Dr. Joy Asekun is the Acting Dean of Academics at the FBI Academy, where she leads faculty development and instructional standards for the Bureau’s national training programs. Trained as an English Literature scholar with degrees from Lagos State University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Virginia, her intellectual formation was deeply shaped by the mentorship of Professor Deborah McDowell. Dr. Asekun’s career reflects the power of a liberal arts education to inform public service, and she remains committed to mentoring learners across diverse communities.

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. 

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic who works at the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her scholarship and teaching in Africana Studies include expertise on Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean literature, Black girlhood, Haiti, and the diaspora.

Tony C. Perry is Curator of Environmental History at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. At the museum he stewards the Extractive Industries collections and is currently curating an exhibition on Gullah Geechee cultural and environmental heritage. His forthcoming monograph, These Flowers, Those Waters, That Garden: The Environment in the Lives of People Enslaved (UNC), examines the relationship between enslaved people and the nonhuman world in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Alexandria Smith (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality in the Department of African American and African Studies. She works in the areas of Black feminist and queer literature and theory, writing and thinking about the roles of embodiment in life writing and theory, the ways that Blackness interacts with and disrupts conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how gendered discourses are constructed in Black cultural work.

Brian C. Smithson is a cultural anthropologist who studies the audiovisual cultures and religions of West Africa. He is completing a book titled Aesthetics of Praise: Making Movies Religious in Bénin—a story about cash-strapped movie producers, Christian–Muslim animosities, and professional rivalries in Yorùbá-speaking Bénin. The book shows how moviemakers overcome these hurdles by championing Yorùbá indigenous religion, its ethical principles, and its moral demands.