Leslie M. Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University and is a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. A graduate of Stanford University (B.A. cum laude) and Cornell University (M.A. and Ph.D.), she is a specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history. She is the author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 and Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States, as well as the co-editor of three additional volumes, including Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining the Boundaries of Black Intellectual History. A recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship, Alexander is the immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and is an Executive Council member of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS).

Shaun Armstead is a historian of twentieth-century Black women’s internationalism She earned her PhD in history from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her work considers the affective and interpersonal dimensions of the National Council of Negro Women’s Afro-Asian and Pan-African solidarities. In so doing, she considers how national identity and misperceptions enabled, undermined, and redirected these collaborative worldmaking endeavors distinct from leftist and nationalist iterations of Black internationalism. The Carter G. Woodson Institute for the Study of African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia has supported her research. The American Council of Learned Studies and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars have also endorsed her work. She will spend the 2023-2024 academic year in-residence at Brown University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Africana Studies. She will then join the Department of History at University of California-Santa Barbara as Assistant Professor of History beginning July 2024.

Keisha N. Blain, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow, is an award-winning historian of the 20th century United States with broad interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She completed a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and is now a Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University. Blain is the author of the highly acclaimed books Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and Until I am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021). She has also edited several collections, including the #1 New York Times Bestseller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 (with Ibram X. Kendi). Blain's latest book, Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy (W.W. Norton, 2024), brings together the voices of major progressive Black women politicians, grassroots activists, and intellectuals to offer critical insights on how we can create a more equitable political future.

Carole Boyce Davies is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce Davies has also published the following critical anthologies: Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Africa World Press, 1986); Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World Press, 1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled Moving Beyond Boundaries (New York University Press, 1995): International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (volume 1), and Black Women’s Diasporas (volume 2). She is co-editor with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho of The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (Africa World Press, 2003). She is general editor of the three-volume, The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008), and of Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment:  Autobiography, Essays, Poetry (Banbury: Ayebia, 2011). She is a past-president of the Caribbean Studies Association which organized under her leadership the first CSA Conference in Haiti in 2016.

Ashley Everson is a PhD student in Africana Studies at Brown University. Ashley earned her B.A. with honors distinction in Social Thought and Political Economy and her  M.A. in Political Science with a graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, political theory, labor history, and Black women’s political histories. Her most recent research seeks to investigate the relationship between Black political mobilization in the Tennessee Valley region and decolonial organizing throughout the African Diaspora during the interwar period.

Joan Flores-Villalobos is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in African Diaspora History from New York University in 2018. She previously taught as Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. Her work focuses on histories of gender, race, and diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book, The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal, was recently published with Penn Press. Her work has garnered support from the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the American Association of University Women, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, among others. At USC, Prof. Flores-Villalobos teaches courses on Afro-Latin America and the African Diaspora, U.S. empire, gender and migration, and the Caribbean.

Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. Her research, writing, and teaching are situated at the intersection of French, francophone, Caribbean, and Haitian literary studies. Her work explores phenomena of border-crossing, marginality, gender, and canon-formation, querying––through rigorous textual study––the shifting categories of ‘center’ and ‘margins’ as they are constituted across the postcolonial Afro-Americas. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. Her published monographs include A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP, 2010). She has edited several collected volumes, including Translating the Caribbean for Small Axe (2015); and The Haiti Exception (Liverpool UP 2016); and The Haiti Reader (Duke UP 2020). She is the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography.

DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and creative scholar. Her most recent book, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, is deemed “urgent” and “luminous” in a starred Publisher’s Weekly review. Hill’s first poetry collection, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, is a powerful narrative-in-verse that bears witness to Black women burdened by incarceration. It was an Amazon #1 Best Seller in African American Poetry, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title, and 2020 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Hill’s other books include The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland,  \Vi-zə-bəl\   \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures). Her digital work, “Shut Up In My Bones”, is a twenty-first century poem that uses remix/pastiche/intertextuality to honor a specific cultural past, while working to construct visions of a better future. Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. She is a Professor of Creative Writing, English, and African American Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Kiana Knight is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her research focus includes black transnational feminisms, black nationalism, and the African Diaspora. Kiana’s most recent research endeavor comprises the Pittsburgh Crafting Democratic Futures Project where she conducts oral histories discussing the history of Black Pittsburgh. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from North Carolina Central University with a B.A. in history. As an undergrad, she participated in research programs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill where she explored her early interest in the gender politics of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Kiana then received her M.A. in history from the University of Pittsburgh. Her master’s thesis evaluates the importance of Spanish translations in the dissemination of Garveyism throughout the circum-Caribbean.

Marius Kothor is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her Ph.D. in history in 2023 from Yale University. She is a specialist in 20th century African history, gender, and Black Internationalism. She investigates these topics in her dissertation, which focuses on women trader’s political and economic contributions to Togo’s independence movement and how Togo’s anti-colonial struggle informed African American discourses on decolonization in Africa. Marius employs a variety of methods in her research including archival research, oral histories, and visual analysis.

