Meet The Team
Adam Domby
Adam Domby is a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His first book, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020), examines the role of lies and exaggeration, in the creation of Lost Cause narratives of the war, as well as their connections to white supremacy. Looking at pPost war pension fraud, Confederate monument dedications, and other myths reveals that much of our understanding of the Civil War remains influenced by falsehoods and racism. Domby Adam has written on a variety of topics including prisoners of war, guerrilla warfare, and genealogy. His current book project At War with Itself, focuses on southerners fighting their neighbors during the American Civil War and examines the legacy of those local fights that civil wars inevitably create. His research centers on the role these conflicts played in three divided southern communities during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Close examination of the social dynamics of these southern communities reveals new insights into why the Confederacy lost, why Reconstruction ended the way it did, and the distinctiveness of southern society, culture, and politics.
Adrian Miller
Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Adrian received an A.B in International Relations from Stanford University in 1991, and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1995. From 1999 to 2001, Miller served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton with his Initiative for One America – the first free-standing office in the White House to address issues of racial, religious and ethnic reconciliation. Miller went on to serve as a senior policy analyst for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. From 2004 to 2010, he served on the board for the Southern Foodways Alliance. In June 2019, Adrian lectured in the Masters of Gastronomy program at the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche (nicknamed the “Slow Food University”) in Pollenzo, Italy. He is currently the executive director of the Colorado Council of Churches and, as such, is the first African American, and the first layperson, to hold that position.
Agnes Arnold-Foster
Agnes Arnold-Forster is a writer, researcher, and historian. She has written, researched, and presented on everything from women's health in today's Britain to the history of cancer; from the 1918 flu pandemic to the well-being of surgeons in twenty-first-century America. She is an expert in the history of Europe, the USA, and Canada, and my research spans the eighteenth century to the present day. She explores societies, cultures, medicine, science, technology, emotions, and the world of work. She is currently writing a book about the history of nostalgia, due to be published by Picador in April 2024.
Akiko Takenaka
Akiko Takenaka specializes in social and cultural history of modern Japan. Her research involves memory and historiography of the Asia-Pacific War, gender and peace activism, and history museums. Her teaching interests include gender, war and society, nationalism, memory studies, and visual culture. Prior to coming to UK, she has taught as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Professor Takenaka's first book, entitled Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (University of Hawai'i Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University), explores Yasukuni Shrine as a physical space, object of visual and spatial representation, and site of spatial practice in order to highlight the complexity of Yasukuni’s past and critique the official narratives that postwar debates have responded to. Her second book project Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Postwar Japan is under advance contract with the University of Hawai'i Press. Her research has been funded by long-term research fellowships by Fulbright and the Japan Foundation. Find her on twitter at @ata225.
Alan Malfavon
Alan Malfavon is assistant professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is a historian of late-colonial and early independent Latin America. His first book, Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Making of Mexico, under contract with the University of Alabama Press, focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its hinterland of Sotavento (Leeward) and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period.
Alejandra Dubcovsky
Alejandra Dubcovsky is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the inaugural fellow in the Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a partnership of The Huntington and UC Riverside that aims to support the future of the humanities. She received her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley. She also has a Masters in Library and Information Science from San Jose State. Her first book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (HUP 2016), won the 2016 Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Her most recent book, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South was released by Oxford University Press in May 2023.
Alexis Coe
Alexis Coe is an American presidential historian and fellow at New America, where she studies the presidency in anticipation of America's 250th. She is the New York Times bestselling author of You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington, now out in paperback. Alexis is the first woman historian to write a biography of Washington in over a hundred years and the only woman in over four decades. She served as a consulting producer on and appeared in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Washington series the History Channel. Her first book, the award-winning Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis, has been optioned. She is working on a third book on young John F. Kennedy for Crown. She frequently appears on live television and in documentaries on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, History, BBC, and PBS. She hosted the podcast "No Man's Land" and co-hosted "Presidents Are People, Too!"
Anna Waymack
Anna Waymack is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's Medieval Studies Program, and was selected as a fellow in Olin Library's Summer Graduate Fellowship for Digital Humanities in 2016. As part of that fellowship, Anna developed digital humanities expertise and produced a public website focused on an aspect of her research, Geoffrey Chaucer and the charge of raptus brought forth by Cecily Chaumpaigne.
Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs, 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her most recent book is On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing, 2021). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation. A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Gordon-Reed served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2010 to 2018. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Bathsheba Demuth
Bathsheba Demuth is a writer and environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern places and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she trained huskies for several years. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, and ecologies intersect. In addition to her prize-winning book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is currently writing a biography of the Yukon River watershed. Demuth is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.
Bill Tsutsui
Bill Tsutsui is an award-winning scholar and teacher, an experienced academic leader, and an outspoken supporter of the public humanities, international education, and more inclusive, accessible colleges and universities. He researches, writes, and speaks widely on Japanese economic and environmental history, Japanese popular culture (especially the Godzilla movies), Japanese-American identity, and issues in higher education. He is highly opinionated about BBQ, proud to have once driven the Zamboni at an NHL game, and slightly embarrassed to be Level 40 in Pokemon Go. Find him at https://www.billtsutsui.com/
Blake Scott Ball
Blake Scott Ball is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Alabama. He joined the Huntingdon faculty in the fall of 2017 after completing his doctoral degree. He has previously taught as an assistant professor at Miles College, as an adjunct professor at the University of North Alabama, and as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. He served as assistant director for the New Summersell Center Public History Initiative at the University of Alabama, and as a graduate assistant for the Alabama Historical Association. An avid writer, he served as editor for the Southern Historian graduate history journal and as a contributor and assistant editor for The Historian behind the History, a collection of oral stories documenting historians’ graduate training and insights into the historical profession, published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014. His book, “Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. You can find him on twitter at @bsb1945
Brett Rushforth
Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery. He recently completed, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804. It will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
Brian DeLay
Brian DeLay is a scholar of 18th- and 19th-century North America, specializing in transnational, borderlands, and Native American histories. Most of his writing explores connections between U.S., Latin American, and Indigenous histories in order to better understand power and inequality in the Western Hemisphere. His first book, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War recovers the forgotten, transnational story of how Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Navajos and other Indigenous peoples shaped the transformative era of the U.S.-Mexican War. He is now working on three interconnected projects about the history of the international arms trade. The first is a book called Aim at Empire: American Revolutions through the Barrel of a Gun, 1750-1825. The book explains how the international arms trade made anticolonial rebellion a practical possibility in British North America; how arms dealers from the newly-independent United States equipped the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish American Wars for Independence; and how privileged control over war material empowered U.S. empire in the trans-Appalachian West. Aim at Empire will be published by W.W. Norton in 2024. The second project is another book under contract with W.W. Norton: Means of Destruction: Guns, Freedom, and Domination in the Americas before World War II.
Christopher Hodson
Christopher Hodson (PhD., Northwestern University, 2004) is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world. He is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford, 2012) and essays in the William and Mary Quarterly, French Historical Studies, Early American Studies, and numerous edited volumes. With Brett Rushforth of the University of Oregon, he has recently completed a book manuscript, also to be published by Oxford, on the intertwined histories of France, West Africa, and the Americas from the medieval period through the age of revolutions. With Manuel Covo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, he is currently producing a translated critical edition of a long-lost first-person account of the Haitian Revolution to be published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press. He has received fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, and has taught as a visiting lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He has served on numerous editorial boards, conference planning committees, and awards committees, and has recently accepted a position on the College Board’s AP U.S. History Exam Development Committee. He is also a volunteer instructor at the Utah State Prison via the Utah Prison Education Project, and serves as an appointed member of Utah’s Higher Education and Corrections Council.
Colin Colbourn
Colin Colbourn, Ph.D., is Project Recover’s Lead Historian and a Postdoctoral Researcher with the University of Delaware. Since 2016, he has managed historical operations including archival research, data management, case analysis, and field investigations. Through these efforts, Project Recover has developed a massive internal archive comprised of thousands of historical reports, maps, and images. As a Postdoctoral Researcher, Colin Colbourn works closely with Mark Moline, Ph.D., co-founder of Project Recover. In this capacity, he develops MIA cases with the team of oceanographers and AUV/ROV experts at the University of Delaware. It is a collaboration that, like Project Recover, relies on mutli-disciplinary expertise to approach the MIA mission from different angles.
Corinne Gressang
Corinne Gressang began as an Assistant Professor of History at Slippery Rock University in the Fall of 2023. She specializes in the history of the French Revolution, but she teaches various courses on Early Modern and Modern European History. She grew up in Western Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate degree in History with a minor in Legal Studies from Grove City College in 2013. From there, she received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2015 and 2020, respectively. She spent three years teaching at Erskine College in Due West, SC as an Assistant Professor before moving back home to Western Pennsylvania to teach at Slippery Rock.
Chelsea Barnett
Chelsea Barnett is a gender and cultural historian whose work explores the representation of masculinities in Australian popular culture, in order to understand the complex and varied ways in which masculinity has made sense in particular historical contexts. Under this broad research aim she engages with feminist and queer theory, the history of sex and sexuality, twentieth-century Australian history, and the history in and of popular culture. Chelsea is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UTS, and is located in the Australian Centre for Public History. In her current project, she is exploring the cultural history of single men, focusing on how Australian film and magazines in the postwar world have represented and made sense of the relationship between men and the expectation of marriage. She is also the author of "Reel Men: Australian Masculinity at the Movies, 1949-1962" (Melbourne University Press, 2019). She has authored academic articles in leading journals including History Australia, Australian Historical Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Chelsea is currently the ECR co-representative for the Australian Historical Association, and is the co-convenor of Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus).
Christina Abreu
Christina Abreu is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Latino/Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the role of race, nationalism, and migration in the Cuban and Spanish Caribbean diasporic communities of the United States with a particular emphasis on popular culture. Her first book, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960, examined the relationship between black and white Cuban musicians and the Cuban and broader Latinx communities of New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s. In her second book, Patria over Profits: The Story of Afro-Cuban Boxing Champion Teófilo Stevenson, she offers a cultural history of the life and times of Afro-Cuban boxing champion Teófilo Stevenson, winner of three heavyweight boxing Olympic gold medals in 1972, 1976, and 1980. In detailing Stevenson’s triumphs in the ring, another more complex and interconnected story emerges about revolutionary Cuba and the island’s Afro-Caribbean connections, race and black athletic activism, Cuban exile culture and politics, and international sports celebrity. Patria over Profits is under contract with the Sport and Society series at the University of Illinois Press.
Craig Bruce Smith
Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.
David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is the co-author of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, out now from Harper Collins. The Boston Globe called it “incandescent and ultimately intoxicating.” Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). Now he works for the University of Minnesota, convincing students that studying history is good for them and good for their careers (it is!).
Drew McKevitt
Drew McKevitt is an associate professor of history at Louisiana Tech University. He recently published a book called Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America. His new book is Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America. His next project examines U.S. workers in foreign-owned manufacturing facilities in the United States since the 1970s. You can find him on twitter at @drewmckevitt or his website, https://andrewcmckevitt.com/
Edda Fields-Black
Edda Fields-Black is a specialist in the trans-national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry during the antebellum period. Fields-Black’s new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford University Press, trade list, February 2024) offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service. This narrative history tells the untold story of the Combahee River Raid from the perspective of Tubman and the enslaved people she helped to free based on new sources not previously used by historians, as well as new interpretations of sources familiar to Tubman’s biographers. It is the story of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service during which she worked as a cook and nurse in Beaufort, SC, and gathered intelligence among freed people and enslaved Blacks. It is the story of enslaved people who labored against their wills on seven rice plantations, ran for their lives, boarded the US gunboats, and sailed to freedom.
Frequently appearing in historical documentaries on the History Channel, PBS, and Curiosity Stream. O’Donnell is also a podcaster and professor at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA.
Elizabeth Jones
Elizabeth Jones holds a PhD in Science & Technology Studies from University College London, a MA in History & Philosophy of Science from Florida State University, and a BA in History & Philosophy from North Carolina State University. Currently, she works at the North Carolina Museum and Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University as the Coordinator for Cretaceous Creatures, a public science project that engages 8th grade science teachers and students across the state in making their own microfossil discoveries.
