projects, including Founders Online, the National Archives initiative to make early American presidential letters available to the public in one location. 

Lyndsey P. Beutin is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research focuses on the politics of the public memory of slavery and contemporary social movements. She is the author of Trafficking in Antiblackness: Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Canadian Communication Association and the 2024 Shepherd Book Prize in the Humanities from McMaster. She has held fellowships at the African American Studies department at Princeton University and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Nicole Burrowes is an Assistant Professor in the department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.  She also serves as Associate Director for the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies. She is a scholar of the African Diaspora, with a focus on 20th century Caribbean and African-American history. Her interests include social movements, racial capitalism, Black Internationalism, and the politics of solidarity. Her book, Seeds of Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana, explores the historical possibility of a movement forged by those at the edges of empire in the midst of economic, political, and environmental crises, and is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in July 2026. Dr. Burrowes was a pre-doctoral fellow in the Carter G. Woodson Institute in 2015. 

Mrinalini Chakravorty received her PhD in English with a certificate in Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine.  She specializes in postcolonial studies, history of the novel, and queer theory.  She is particularly interested in coloniality and discourses of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Her first book, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary(Columbia UP, 2014) explored the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature. The book argues that stereotypes about South Asia (depicted as riven by hunger, overpopulation, filth, slum, death, migrancy, terror and outsourced labor) are crucial to how the crises of liberal development in this region are relayed through fiction and understood beyond its borders. She is now writing her second book,The World Republic of Queer Letters which details the dispersion of sexual self-fashioning in novels from the modernist period to the present to show how ‘world literature’ has overlooked sexuality as a site of a lively traffic of exchanges.  

I acquire books on Africa and the African Diaspora. My list seeks texts that explore African and Afro-diasporic cultural practices and quotidian life in the contemporary period by connecting them to historical, economic, and political causes. Books on racialization in Africa and its Diaspora, Black colonial and postcolonial life, Black/Afro-feminisms and womanisms, Black transnationalism and international connections, Black queer life and theory, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American politics and identities, Black disability studies, and contemporary Black arts and cultures in the U.S. South are of particular interest.

I hold a B.A. in Political Science and Latina/o Studies from Northwestern University and an M.A./Ph.D. in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Before her UCONN appointment, Dr. Cooper Owens simultaneously directed the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a medical humanities program at the University of Nebraska. During that time, she was the only Black woman in the country who served as director of a medical humanities program. An award-winning scholar and activist, she is  a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Research Fellow, and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. Most recently, Dr. Cooper Owens was awarded ASALH’s Carter G. Woodson Scholar Medallion Award. Time Magazine named her as one of the country’s “best historians.” Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology won a Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. It has been translated into Korean.

Mary Ellen Curtin is currently a professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University in Washington DC.  She earned her PhD in history from Duke University and wrote much of her first book, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (University Press of Virginia, 2000), a social and political history of convict leasing, as a fellow at the Carter G Woodson Institute.  She served as a consultant for the PBS documentary Slavery by Another Name, (2012). Her latest book, She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) won the Liz Carpenter Award for the best book on Texas women given by the TSHA. In the spring of 2025, Dr. Curtin taught at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and Professor Emerita of English, received her Ph.D. from Boston University. Her research areas are African American and Southern literatures. Her books include: Faulkner’s “Negro": Art and the Southern Context, Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature, and Understanding Alice Walker.