Whitney Battle-Baptiste is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A native of the Bronx, New York, and a member of the Hip-Hop generation, she is a scholar and activist who sees the classroom and the campus as spaces to engage contemporary issues with a sensibility of the past. Her work actively uses the tools of archaeology to interpret the landscapes of captivity and freedom, and she has led excavations on a variety of archaeological sites. Her current project incorporates geospatial analysis into a community-based heritage site project at Millars Plantation on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. Her first book, Black Feminist Archaeology (Left Coast Press, 2011), outlines the basic tenets of Black Feminist thought as a method for enhancing archaeological theory and practice.
Aldon Morris is the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He has published widely on social movements, race, religion, social inequality, and the sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is the author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (Free Press, 1984), which won the 1986 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association, and co-editor of the volumes Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (Yale, 1992) and Opposition Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (University of Chicago, 2001). Most recently he authored the award-winning book The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (University of California, 2015). In 2009 Morris won the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association for a lifetime of research, scholarship, and teaching.
Silas Munro is an educator and designer who applies design to inspire people to elevate themselves and improve society. His Los Angeles–based studio, Poly-Mode, helps organizations embrace cultural diversity and increase community involvement. His studio has collaborated with MoMA, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Mark Bradford, and Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, among others. Munro’s design work and writings have been published in many forms at home and abroad. As an educator, he focuses on expanded design studies. He has been a critic, lecturer, and professor at many internationally ranked art and design programs. Munro is an assistant professor at Otis College of Art and Design and an advisor at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Britt Rusert is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research is situated at the intersections of race and science, Afrofuturism, gender and sexuality studies, and visual culture. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University, 2017) and an assistant professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently at work on two projects: The Fantasy Worlds of W. E. B. Du Bois, a collection of Du Bois’s short genre fiction co-edited with Adrienne Brown; and a monograph about William J. Wilson’s Afric-American Picture Gallery (1859), a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States.
Mabel O. Wilson is an architectural designer and cultural historian. She is the author of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Smithsonian, 2016) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (University of California, 2012). At Columbia University she is a professor of architecture, a co-director of Global Africa Lab, and associate director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies.