Matthew Casey is Associate Professor of History and Interim Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Empire's Guest Workers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of US Occupations (Cambridge, 2017). He is currently working on a second book that explores urban protest and transnational activism in Haiti during the US military occupation of the country.
Karina Cespedes was born in Havana, Cuba and in 1980 migrated with her family to the U.S. She grew up in the port city of Elizabeth, New Jersey and received her B.A. in Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies from Rutgers University. She received her M.A and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from U.C Berkeley. Her research areas include U.S. Women of Color, feminist thought and praxis, the legacy and afterlife of Cuban slavery, food insecurity within the context of Cuban tourism and sex work, as well as intersectional pedagogy. Some of her work has been published in the collections A Window into Cuban and Cuban American Studies and Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, as well as in the journal Callaloo: A Journal of African Diasporic Arts and Letters (2007), the anthologies This Bridge We Call Home… and Tortilleras: An anthology of Queer Latinas and Performance.
Miriam Cohen is Evalyn Clark Professor of History at Vassar College. Her specialties include the history of American women, twentieth-century social movements, and social reform. She has published numerous articles on the history of social welfare in Europe and the United States, including several that were co-authored with Michael Hanagan. Her most recent book, Julia Lathrop: Social Service and Progressive Reform, published in 2017 by Westview (now Routledge) Press, is a volume in the Lives of American Women series edited by Carol Berkin.
Shona N. Jackson is from Guyana, South America and is Associate Professor and Associate Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Texas A&M University, College Station. She was founding co-editor of the book series in Caribbean Studies at University Press of Mississippi and an advisory and contributing editor for Callaloo, for which she co-edited the first 30th anniversary volume, “Reading Callaloo, Eating Callaloo” and a special section on “Postcoloniality and Blackness.” Her publications include book chapters and journal articles in the following: American Quarterly, Theory & Event, Keywords for African American Studies, Small Axe, and Caribbean Quarterly. She is the author of Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minnesota 2012). Jackson is currently at work on a book titled Marxism, Method, and Indigenous Sovereignty.
Kasia Kalina is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines theories of history, political economy, and social commensality emerging from struggles over forensic claim-making pertaining to the long durée history of Atlantic slavery in Colombia's ongoing peace process.
Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo is a Mellon Faculty Fellow (2018–2020), Founding Faculty Fellow of Dartmouth's Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexualities (2019–), and Assistant Professor of History (2020–) at Dartmouth College. His academic work uses a hemispheric and diasporic lens to explore the circulation of radical ideas from the standpoint of working-class intellectual communities in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Sara-Maria Sorentino is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Race Studies at the University of Alabama and serves as the co-program director of the African American Studies program. She earned her PhD in Culture & Theory in 2018 from the University of California, Irvine. Her research is interested in excavating connections between anti-black violence, philosophical abstraction, and material reproduction. Her book manuscript, in progress, engages a black feminist philosophy of history to put pressure on received discourses from political theology, political theory, political economy, and psychoanalysis by exposing the centrality of slavery to their conceptual worlds. Sara-Maria has work published in Rhizomes and Theory & Event. She can be reached at ssorentino@ua.edu.
Benjamin D. Weber is Watson Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in International & Public Affairs at Brown University. He holds a PhD in History from Harvard University, and is the author of several articles on the historic roots of racial inequality in the US criminal justice system within and beyond national borders. His first book, American Purgatory: The Imperial Workings of the Carceral State, is forthcoming from The New Press.
Tryon Woods is Associate Professor of Crime & Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and Special Lecturer in Black Studies at Providence College. He is the author of Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the “Post-Racial” Era (Michigan State UP), and co-editor of On Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness (Africa World Press) and Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation (Lexington).