Elsa Devienne
Elsa Devienne joined Northumbria University in 2019, having previously taught at Princeton University, Université Paris Nanterre, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her research lies at the intersection of urban history, environmental history, and the history of gender, body, and sexuality, with a focus on the 20th century. She is particularly interested in the history of Americans’ intense engagement with their coastlines, from the 19th-century beach-bathing boom until today’s climate crisis and its catastrophic consequences for coastal communities. Her first book, La ruée vers le sable: une histoire environnementale des plages de Los Angeles (Sorbonne Editions, 2020), won the 2021 Willi Paul Adams Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best book on American history published in a language other than English. A translated and updated version with a new epilogue is coming out with Oxford University Press in 2024 under the title Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. She is also the author of several articles published in academic journals in the US and Europe, including in The Journal of Urban History, The European Journal of American Studies, California History, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire and Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales.
Dr. Emily Contois is a scholar and teacher of media, food, health, and identity. Her book, Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media & Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) demonstrates how the food, marketing, and media industries manipulated the concept of "the dude" in order to sell feminized food phenomena to men post-2000. She considers examples such as cookbooks, food TV, yogurts, and weight loss programs. She is also co-editor with Dr. Zenia Kish of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022).
Emily C. Friedman
Emily C. Friedman is an Associate Professor of English at Auburn University and teaches courses on British literature, book history, and game narratives. Trained as a book historian, narratologist, and digital humanist, her work examines the history of cultural production outside of commercial mass media from the eighteenth century to today, from never-published manuscript fiction to emerging media. Now one of the senior scholars and public intellectuals in the field of "Actual Play," a new media form where roleplaying games are performed for audiences, her research on the topic has appeared in multiple academic books and journals, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is a regular contributor to Polygon. She is at work on two book projects on Actual Play: a field-defining history of the form online, as well as a multiauthored critical companion to major Actual Play Dimension 20.
Eric Rauchway is the author most recently of Why the New Deal Matters (Yale University Press, 2021), he writes about U.S. history with a focus on the period from 1933-1945. He is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and has written seven books of history, as well as a novel. He has been on National Public Radio, BBC Radio 4, C-SPAN, and the Black News Channel, among other media, and has written for the Times Literary Supplement, as well as Dissent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications.
Eric Baker
Erik Baker is currently a Lecturer in the History of Science at Harvard University and oversee the senior thesis program for undergraduates. As an associate editor at The Drift, he has been involved since its inception.He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in May 2022, and his dissertation won the 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. His research delves into the modern U.S. work culture and the impact of scientific expertise on workers' self-perception. In his forthcoming book, Make Your Own Job: The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic in Modern America, he explores how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the turbulence of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism. He has contributed articles on labor, politics, and American history to publications such as Harper’s, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, Jacobin, and The Drift, where he has been an editor since its inception.
Evan Nooe
Evan Nooe is an Assistant Professor of History and historian for the Native American Studies Center at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. His book Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South examines how the violent dispossession of the Indigenous South remade the region and white Southerners. Nooe has also published numerous journal articles and essays on the US South, Native American history, violence, tourism, and foodways. His work has appeared in Ethnohistory, Native South, the Southern Quarterly, and the Journal of Tourism History. Nooe also serves as the Book Review Editor for H-AmIndian, as a Content Editor for the Journal of Florida Studies, and on the editorial board for the International Journal of Disney Studies.
George Dehner is a world environmental historian who examines the intersection of humans and disease in the modern era. His first book Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health was published in April 2012 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His second book Global Flu and You: A History of Influenza was published in December 2012 by Reaktion Press. His article “WHO Knows Best? National and International Responses to Pandemic Threats and the ‘Lessons’ of 1976” published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences received the 2011 Margaret T. Lane/Virginia F. Saunders Memorial Research Award by the American Library Association Government Documents Roundtable. He is currently beginning a research project on Legionnaires’ Disease.
Greg Egighian
Greg Egighian is a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University. A historian of both the human sciences and modern Europe, he is particularly interested in how societies grapple with the questions and problems associated with modernity through the vehicles of science, technology, and medicine. His research has largely focused on the nature of power and the relationship between the state, science, and medicine in understanding and managing things such as disability, deviance, criminality, mental illness, and security. He regularly writes articles and present papers on the general history of madness and psychiatry. In recent years, however, his interests have moved into studying the history of supernatural and paranormal phenomena.
