ROBIN BERNSTEIN is a cultural historian who focuses on US racial formation, with an emphasis on live performance, from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (2024). Her 2011 book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights won five awards.

ELIZABETH MAEVE BARNES is lecturer in history at the University of Reading, specializing in women in the mid-nineteenth-century South. She is currently writing a monograph about how formerly enslaved women navigated competing patriarchal authorities after sexual victimization.

GARY T. EDWARDS is associate professor of history at Arkansas State University. Edwards is the coeditor, with Cherisse Jones-Branch, of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (2018). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “Imagining the Real Confederates of Crockett’s Tennessee: Four Common Southerners before, during, and after the Civil War.”

EVAN A. KUTZLER is associate professor of history at Western Michigan University and a practitioner of public history. He has published five booklength projects, including a monograph, Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (2019) and a collection of primary sources, Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863–1866 (2018).

JONATHAN LANDE earned his PhD at Brown University (2018) and is assistant professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons (2024). He has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Journal of Social History, Journal of African American History, Journal of American Ethnic History, and CivilWar History.

KORITHA MITCHELL is a literary historian, cultural critic, and professor of English at Boston University. She is the feminist scholar who coined the term know-your-place aggression to emphasize that marginalized groups are attacked for succeeding, not for having done something wrong. Mitchell is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (2012), and From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture (2021). She is also an editor of Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy (2018) and of the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2023).

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is a historian at the University of Michigan as wellas the Pulitzer and Bancroft–prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001, 2017). She writes regularly on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for myriad scholarly and popular publications.

CRYSTAL WEBSTER is associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. She teaches and researches early African American history with a focus on Black children. Her first book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North, published June 2021, won the Biennial First Book Award from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her second book, titled Condemned: How America’s Courts and Prisons Terrorized Black Children, is forthcoming.

JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS is professor of history in the Residential College, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author most recently of Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War (2019) and The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (2020).