Laura Helton, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of History, specializes in American literature and history of the twentieth century with an emphasis on African American print culture and public humanities. Her research and teaching interests include archival studies, material texts, race and memory, gender and sexuality, and the literary history of social movements.
There are 4 generations of educators in my family, and I can go back to at least one member who taught in one-room schools in the early part of the century. They were amazing storytellers, and in my child's mind, I associated being educated with the ability to tell stories to people inside and outside the classroom. Because I was such an avid listener, a reader and extremely curious, I saw early how stories empowered people, imparting wisdom and guiding their actions in one way or another. The more I advanced in my own education, the more I left these stories behind.
Michael Furlough is Executive Director of Hathi Trust. Furlough's research has focused on how libraries and universities develop organizational support for emerging scholarly communication practices, and he has presented work at the Digital Library Federation, the American Association of University Presses, the Charleston Conference, the Bloomsbury Conference, Educause, IFLA and other venues. From 2011-2013, Furlough served as faculty for the ARL/DLF/Duraspace E-Science Institute.
Benjamin Fagan received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and his B.A. from the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation, editor of African American Literature in Transition, 1830-1850, and co-editor of Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image. His work has also appeared in journals such as American Literary History, Civil War History, and American Periodicals, as well as in edited collections focused on the Colored Conventions Movement, Frederick Douglass, and antebellum African American literature.
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 teaching areas include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race, region, and gender. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and Southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction.
Mary Ellen Curtin is a historian of modern African American and women's social and political history. Her first book Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (University Press of Virginia, 2000) investigated the origins of the convict leasing system in Alabama and explored the lives of Black convict coal miners and their communities after emancipation.
Deirdre Cooper Owens believes she was born to be a historian. Born to Gullah/Geechee parents from South Carolina’s Low Country, she was raised around folks who told oral histories of their family members, historical events, and the enslaved. Her mother is the family’s genealogist and her father worked at the National Archives for over 30 years. It was this background in both SC and Washington, DC that nurtured her love of the past. Today, Prof. Cooper Owens is a popular public speaker, writer, and reproductive justice advocate.
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.
My scholarship reflects and informs emerging directions in African Diaspora Studies, with a focus on 20th century Caribbean and African-American history. My interests include social movements, racial capitalism, Black Internationalism, and the politics of solidarity. My 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 2026.