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 PhD 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.

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