Dr. Cook Bell is the Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Government at Bowie State University. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (University of South Carolina Press, 2018); and Running From Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is the Project Director of “War and Memory,” an NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War Grant, and editor of Southern Black Women’s Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Felicia Jamison is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisville. Her research focuses on the lives and experiences of nineteenth and twentieth-century African Americans who lived in the rural South. She is currently working on a monograph that analyzes the strategies Southern Black women used to accumulate property during slavery and purchase land during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Jamison received her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Maryland College Park History Department.