Nicole Viglini received her PhD in history from University of California, Berkeley, and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. histories of slavery, capitalism, gender, and legal cultural histories. Nicole’s dissertation, “‘She is a very smart woman and a great trader’: Enslaved and Free Women’s Economic Strategies and Gendered Geographies of Credit in the Nineteenth-Century South,” foregrounds enslaved and free Black women’s skills, knowledge, and survival strategies, and shows how antebellum southern women claimed property and credit to define their belonging within their communities. Her project centers the testimony of propertied Black women who filed claims to compensation before the Southern Claims Commission (SCC), a federal organization created in 1871 to reimburse unionist southerners in seceded states for property confiscated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. At the Richards Center, Nicole will focus on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript and will begin a digital project to bring visibility to the lives and livelihoods of the Black women who filed SCC claims. Nicole’s work has been supported by several institutions, including the American Historical Association, the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.

Hannah Katherine Hicks received her PhD in History from Vanderbilt University and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, focusing on women and law and the intersections of gender, medicine, and law. Her dissertation, “Troubling Justice: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War South” draws on county-level court records to examine criminal courts in postbellum South Carolina and the primarily working-class Black and White women who frequently appeared in them as defendants, complainants, and witnesses. At the Richards Center, Hannah will work on turning this dissertation into a book manuscript. Hannah was most recently an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at UNC Charlotte, which is also her undergraduate alma mater. In Winter 2022, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine published her article entitled “A Conjure Woman in Court: African American Conjurers as Health Practitioners and Performative Poisoners in the Post-Emancipation South.” Hannah’s research has been supported by the American Historical Association, the South Caroliniana Library, the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

Allison Mashell Mitchell received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia, and specializes in twentieth-century African American history, focusing on Black electoral politics, political realignment, southern history, and civil rights studies. Her dissertation, “Battle for the Ballot: A History of Black Electoral Politics and Voter Suppression in Florida, 1940-2000s” uses Florida as a case study to analyze the role of Black Americans in political realignment in the South from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright ruling to the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. Along the way, it traces Black Floridians’ tumultuous relationship with the Democratic Party and capricious interactions with the GOP since World War Two. She challenges the traditional periodization and white American-centered narratives of political realignment scholarship by emphasizing points of contention in state-level and southern politics that display the inherent failure of the U.S. two-party system. Allison received her BA in History and African American Studies at the University of Florida. Her work has been supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, and the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University.