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Lois Brown joined the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College in 1998. Currently, she is the Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College, a center dedicated to creating invigorating public programs, supporting the leadership potential of students, and creating events that allow dynamic and productive consideration of vital contemporary issues and significant historical questions. A recipient in 2004 of one of the college's two Distinguished Teaching Awards awarded that year, she also was a Baccalaureate speaker in 2004 and delivered the faculty address at the 2002 Convocation. Brown's research and teaching focuses on nineteenth-century African American and American literature and culture, abolitionist narratives, and evangelical juvenilia. A 2000 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Award recipient, she has been affiliated with the Harvard University Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research where she also has been a visiting fellow. Brown has lectured widely and published articles on African American literature, women's writing, early American education, and African American history and religion. In 2001, the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston recognized her work with one of its first African American History Awards and lauded her for her "extraordinary commitment to American history" and her "obvious commitment to education and equality." Brown's biography, *Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution*, published by the University of North Carolina Press in June 2008, has been hailed as the definitive Hopkins biography for decades to come. Photo courtesy of Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo.

Professor Linda Heywood is the author of *Contested Power in Angola*, editor of and contributor to *Central Africans Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora*, and co-author with John Thornton of *Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of America *(Cambridge University Press, July, 2007). Her articles on Angola and the African Diaspora have appeared in *The Journal of African History*, *Journal of Modern African Studies*, *Slavery and Abolition*, and the *Journal of Southern African Studies*. She has served as a consultant for numerous museum exhibitions, including "African Voices" at the Smithsonian Institution, "Against Human Dignity" sponsored by the Maritime Museum, and the new exhibit at Jamestown, Virginia. She was also one of the history consultants and appeared in the PBS series *African American Lives* (2006) and *Finding Oprah's Roots* (2007).

Primarily an Early American historian, I also have subsidiary interests in African-American history and the study of the Atlantic world. I am a newcomer to the department, having been appointed in 2000 (although I was once an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar at Hopkins). I came from the College of William and Mary, where I was a professor of history and editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. My publications include: Colonial Chesapeake Society (1988), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (1991), Cultivation and Culture: Work and the Shaping of Afro-American Culture in the Americas (1993), and Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998). Fellowships include: Institute of Early American History and Culture, Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, John Carter Brown Library, American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, American Council of Learned Societies, and Guggenheim Foundation. Prizes include: Association of Caribbean Historians Best Article Prize (1995-1997); American Historical Association, Albert J. Beveridge Award and Wesley-Logan Prize (1998); Organization of American Historians, Elliott Rudwick Prize (1999); South Carolina Historical Society Prize (1999); Columbia University, Bancroft Prize (1999); Library of Virginia Literary Nonfiction Award (1999); Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Yale University, Frederick Douglass Prize (1999); Southern Historical Association, Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize (1999); and American Philosophical Society, Jacques Barzun Prize (1999). My major project is provisionally entitled, "Jamaican Small World: White and Black in the Eighteenth Century." My microhistorical study has four major goals: to explore the process of colonization and the transition from homeland to adopted land in personal and comprehensive terms; to capture the routines and rhythms of daily life in southwestern Jamaica and related corners of the Atlantic world; to probe an interracial world of plain folk; and to paint a vivid portrait of the individuality of ordinary people and the particularity of one local community. My main informant is Thomas Thistlewood, a man of no particular distinction except that he kept one of the most detailed records of plantation life in existence. I have also a number of subsidiary plans e.g. I am co-editing a book, "The Black Experience and the British Empire," for Oxford University Press (to be submitted 2001) and another "Arming Slaves: From the Classical Era to the American Civil War" for Yale University Press (also to be submitted 2001). I have also guest edited (with David Eltis) a special issue, "New Perspectives on The Transatlantic Slave Trade," set to appear in William and Mary Quarterly, LVIII (January 2001).