Hilary Green
Hilary Green is James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Her first book, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), explored how African Americans and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American education schools during the transition from slavery to freedom in Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama. Her in-progress second book focuses on how African Americans remembered and commemorated the American Civil War and its legacy.
Holly Pinheiro is an Assistant Professor of African American History in the Department of History at Furman University. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. Counter to the national narrative which championed the patriotic manhood of soldiering from the Civil War through the 1930s, his research reveals that African American veterans and their families’ military experience were much more fraught. Economic and social instability introduced by military service resonated for years and even generations after soldiers left the battlefield. He has published articles in edited volumes and academic journals, in and outside of the United States. My manuscript, The Families’ Civil War, is under contract with The University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series. The study highlights how racism, within and outside of military service, impacted the bodies, economies, family structures, and social spaces of African Americans long after the war ended.
Jacob Lee
Jacob Lee is historian of early America and the American West, focusing on colonialism and borderlands and assistant professor of history at Penn State University. His first book, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi embedded intertwined Native and imperial histories in the physical landscape of Middle America, a vast region encompassing much of the central Mississippi River valley. His second project returns to the region, which is a history of the Louisiana Purchase, tentatively titled An Empire Without Bounds: How the United States Conquered the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803, when the U.S. purchased claim to more than 800,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River, it possessed only the most tenuous hold on the region. This project explores the decades of negotiation and compromise, conquest and violence that followed, the processes by which the U.S. established and maintained authority over its western claims, and the ways that Native peoples and colonists limited imperial power in the American West.
Jacqueline Antonovich
Jacqueline Antonovich is a historian of health, medicine, and politics in the United States. She is an Associate Professor in History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, where she also directs the Shankweiler Scholars Medical Humanities Honors Program. She is currently working on a book with Rutgers University Press on women physicians and medical imperialism in the turn-of-the-century American West.
Dr. Jamie L.H. Goodall is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. She also teaches part-time at Southern New Hampshire University in their College of Online & Continuing Education. She is the author of Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020), National Geographic’s Pirates: Shipwrecks, Conquests, and their Lasting Legacy (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2021), Pirates and Privateers from Long Island Sound to Delaware Bay (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2022), and The Daring Exploits of Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2023).
Jeffery Melnick
Jeffrey Melnick is a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Black-Jewish Relations on Trial (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and A Right to Sing the Blues (Harvard University Press, 1999). You can find him on twitter at @melnickjeffrey1
Jennifer McCutchen
Jennifer McCutchen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas. She specializes in Early American History and Native History, with a focus on the themes of gender, power, exchange, and diplomacy. Her current project is an ethnohistorical study of gunpowder in the late eighteenth-century Creek Confederacy
Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History, specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001. Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.
Joel Barnes
Joel Barnes is a historian of the humanities, science, religion and universities. His present research examines the history of relations between evolutionary science and religious belief within Australian higher education, as part of the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project run by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. Before joining the University of Queensland, Joel was a Research Associate in the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. His work at UTS was on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the history of humanities institutions in Australia since 1945, for which he is finalizing a monograph on the humanities disciplines and the idea of the national interest.
John Greenlee
John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces: how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw
Joy Vaughn’s research interests lie in entertainment and social histories, particularly in the post-war period in the United States. For her PhD research project, Vaughn is exploring the extent of Hollywood’s reflection of and influence on the political and cultural climates of the early Cold War period through the propagandising of Christmas films from 1946 to 1961. By exploring the cinematic representations of Americans and their traditions during the Christmas season, the thesis argues that these sentimental films, and other innocuous media of the like, are not simply feel-good media, but rather provide commentary on the world around them. Before pursuing a research degree at UCL, Vaughn completed an MA in History at UCL and an MPhil in Classics at Trinity College Dublin with dissertation titles “Venus in Manhattan: A Study of Gender Relations in Post-WWII New York” and “Reproductive Demonesses: Mental Escapism from Reproductive Failures in the Ancient World,” respectively. Alongside bylines in The Washington Post and Red Pepper Magazine, Vaughn is an active public scholar with appearances on numerous podcasts and radio shows including NPR. Vaughn is also a researcher and co-host on the Impressions of America podcast which explores American politics, culture, and media in the latter 20th century, as well as creator, researcher, and host of the Joy of Star Wars podcast melding themes in American history with those in the Star Wars franchise.
Julia Troche
Dr. Julia Troche (she/her) is an Egyptologist, public historian, and educator who is passionate about making history accessible across barriers. She holds a Ph.D. in Egyptology from Brown University and a B.A. in History from UCLA. Julia is currently Associate Professor at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO. She serves as a Governor for the Board of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and is President, Past Two-Term Vice President, and co-founder of ARCE-Missouri. She is co-chair (since 2024) of the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee as well as the Session Chair (2023-2025) for the Archaeology of Egypt sessions at the ASOR annual meeting. Julia’s first book, "Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt: The Old and Middle Kingdoms" was published in 2021 with Cornell University Press. She is currently working on a book about the god Ptah for Bloomsbury, a textbook (with B. Brinkman) for Routledge, and a series of articles on Egyptomania and Imhotep that she hopes to turn into a public-facing book.
Julio Capó
Julio Capó is a transnational historian whose research and teaching interests include modern U.S. history, especially the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America. He addresses how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. His first book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (UNC Press, 2017), highlights how transnational forces—including (im)migration, trade, and tourism—to and from the Caribbean shaped Miami’s queer past. The book has received six awards and honors, including the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book written on Southern history. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, Radical History Review, Diplomatic History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Modern American History, GLQ, H-Net, American Studies, and several volumes. Capó’s research extends to his commitment to public history and civic engagement. He curated “Queer Miami: A History of LGBTQ Communities” for History Miami Museum (open from March-September 2019) and participated in a National Park Service initiative to promote and identify historic LGBTQ sites and contributed a piece on Miami’s queer past for its theme study. Prior to entering graduate school, he worked as a broadcast news writer and producer, and his work has appeared in several outlets such as The Washington Post, Time, The Miami Herald, and El Nuveo Día (Puerto Rico).
Justin Rawlins is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa. He has an upcoming book from the University of Texas Press called Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance, which you can find on preorder for 40% here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477328507/imagining-the-method/ You can find his website at https://justinowenrawlins.com/ and on twitter at @j_o_rawlins
Karen Cox
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history and has written numerous essays and articles, including an essay for the New York Times best seller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, which was published in April 2021 and won the Michael V.R. Thomason book prize from the Gulf South Historical Association.
Kate Carpenter
Kate Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Princeton University. Before that, she earned a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Master of Arts in History (with an emphasis in public history) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In between, she has been a writer, copy editor, designer, screenprinter, farmers’ market volunteer and communications officer, and occasional history consultant. When she’s not hosting and producing Drafting the Past, she is working on a dissertation about the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the second half of the twentieth century.
Katherine Rye Jewell is Professor of History at Fitchburg State University, where she teaches modern U.S. history. She is a historian of the business and politics of culture in the twentieth-century United States. Her book, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies on the American South) (Cambridge University Press, 2017), explored the intersection of southern culture and politics through industrialists’ responses to the New Deal She turns attention to another kind of business in her new book, Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio, from the University of North Carolina Press. Taking aim at the informal spaces that shaped the music industry since the 1970s, Jewell uncovers how college DJs confronted the politics of culture, higher education, and identity.
Kathleen Belew
Kathleen Belew is a historian, author, and teacher. Kathleen is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned tenure at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she spent seven years. She specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy. Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).
Kathleen Sheppard
Kathleen Sheppard is an associate professor at Missouri S&T in Rolla, Missouri. She is a historian of science who studies the history of archaeology in Britain and the United States. She is the author of the scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray (Lexington Press, 2013), and the newly published correspondence collection between Caroline Ransom Williams and James Henry Breasted from Archaeopress (2018). She is an administrator for the Histories of Archaeology Research Network (HARN) and a contributing editor for Lady Science and Bulletin for the History of Archaeology. She is a mom, triathlete, and wife, improving cook and work-life balance.
Kevin Levin is an experienced and award-winning educator, author, and historian with expertise in high school and college classroom instruction, historic site tours, collaborations with museums, and history teacher training. His research and writing are focused primarily on the history and legacy of the Civil War era. He is the author and editor of three books, including most recently, Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (2019), Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites (2017). He is currently at work on A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, which is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press as well as editing the collected wartime and postwar correspondence of Captain John Christopher Winsmith.
