Simon P. Newman

Sir Denis Brogan Professor of History Emeritus, University of Glasgow

Simon P. Newman is a Research Fellow at the IRH at the University of Wisconsin and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Glasgow. He has published on the popular political culture of the American Revolutionary era, the bodies of the poor in the early American republic, the origins of plantation slavery, and freedom-seeking runaway slaves. Most recently he is the author of A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and Runaway London: The Invention of the runaway slave in the English Atlantic World (forthcoming). He is also the co-author of the University of Glasgow’s report into the institution’s slavery links (2018).

Newman is past Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society, and past Chair of the British Association for American Studies.

Kevin Butterfield

Executive Director, Washington Library at Mount Vernon

Kevin Butterfield is the Executive Director of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mt. Vernon. Previously, he was the Wick Cary Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma and Director of the Institute for American Constitutional Heritage and Constitutional Studies Program. His first book, The Making of Toqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States (Chicago, 2015) won the William Nelson Cromwell book prize from the American Society for Legal History in 2016.

Justin Roberts

Associate Professor of History, Dalhousie University

Justin Roberts specializes in the study of slavery in the Americas and in the early modern Atlantic World more broadly. He is currently engaged in a major research project focused on several issues relating to the expansion of the early English Atlantic, including the development of slavery and the plantation complex and seventeenth-century ideas about population management, migration and social control. He is also doing research on the early Dutch Atlantic and on slavery in the Danish West Indies. He teaches undergraduate courses and supervises graduate students in a wide range of areas, including slavery, the Caribbean, the British Atlantic World, The American Revolution, the early modern Dutch empire and the history of early modern medicine and the body.

Barry Gaspar

Professor of History, Duke University

Barry Gaspar concentrates on comparative slave systems, with a special interest in the development of slave society and the evolution of slave life in the United States and the Caribbean. The Atlantic Slave Trade, Atlantic history and culture, the legacy of slavery in post-slave societies, historical geography, colonial British America, and Caribbean and Afro-American history are also fields of major interest. He has published articles on slave resistance and social control. His study, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and he co-edited More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, published by Indiana University Press. He is currently working on transitions in patterns of slave revolt in the Caribbean and North America.

Jennifer L. Morgan

Professor of History, New York University

Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair. She is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in in the Black Atlantic world.

Morgan serves as the Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. She is the past-Vice President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and is a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians. She lives in New York City.

James Walvin

Professor of History Emeritus, University of York

James Walvin is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of York. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006 and awarded an OEB for his scholarly contributions. Walvin has published extensively on the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. His books include Black and White: The Negro and English Society, winner of the 1975 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery, Crossings: Africa, the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires.