Cheryl Knott publishes in the area of information access and print culture history, broadly construed. Her history of racially segregated libraries, Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award. Her current research assesses the impact of The Limits to Growth, a book published in 1972, which used computerized scenarios to project the earth’s catastrophic future.

She is the author of Find the Information You Need! (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and the third edition of Karen Markey’s Online Searching. Professor Knott is a recipient of the Justin Winsor Prize sponsored by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association and a winner of the Methodology Paper Competition of the Association for Library and Information Science Education. External funding for her research has come from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the American Philosophical Society. With ten years of experience as an academic librarian at the Universities of Michigan and Texas, she teaches the undergraduate online searching course, co-convened government information course and graduate information intermediation course.

Laura Helton, who holds a joint appointment in English and History, specializes in American literature and history of the twentieth century with an emphasis on African American print culture and public humanities. Her research and teaching interests include archival studies, material texts, race and memory, gender and sexuality, and the literary history of social movements. Her first book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores the emergence of African American archives and libraries to show how historical recuperation shaped forms of racial imagination in the early twentieth century. Professor Helton is a Scholar-Editor of “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg,” a collaborative digital editing project with Fisk University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 2021, she co-edited a special issue of African American Review devoted to the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg. Her 2019 article, “On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading," won multiple prizes.

Fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholars-in-Residence Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bibliographical Society of America have supported her research. Professor Helton's interest in the social history of archives arose from her earlier career as an archivist. She has surveyed and processed collections documenting the civil rights era, women's movement, and American radicalism for several cultural institutions, including the Mississippi Digital Library, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, CityLore, and the Schomburg Center.

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the Interim Dean of the Macaulay Honors College. She is the former director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her latest book, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) is an edited collection that re-centers Haiti in the disciplines of Caribbean, and more broadly, Latin American Studies.

Ethelene is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison affiliated with the departments of African American Studies, German, Nordic, and Slavic, and Gender & Women’s Studies. She received an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship and a Lois Roth Endowment grant to support this project. She was also a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Transnational American Studies. Her first book, Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian, was published by the University of Illinois Press. Her second book project, Searching for a Rainbow: African Americans in 20th Century Denmark, is about African Americans who lived, performed, studied and visited Denmark. Educators, painters, social workers, writers, singers, jazz musicians among many others were drawn to this Scandinavian country. While many have written about African Americans in France, their experiences in Denmark have remained unexplored. Her project will answer several questions including: Why did African Americans go to Denmark? and What were their experiences while there? She argues that many of her subjects initially viewed Denmark as a utopia.