Kevin Rusnak
Kevin M. Rusnak is the Chief Historian of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center History Office, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio. He is responsible for leading the professional research, collection, preservation, analysis, writing, and dissemination of AFLCMC's history and heritage to the organization’s leadership and workforce, as well as to a public audience. Kevin graduated with a degree in History from the University of Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, and subsequently entered the History of Technology graduate program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. His thesis focused on the production of B-29 bombers in Marietta, Georgia, during World War II, while his dissertation explored the development of Air Force and NASA pressure suits and space suits from the 1930s through the 1960s. He spent over four years as a historian at the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where he researched and interviewed dozens of pioneering engineers, managers, and astronauts from the early years of human spaceflight.
Kristalyn Shefveland
Kristalyn Shefveland is an Associate Professor of American History at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville where she teaches classes on the American South, Indigenous and Settler relationships from the colonial era to the present, the American Revolution, and the Atlantic World. Her current research project is a book on historical memory of indigenous peoples in Florida, particularly the town of Vero Beach, on the Indian River. She is also working with students and communities on a local history project- River Cities Oral History- that seeks to capture stories and popular memory of the Ohio and Wabash River Valley settlements.
Laura O'Brien joined Northumbria University in September 2015, having previously taught at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and the University of Sunderland. She completed her PhD at University College Dublin, where she held an Irish Research Council ‘Government of Ireland’ Postgraduate Scholarship, and was a doctoral fellow at the UCD Humanities Institute. Between 2010 and 2013 Laura was an Irish Research Council/Marie Curie Actions COFUND Fellow, based at Trinity College Dublin and the Centre de recherches en histoire du XIXe siècle, Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne).
Lauren Shepherd
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s expertise is in the history of United States higher education from the 20th century to present, especially on the topic of conservatism in the academy. She is an instructor in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans and an IUPUI-Society for US Intellectual History Community Scholar. Shepherd’s first book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars, is out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Her second book manuscript is a historical survey of colleges and universities in the United States since the 1960s.
Lauren Thompson
Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights and public health. She serves as the faculty research fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. She is also part of the faculty at Kennesaw State University as a jointly-appointed Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies. Thompson’s current research focuses on the intersections of medical authority and expertise, women’s health, and public health policy in the birth control and reproductive health movements. She is working on a book manuscript, Battle for Birth Control: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Rivalry That Shaped a Movement, forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. She has published numerous articles and op-eds including work in Law and History Review, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Society for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, among others. Thompson is also a frequent public speaker including presentations at the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the American Association for the History of Medicine, as well as national and international symposiums on suffrage and legal rights, reproduction, health, and medicine. She is a member of the national Scholars Strategy Network.
Leah LaGrone is an assistant professor of history and public history director. She graduated from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, with a PhD in history focused on borderlands, labor, and gender studies in early 20th century. Her research examines state legislation and the discourse on minimum wages for women, specifically the connections of sex work with low wages. Her current book project, “A Woman’s Worth: How Race and Respectability Politics Influenced Minimum Wage Policies,” demonstrates that the politics around race and the minimum wage for women drove conversations among labor, politicians, and progressive reformers about the future of white supremacy in Texas.
Leah Packard-Grams
Leah Packard-Grams is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Her primary interests include Greek, Demotic, and Coptic papyrology, the archaeology of Greco-Roman Egypt, the archaeology of papyrology, and the physicality of ancient texts. She is passionate about diversifying the fields of Archaeology and Greco-Roman Classics to include those accounts of the people who have been historically oppressed and underrepresented. She has worked on translating unpublished papyri in Coptic and Greek for Bryn Mawr College and her recent work has been focused on lexicographical papyrology and the usage of lexical papyri.
Lindsay Chervinsky
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a historian of the presidency, political culture, and the government. She produces history that speaks to fellow scholars as well as a larger public audience. Dr. Chervinsky believes history can be exhilarating and she works to share her passion with as many people as possible. Her research can be found in publications from op-eds to books, speaking on podcasts and other media, and teaching for every kind of audience. Dr. Chervinsky’s book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, was published on April 7, 2020 (paperback February 2022). She also co-edited Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture (February 20, 2023). She is a regular guest on podcasts and appears frequently on Listening to America podcast. She is the creator of the Audible course: The Best and Worst Presidential Cabinets in U.S. History. Her next book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic, will be published in August 2024. Dr. Chervinsky is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
Lindsay Marshall is a historian of Native North America and of popular memory. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma and is Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University. You can find her on twitter at @lindstorian.
Luke Truxal
Luke Truxal is an American military historian who focuses on the application of American air power during the Second World War. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Texas in 2011 and 2018. His teaching fields include Europe in the twentieth century, United States history, United States military history, and United States political history in the twentieth century. Truxal’s main research interest is the air war in Europe from 1942 to 1945. He is the author of the forthcoming book Uniting against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe, which comes out in fall 2023. He is also an assistant editor for the scholarly web journal Balloons to Drones. He previously published “Bombing the Romanian Rail Network,” in the Spring 2018 issue of Air Power History. He is currently researching the air war over Romania from 1942 to 1944 with a particular emphasis on American and Soviet coordination and joint operations.
Margari Hill
Margari Hill is the co-founder and Executive Director of Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC), a human rights education organization. She is also a freelance writer published in How We Fight White Supremacy (2018) Time, Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera English. She earned her master’s degree in History of the Middle East and Islamic Africa from Stanford University in 2006. Her research includes transformations in Islamic education, colonial surveillance in Northern Nigeria, anti-colonial resistance among West Africans in Sudan during the early 20th century, interethnic relations in Muslim communities, anti-bias K-12 education, and the criminalization of Black Muslims. She is on the Advisory Council of Islam, Social Justice & Interreligious Engagement Program at the Union Theological Seminary. For her work, she has received numerous awards including the Council of American Islamic Relation’s (CAIR) 2020 Muslim of the Year award, Khadija bint Khuwaylid Relief Foundation Lifetime Humanitarian award in 2019, the Big Heart Award in 2017, and MPAC’s 2015 Change Maker Award. She has given talks and lectures in various universities and community centers throughout the country.
Mark Johnson is an assistant professor in history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. He specializes in the history of the United States and, specifically, the U.S. South and African American History. In 2017, he published An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce. In 2021, he published Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 came out with University Press of Mississippi. He previously published articles in Southern Cultures and Louisiana History. Currently, he’s working on a cultural history of bacon in the United States tentatively titled American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon with University of Georgia Press.
Mary Hicks
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.
Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies and the chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. His research and teaching generally explore religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse, whether manifested in the Middle Ages or the modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and medieval religious and political life. He has also presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena like Game of Thrones and the video game Dragon Age. His book, co-authored with David M. Perry, is out now: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper Books, 2021). His new book will also be with David M. Perry and is entitled Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages (Harper Books, 2024).
Matthew Guariglia
Matthew Guariglia is a historian and inter-disciplinary scholar serving as senior policy analyst for surveillance and technology policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) where he focuses on policy and advocacy related to how local & federal law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and private corporations use technology. He currently holds academic affiliations in the Emory University Department of History and at Indiana University and the Institute of American Thought in support of research into the long history of how the U.S. government collects information on individuals and the relationship between information technologies and punitive state power and activism. His first book Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York is out now from Duke University Press. He is also the co-editor of the Essential Kerner Commission Report (Liveright, 2021). He has a PhD in History from the University of Connecticut where my dissertation was awarded the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. He is also a researcher with years of experience with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesting. His writing can also be found in the Washington Post, NBC News, TIME, Slate, VICE, MuckRock, and the Urban History Association's blog, The Metropole.
Max Felker-Kantor
Max Felker-Kantor is an associate professor of history at Ball State University. He teaches courses in twentieth-century American and African American history. His research explores policing, race, policing, politics, and cities since World War II. His first book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) explores policing and antipolice activism in Los Angeles from the Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion. His second book, DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, is a history of the DARE Program and will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. He is currently working on a new project on the history of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Scandal and the origins of twenty-first century policing. His work has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Modern American History, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Boom California, and the Pacific Historical Review, as well as a range of other academic and popular outlets.
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022); The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History); Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012); and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2005). Megan writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and TIME. For several years, she also wrote movie and TV series reviews for the Civil War Monitor. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Megan taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She grew up in Colorado but now lives outside Boston with her husband and two cats.