Keisha N. Blain, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow, is an award-winning historian of the 20th century United States with broad interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She completed a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2014. Professor Blain is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). The book won the 2018 First Book Award from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the 2019 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians. Her second book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021), was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Professor Blain has also published four edited volumes. She is the co-editor of To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019); New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018); and Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016). Her latest volume is Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited with Ibram X. Kendi (2021). Four Hundred Souls debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers' list and was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Professor Blain is now writing A Global Struggle: How Black Women Led the Fight for Human Rights (W.W. Norton). The book offers a sweeping history of human rights framed by the work and ideas of Black women in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present.

Dr. Lindsey specializes in African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics. Her first book is Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. She has published in The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Souls, African and Black Diaspora, the Journal of African American Studies, African American Review, The Journal of African American History, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Urban Education, The Black Scholar, Feminist Studies, Signs, and the edited collection, Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem. She was the inaugural Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellow at Harvard University (2016-2017). She recently published America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (2022).

She is also the recipient of several awards and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University, the National Women’s Studies Association, the Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant, the Center for Arts and Humanities at the University of Missouri and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. Dr. Lindsey was the inaugural recipient of the University of Missouri Faculty Achievement in Diversity Award. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection on the future of Black Popular Culture Studies (NYU Press). Dr. Lindsey is also the current co-chair of the Women of Color Leadership Project for the National Women's Studies Association. She is building a strong online presence by guest contributing to Al Jazeera, BET, Complex Magazine, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost Live, NPR, The Root, and The Marc Steiner Show.

Erica R. Edwards is Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University. She is the author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire (NYU Press, 2021), which was a finalist for the Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers and the annual book prize from the Association of African American Life and History. Her first book, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, (University of Minnesota Press), was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Professor Edwards is the co-editor, with Roderick Ferguson and Jeffrey Ogbar, of Keywords for African American Studies. Her work on African American literature, politics, and gender critique has appeared in journals such as differences, Callaloo, American Quarterly, and American Literary History, and her public-facing work has appeared in venues such as The Washington Post, Public Books, and A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought. Before moving to Yale, Edwards taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the University of California, Riverside. She founded the Lindon Barrett Scholars Mentoring Program and the UC Center for Black Studies in California. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Institute of Citizens & Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.