Gerard Aching is professor of Africana and Romance Studies at Cornell University. His collaborative Underground Railroad Research Project informs his new book project, The Promise of Rebirth: A Contemporary Approach to the Underground Railroad.
Edward E. Baptist is a professor of history at Cornell University and the author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
Christopher Bonner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland and the author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship.
Nick Bromell is the author of six books, including The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy and The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Thought of Frederick Douglass. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) and the author of many articles and books.
Marcia Chatelain is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Anthony Cohen is a nationally known expert on the Underground Railroad and a descendant of freedom seekers. He is the founder and president of the Menare Foundation, located at the Button Farm Living History Center in Maryland.
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is the author or editor of over 20 books, including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Lincoln Prize. His most recent book is The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.
Adam Goodheart’s most recent book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, was a national bestseller in both hardcover and paperback. He also serves as the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she also served as the inaugural Chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department. She is the author of eight books including Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature.
Vincent Leggett is founder and president of the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation (BOCF), which documents, promotes, and educates on the significant contributions of African Americans to the Chesapeake Bay’s maritime industries and culture.
Keith Leonard is associate professor of literature at American University and author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights.
Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is Associate Professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies and founder of The Vision and Justice Project.
Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. is co-founder and president of the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, which advocates for a more equitable world on the issues of human trafficking and racism. He is the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington.
Derrick Spires is associate professor of literatures in English and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States.
John Stauffer is the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, a national bestseller, and Picturing Frederick Douglass.
Amy Murrell Taylor is the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and author of Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps as well as The Divided Family in Civil War America.