Reconstructing the Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study, 1739-1895 (June 18 – July 8, 2023)

Dr. Edda Fields-Black is Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a specialist in the trans-national 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 will lead an onsite tour exploring Harriet Tubman’s Combahee River Raid based on her new book from Oxford University Press on the subject.

Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020 from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.

Professor Inabinet has published on ancient ethics and rhetorical theory in modern contexts. He is specifically interested in the current moment in regional rhetoric, and the way that the U.S. South's project of racial reckoning reflects and leverages global social movement. Inabinet served as chair of the Furman Universtiy Task Force on Slavery & Justice.

Dr. Mary Caton Lingold is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the literature, culture, and music of the early modern African Atlantic world, sound studies, and digital humanities. Her book, Sound Legacy: Music and Slavery in an African Atlantic World, is forthcoming with UVA Press (Fall 2023).

Barbara McCaskill is a professor at the University of Georgia in the Department of English. She is also Co-P.I. of Culture and Community at the Penn Center and Civil Rights Digital Library and Associate Academic Director of Willson Center for Humanities & Arts at UGA. Her areas of research interest are nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature, African American print culture, the literature and film of the Civil Rights Movement, multiplatform storytelling and digital humanities archives, project- and place-based learning, and contemporary Black Feminist/Womanist literature. In support of this research, she has been the recipient of summer seminar grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation, and of prestigious fellowships from centers such as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. McCaskill has published The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford: Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man, co-authored by Sidonia Serafini with Rev. Paul Walker, Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory, Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 a teaching edition of the 1860 memoir Running 1,000 Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. She has also published scores of peer-reviewed journal essays and book chapters including in The Cambridge History of African American Autobiography and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative.

Joycelyn Moody is Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches courses on African American literature, life writing, and Black feminisms. She served as Editor-in-Chief of African American Review from Fall 2004 through Spring 2008. She has taught at several institutions, including the University of Washington, Saint Louis University, Hamilton College, and the Harvard School of Divinity. Besides articles and chapters, her publications include Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women and Course Guide for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature 2nd ed. She is co-editor of the African American Literature in Transition series and editor of A History of African American Autobiography both published by Cambridge University Press.

Jessica Millward is a media-savvy historian and podcast host who specializes in bringing a historical perspective to modern times. An out-of-the-box thinker, radical dreamer and intellectual freedom fighter, Millward is particularly interested in the intersections of slavery, freedom, power and liberation.
Professor Millward is the Black Thriving Inclusive Excellence Term Chair at UC Irvine. An Associate Professor in the Department of History and Core Faculty member of African American Studies, Dr. Millward's first book, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland was published as part of the Race in the Atlantic World series, Athens: University of Georgia Press (2015). An award-winning scholar, she has published in the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Women’s History, Frontiers, Souls and the Women’s History Review as well as Op-eds in Chronicle of Higher Education, The Feministwire.com and The Conversation.com. Millward is currently working on a book length project that discusses African American women's experiences with sexual assault and intimate partner violence in the late 19th century.

Dr. Holly Pinheiro Jr.’s 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 is the author of The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and The Fight for Racial Justice (U. of Georgia P., 2022).

Glenis Redmond is a nationally renowned award-winning poet and teaching artist traveling the world sharing and teaching poetry. She writes about the strength of her Afro-Carolinian roots, while exploring their weighted and palpable histories. Redmond is a literary community leader. She is dedicated to coaching and uplifting youth poet’s voices. She co-founded a literary program called Peace Voices in her hometown of Greenville, SC from 2012-2019. Redmond is also a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist and a Cave Canem poet.