Dr. Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture in the English Department, University of Leeds Dr. Bennett teaches at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include transnational American literature and culture (especially Early American to the C19th), representations of home and the domestic, spiritualism, and slavery and print culture. Dr. Bennett’s publications include Ripples of Dissent (1996); The Damnation of Harold Frederic (1997); Grub Street to the Ivory Tower (1998); Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854-1936, (2002), Twelve Months in an English Prison (2003, two volumes) and Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007). Dr. Rhondda Robinson Thomas Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature, Clemson University Dr. Rhondda Robinson Thomas is a Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where she researches and teaches courses about 18th & 19th-century African American literature and American literature and culture. Her books include The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought, A Reader, co-edited with Susanna Ashton (University of South Carolina Press, 2014), Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1774-1903 (Baylor University Press, 2013), and the first edited and annotated edition of Jane Edna Hunter’s autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, 1941 (Regenerations series, vol. 2, West Virginia UP, 2011). Prof. Thomas’s project, Call My Name: African Americans in Clemson University History, researches and documents the stories, contributions, and legacies of seven generations of people of African descent in Clemson University history. Dr. Kelly P. Dugan Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, Trinity College (Hartford, CT) Dr. Kelly P. Dugan holds a PhD in Language and Literacy Education from the University of Georgia and MA degrees in Classics and Linguistics. Trained in ancient Mediterranean studies, her research focuses on systems of enslavement as well as the social construction of race and ethnicity from Greek and Roman protoracist ideology to modern reception. Informed by multicultural education theory and sociolinguistics, she studies and practices anticolonialist and antiracist teaching practices in the ancient studies classroom. In addition to teaching Classics, Dr. Dugan has a background in designing and teaching academic success courses for transfer and first-generation students. Dr. Barbara McCaskill Professor of English; Co-Director, Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative; Associate Academic Director, Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, University of Georgia Dr. McCaskill earned a B.A. (summa cum laude) from Columbus State University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University. She held a UGA General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship (2005-08), and has received such honors as the Martha Munn Bedingfield Excellence in Teaching Award from the Department of English (2014) and the Lorraine A. Williams Leadership Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. In 2012 she was named the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Society and Culture at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. On William and Ellen Craft, she has written a single-authored study titled Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (UGA Press, 2015) as well as a teaching edition of their 1860 memoir Running 1,000 Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (UGA Press, 1999). Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray Early Career Leverhulme Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray received a PhD in American Studies from the University of Nottingham in 2018. Her research focuses on recovering and amplifying formerly enslaved African American testimony (including forgotten slave narratives, oratory and visual performance), specifically focusing on their transatlantic journeys to Britain between the 1830s and the 1890s. She has created a website (www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com) dedicated to their experiences and has mapped their speaking locations across Britain, showing how Black women and men travelled far and wide, from large towns to small fishing villages, to raise awareness of American slavery. She has organized numerous community events including talks, performances, podcasts, plays, walking tours and exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic. Her first book, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles, was recently published by Cambridge University Press in Autumn 2020. Dr. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University; Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships Dr. Nwankwo earned her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1999, with certificates in Latin American Studies and African American and Diaspora Studies. Her research centers on nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. African American and Caribbean literature and culture (including that from the portions of Central America that border the Caribbean Sea). Dr. Nwankwo has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the DeWitt-Wallace Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Her book, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), is a comparative study of people of African descent in Cuba, the U.S., and the British West Indies in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Sidonia Serafini PhD Candidate of English at the University of Georgia Sidonia’s earned her B.A. from Flagler College and her M.A. from the University of Georgia. Her research examines Hampton Institute’s periodical, the Southern Workman (1872-1939), and how and why diverse writers gravitated toward it to debate meanings of citizenship. Her article, “Black, White, and Native: The Multiracial Writing Community of Hampton Institute’s the Southern Workman,” was recently published by The Southern Quarterly (Winter 2019). Sidonia has also curated large-scale museum exhibits for the UGA Hargrett Special Collections Library on the Georgia convict lease system and the history of women’s suffrage in the U.S. She recently adapted the physical exhibit on carceral labor in Georgia for a new digital platform collaboration between the Digital Library of Georgia and the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