Erik S. McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research and teaching interests include the African diaspora, the Midwest, black feminism, black queer theory, black radicalism, urban history, and black masculinity. He is the author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). The book won the 2012 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, as well as the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. He is also the author of several scholarly articles and essays published in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal; African Identities; American Communist History; Biography; Journal of African American History; Journal of West African History; Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International Women of Color; Radical History Review; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Women, Families, and Children of Color among other journals and edited volumes.

Mary Murphy is the Nancy L. Buc '65 LLD'94 hon Pembroke Center Archivist at Brown University. She serves as manager and curator of the  Pembroke Center Archives, which gather the papers of women and gender diverse people connected to Brown, feminist activists in Rhode Island, and feminist and queer theorists in the academy. Previous to Brown, Murphy worked as a manuscripts archivist and administrative librarian at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University. Her career has had a continuous focus on gender and sexuality collections in the United States. 

Kenvi Phillips is the Deputy Director of Collections and Research Services at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. She was previously the Director of Library Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Brown University. She holds a master’s in public history and a doctorate in US history from Howard University.

Melissa N. Shaw is an assistant professor of history at McGill University. Specializing in Black Canadian and North American history and focusing on socio-political history, her research interests include race politics, gender, ethnicity, slavery, and Black British imperial belonging. Shaw’s work and writing have been published in Histoire sociale/Social History, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Journal of African American History, and Race & Class. Her first monograph, tentatively entitled Unblemished Citizenship: Black Canadian Women’s Fight for Racial Justice, 1919-1939, analyzes the understudied community-building activism of women who strategically used grassroots, national, continental, and global Black Diaspora networks to combat anti-Black racism and inculcate intra-racial solidarity and Black pride in Ontario.

Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine is a historian that focuses on Black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. Her book The Revolution Has Come:  Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland was published in 2016. She is co-founder of the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project and has written widely on gender and Black Power. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History and Souls as well as The Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, Colorlines, and Truthout.  She has received awards for her work from the Mellon foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Association of Black Women Historians. She is completing her second book on the intersections between the movement for Black liberation and the movement against the US war as a fellow at Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History. In addition, she is working on biographies of both Angela Davis and Patricia Murphy Robinson. She created @PATarchives on Instagram to spotlight the ways that the items in Black left theorist Patricia Murphy Robinson’s unprocessed home archives reframe the Black Radical Tradition.

Katharina Weygold is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Her research interests include the African diaspora, Black internationalism, U.S. empire, and women’s and gender studies. In her dissertation, Katharina explores African American women’s ideas about Haiti and activism in Haiti during the U.S. occupation of the Caribbean nation from 1915 to 1934. Katharina holds an MA in Public Humanities from Brown and an MA in American Studies from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Before coming to Brown, she worked in civic education and journalism.

Bianca C. Williams is an Endowed Chair in Race, Racism, and Racial Justice and the Matthew D. Branche Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Anthropology at Bowdoin College. She examines race, gender, and emotion in higher education and organizing communities, with a focus on Black women’s affective lives. The investigative thread that binds Williams’ organizing, teaching, and research is the question “How do Black people develop strategies for enduring and resisting the effects of racism and sexism, while attempting to maintain emotional wellness?” She has written about Black women, travel, and happiness; “radical honesty” as feminist pedagogy; white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and campus activism within the Movement for Black Lives; and writing while anxious. Williams is the author of the award-winning book The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Duke U 2018), and co-editor of the volume Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY 2021). She received the 2016 AAA & Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology, and previously taught at the University of Colorado Boulder and CUNY Graduate Center.

Tiana U. Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a postdoctoral fellow in the African American Studies Department at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in State College, PA for the 2023-24 academic year. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas-Austin in 2023. Her research and teaching interests include Black women’s internationalism, Black women’s intellectual history, Third World Feminism, social movements, and solidarity practices of the twentieth century. Her book project, “Revolution and Struggle: The Enduring Legacy of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), 1968–2010,” offers the first comprehensive study of the largest Black-led multiracial feminist group of the 1970s. Tracing TWWA members’ ideas, grassroots activism, and transnational networks, Dr. Wilson’s research restores the international roots of Black Feminism as theorized by African American women.

Angela T. Tate is Curator of Women’s History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Prior to joining the Smithsonian, she worked as curator and public historian in a variety of archives and museums that focused on telling inclusive and expansive stories of the American past. She is a PhD candidate in History at Northwestern University, and was educated at California State University, San Bernardino and Sacramento City College. Her dissertation follows the history of Black women in radio and their involvement in global civil rights movements, with an emphasis on the intersections between celebrity, activism, and feminism. This work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the New York Public Library, and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. Her work has been published in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, and several upcoming publications.