Kirsten Lee is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also holds certificates in College and Undergraduate Teaching and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her research interests include abolition, migration, 20th century feminisms, queer theory, Black (cultural) studies and early American literature broadly construed. Her dissertation, “ Abolition’s Plots: Literature, Speculation, and Black Border/lands in North America, 1763-1886,” turns to feminist geographies to understand the narrative technologies of American westward (and failed southward) expansion in the long nineteenth century. By studying speculation as an economic and cultural practice in the nineteenth-century United States, her dissertation theorizes how and why Black nationalist aesthetics and Afrofuturist thought routinely confront the problem of imagining life after, beyond, and without property by pointing to the ante- and postbellum period. Her work has appeared in the journal  Early American Literature and in  American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828 from Cambridge University Press.

Cooper Wingert is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Georgetown University. He is a historian of slavery, federalism, and state-building during the Civil War Era. His in-progress dissertation examines how wartime freedom seekers and Union army provost marshals navigated civil-military tensions and brokered emancipation in the field, and in the process renegotiated and reinvented federalism in the United States. His scholarship has been featured in the Journal of American History (June 2023) and Civil War History (September 2023). Wingert is also the author of several books including Slavery and the Underground Railroad in South Central Pennsylvania. Wingert currently serves as Assistant Director of the National Park Service project Slave Stampedes on the Southern Borderlands.

Lauren Feldman received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Her work centers on intersectional histories of intimacy, and investigating the broad intellectual question about how norms surrounding relationships in the U.S. have been created and reproduced over time. She is particularly committed to demonstrating how matters surrounding intimacy shed new light on conventional “big-picture” questions of U.S. history and historiography.

Feldman’s book project focuses on the contingent process by which marriage and state became intertwined in the U.S., from the period of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Through an examination of debates over early American marriage laws, she historicizes marriage’s centrality to the formation of United States governance, as well as the implications thereof surrounding the creation and maintenance of a U.S. privatized social structure. As part of this project, she also works on the history of slave marriage in the United States.

Feldman’s work has been supported by multiple institutions, including the American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, and New-York Historical Society, and has been published in the journal Law and History Review. She also serves as the project coordinator of JHU Hard Histories, a public history initiative that examines the histories of racism and discrimination at the university.

Dr. Feldman is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Michael Haggerty received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. He is a specialist in the history of incarceration with a particular focus on nineteenth century New York. His dissertation, “Bars to Freedom: Emancipation, Incarceration, and the Politics of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century America,” centers the experiences of incarcerated peoples within antebellum debates about slavery and abolition. While much of the work on slavery and emancipation disregards the growing numbers of unfree people in northern jails and prisons, Haggerty argues that northern debates over slavery and freedom must be understood within the context of the carceral state. His work focuses on New York City, where the number of carceral institutions expanded dramatically just as lawmakers secured the passage of anti-slavery legislation. Municipal officials incarcerated tens of thousands of people within jails, workhouses, and penitentiaries, exposing them to forced penal labor, the spread of disease, and sale to the American South, even as New York State completed its process of abolition. Previously, he has published work in both the edited volume Ex Parte Milligan Reconsidered and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law.

Michael Haggerty is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Spartanburg Methodist College.