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Christy Clark-Pujara is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research focuses on the experiences of black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined—small towns and cities in the North and Midwest.
Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War.
Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory, 1725—1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-black race relations in the Midwest.
Ashley Howard received her PhD in history from the University of Illinois. She joined the University of Iowa faculty in fall 2019 coming from Loyola University, New Orleans. Her research interests include African Americans in the Midwest; the intersection between race, class, and gender; and the global history of racial violence. Her manuscript Prairie Fires: Class, Gender, and Regional Intersections in the 1960s Urban Rebellions analyzes the 1960s urban rebellions in the Midwest, grounded in the way race, class, gender, and region played critical and overlapping roles in defining resistance to racialized oppression.
Dr. Howard’s work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC World News Hour, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, Washington Post and NPR. Her “Then the Burnings Began” article is the winner of the 2018 James L. Sellers Memorial Prize.
As an educator, Dr. Howard’s primary goal is to teach students to be effective writers, critical thinkers, and active world citizens. Students in her classes develop skills through hands-on learning, like processing questionnaires for the Louisiana on Lockdown report. She is also dedicated to sharing her scholarly knowledge outside of the traditional campus community. Specifically, Howard has greatly valued teaching opportunities where she can provide quality, university-level education to those with limited access, including underserved schools and correctional facilities.
Erik S. McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research and teaching interests include the African diaspora, the Midwest, black feminism, black queer theory, black radicalism, urban history, and black masculinity. He is the author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, winner of the 2012 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Professor McDuffie’s latest book in progress is Garveyism in the Diasporic Midwest: The American Heartland and Global Black Freedom,1920-80.
Dr. McDuffie earned his Ph.D. in history in 2003 from New York University, and was a 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship winner.
Originally from Detroit, McDuffie is a sixth generation Midwesterner.
Dr. Crystal Moten is curator of African American History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in the Division of Work and Industry.
A Chicago native and a Midwesterner through and through, Dr. Moten focuses on the intersection of race, class, and gender to uncover the hidden histories of Black people in the Midwest.
She has been a contributor to the Journal of Civil and Human Rights; Souls Magazine; and The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside the South. Her forthcoming book is entitled Continually Working: Black Women’s Economic Activism in Postwar Milwaukee. At the Smithsonian, she was co-curator of the exhibit The Only One in the Room: Women Achievers in Business and the Cost of Success.
Dr. Crystal Moten received her undergraduate degree from Washington University in Saint Louis where she majored in Anthropology and African American Studies, and her Ph.D. in Afro American Studies and History from the University of Wisconsin.
Dan Manatt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and director of The Republic of Baseball: The First Dominican Superstars and Civil Rights Heroes; Whiskey Cookers: The Templeton Rye Bootleggers; and The Fort: 177 Years of Crime & Punishment at the Iowa State Penitentiary. Before his media career, he worked as a Capitol Hill election reform lawyer and advocate. In 1999 he transitioned to Digital Media, working for the pioneering web video website FreedomChannel.com and PoliticsTV.com, which he founded. He writes a column on Midwest history for the Carroll, Iowa Times-Herald.