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 Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers: Black Organizing and the Press for Freedom and 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.
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.
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.
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.