Robert Baum is the author of Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Pro-colonial Senegambia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). It was the winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Prize for the best first book in the History of Religions. He is the author of four articles on the issue of the Diola and the slave trade, some focusing on oral traditions and memory, some focusing on slavery in acephalous societies, and others on the links between religion and the slave trade among the Diola. His new book on the Diola women’s prophetic movements contains a chapter on Religion and the Atlantic slave trade.

Robert Bonner is a U.S. 19th century historian, whose scholarship focuses on the sectional politics of slavery, before, during, and after the American Civil War. His published work situates the cultural and political struggles over slavery and emancipation within the broader Atlantic world. Currently he is finishing a biography of Alexander Stephens and in the midst of research on the maritime dimensions of Confederate diplomacy.

Rashauna Johnson is associate professor of history, where she teaches courses on slavery, the US and the world, and the African diaspora. Her first book, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the 2016 Williams Prize for the best book in Louisiana history and was a finalist for the 2016 Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians Book Prize.

Paul Musselwhite is a historian of early America with a particular focus on the political economy of early slave societies in North America and the Caribbean. His first book, Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake is a study of the repeated efforts on the part of colonists and English officials to establish towns and cities in the Chesapeake colonies throughout the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. He has also organized a conference commemorating the 400th anniversary of the events of 1619 in Virginia, which marked the arrival of the first Africans to British North America and also the gathering of the first legislative assembly in British America. This conference grew into the volume Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America (UNC Press, 2019).

Nicholas Rinehart is a scholar of Black literature in the Americas and the comparative history of Atlantic slavery. His first book project, Narrative Events: Reading Slave Testimony in the Afro-Atlantic World, examines enslaved testimonial practices across historical periods, colonial geographies, and expressive forms—including legal complaints, mystical visions, epistolary writings, folk ethnographies, and lyric poems, among others. Harnessing the resources of comparative literature, historical anthropology, and queer studies, it reorients prevailing conceptions of literary-historical time in the study of slavery. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, MELUS, and Winterthur Portfolio, with additional essays in the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Oxford UP) and Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019). His public writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition: Magazine of Africa and Diaspora, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Public Books, and LARB. He is also a co-editor, along with Wai Chee Dimock et al., of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia UP, 2017).

Roberta Stewart is a Roman Historian and broadly trained Classicist. She has published on Roman government, religion and politics, as well as Latin lexicography and Roman coins. Her first book on Roman slavery (Plautus and Roman Slavery, 2012) analyzed publicly performed drama in order to consider the development of the Roman slave society as a historical phenomenon and the cultural thinking that naturalized it, the conception of the slave as “chattel” and “other than human,” the violence enacted individually and corporately by the master and by the slave society, the problem of freedom for both slaves and society. Her current book project (Slavery and the Roman Revolution) focuses on the role of slavery in the dissolution of the Roman Republic and the transition from oligarchic to imperial government in the first century BCE.