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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sandhya Shukla is Professor of English and American studies at the University of Virginia, where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. 

Robert Trent Vinson is the Commonwealth Professor of African American & African Studies, Director & Chair of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies at the University of Virginia, and a Research Associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.  He is a scholar and teacher of 19th and 20th century African & African Diaspora history, specializing in the transnational connections between southern Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean.