Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Women of Fire and Spirit: History, Faith and Gender in Roho Religion in Western Kenya and is currently completing a manuscript on Islam in western Kenya during the colonial period. Cindy’s scholarship concentrates on the interaction between indigenous religions and the two major missionary traditions embraced by Africans: Christianity and Islam.
Laura Helton is an Associate Professor of English and History at the University of Delaware, where she teaches African American print culture, archival theory, and public humanities. Her award-winning first book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores the emergence of African American archives and libraries in the early twentieth century.
Graham is from 4 generations of educators and storytellers. She attributes the starts of her academic career to the discovery of her late father's battered copy of The Negro Caravan and a Royal typewriter. Founding Director of the History of Black Writing (HBW), and recipient of over $3,500,000 in external funding, her research is tied directly to the recovery, preservation, and recirculation of understudied texts and authors, supported by national and international collaborations.
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 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.