PETER HINKS earned his Ph.D. in American history from Yale University in 1993. He has taught at Yale University, Bennington College, Grinnell College, and Hamilton College. He is the author of the award-winning book, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. He works professionally in public history and has recently co-curated the new exhibit at the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, "Intimate Strangers: Slavery and Freedom in Fairfield County, 1700-1850." Dr. Hinks is the senior historian for a major exhibit on slavery and its demise in New York City, "Africans in New York, 1620-1865," which opened at the New York Historical Society in October 2005. With the late Professor John Blassingame and Professor Jack McKivigan, he co-edited Frederick Douglass' first two autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom. [Source: http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/author/H/Peter\_-\_Hinks.aspx]

Professor Bryan Rommel-Ruiz has been teaching at The Colorado College since 1996 when he first arrived as a Minority-Scholar-In-Residence and Visiting Instructor in American History. He teaches a wide variety of courses in American History, African American History, US Southern History; World History, and Film and History. He has published articles and essays in these fields and is currently completing a book manuscript on Black Atlantic culture and politics in Rhode Island and Nova Scotia for The University of Pennsylvania Press. Professor Rommel-Ruiz is also writing a book manuscript on Charleston, South Carolina, and the Atlantic world that will be published by The University of Georgia Press. Additionally, he has a book-length manuscript under review about American Film and History.

Beverly A. Morgan-Welch serves as the chief executive of the oldest and most visible African American history museum in New England located on Bostons Beacon Hill and Nantucket. With four historic sites and collections that preserve the powerful past of African Americans from the Colonial Period through the Abolitionist Movement, the museum provides Black Heritage Trail tours, exhibits and education programs that illuminate and share a liberating American History. Beverlys career spans three decades of experience in not-for-profit management and corporate philanthropy. She has served as the Executive Director of the Greater Hartford Arts Council, Director of Development at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Assistant Dean of Admission at Amherst College. Beverly was also the Manager of Community Relations at Raytheon, a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Hartford, and Secretary of the Connecticut Mutual Life Foundation serving the companys Corporate Social Responsibility Department. As a volunteer, her achievements include serving as Co-Chairperson of the Inauguration of the Honorable Deval Patrick, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and raising funds for the Bishop Desmond Tutu Southern African Refugee Scholarship Fund. A graduate of Smith College with a major in Theatre and Speech, in 2009, she received the Smith Medal awarded to graduates who, in the judgment of the trustees, exemplify in their lives and work the true purpose of a liberal arts education. Currently she is a Member of three distinguished history institutions: the Antiquarian Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Beverly Morgan-Welch, the widow of the Reverend Mark Welch, resides in Andover, Massachusetts with their daughter, Alexandra.

Patrick Rael is a specialist in African-American history, who earned his PhD in American History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. He is the author of numerous essays and books, including Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North published in 2002, which earned Honorable Mention for the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Rael is also the editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North, and co-editor of Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature.

Robert Patrick Cooper is Senior Counsel for OneUnited Bank. He is responsible for raising capital, negotiating acquisitions and directing all legal, regulatory and external affairs for the bank. As a corporate attorney for over seventeen years, he honed his practice skills with the law firm of Hale and Dorr and acquired international merger and acquisition experience as Associate General Counsel for Battenfeld GmbH in Germany. Admitted to practice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, Mr. Cooper holds a Bachelor's degree in economics from Yale College and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School. Mr. Cooper is a member of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association and serves as Secretary of the National Bankers Association. Mr. Cooper also serves on the steering committee for Black and White Boston Coming Together, Inc. He is a Boston Fellow with the Partnership, Inc. and a member of the NAACP and the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts.

For more than 30 years Kathleen McDermott has popularized History and Culture. As a Consulting Historian from 1986 to 1998, she authored illustrated histories of large American fashion, beauty, and consumer product companies including Max Factor, Butterick Patterns, Kinney Shoe, Timex, Buxton Wallet, Sherwin-Williams, and Price Waterhouse (Harvard Business School Press). As Fashion History Instructor from 1998 to present at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and concurrently for five years at Rhode Island School of Design (2005-2011), she has presented slideshows and lectures on 500 years of Western fashion, culture, and art history to hundreds of students. Her classes are designed to create informed and activist adults, passionate about women’s history, fashion history, and art museums. She wrote, illustrated, and published in 2010 an accessible fashion history handbook Style for All: Why Fashion, Invented by Kings, Now Belongs to All of Us. See her online resume for fashion history public lectures and museum gallery talks as well as TV, radio, and print commentary. Since 2001, Kathleen has created and sold fashion-history-inspired handmade hats and accessories for private clients and Boston Lyric Opera as donor gifts.