About Princeton & Slavery

April C. Armstrong earned her Ph.D. in Religion with a concentration in Religion in the Americas from Princeton University in 2014. Since 2014, she has been responsible for managing social media and blogs along with other work in public services as a Special Collections Assistant at Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, part of the Princeton University Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and the repository for the Princeton University Archives.

Thomas J. Balcerski is assistant professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University. A native of New Jersey, he is the author of “‘Under These Classic Shades Together’: Intimate Male Friendships at the Antebellum College of New Jersey,” which was awarded the Robert G. Crist Prize Pennsylvania History Prize for the best article by a graduate student. He is currently working on a book project titled “Siamese Twins: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King.”

Annabel Barry is a past winner of the Class of 1859 Prize.

Suzanne Geissler Bowles received a Ph.D. in History from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is Professor of History Emerita at William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ. She is the author of Jonathan Edwards to Aaron Burr, Jr.: From the Great Awakening to Democratic Politics and is currently at work on a book about Aaron Burr’s anti-slavery activities.

Dr. Lolita Buckner Inniss is a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton and her J.D. from UCLA. She also holds an LL.M. with Distinction and a Ph.D. in Law from Osgoode Hall, York University in Canada.  Her research addresses historic, geographic, and visual norms of law, especially in the context of comparative equality, race and gender.

Sherri Burr, a Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs graduate (*1988), also obtained degrees from Mount Holyoke College and the Yale Law School. In 1988, she joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico School of Law. She retired as the Dickason Chair in Law Emerita to become a full-time author. Her 27th book, Complicated Lives: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619-1865, was published in 2019 by Carolina Academic Press. This web submission is adapted from Complicated Lives and her next book, Aaron Burr’s Family of Color. A descendant of John Pierre Burr, Sherri Burr serves as the Aaron Burr Association’s Third Vice-President.

For forty years Alfred Bush curated the Western Americana collections in the Rare Book department of Firestone Library at Princeton. He is the author, among other works, of The Life Portraits Of Thomas Jefferson and, with Lee Clark Mitchell, The Photograph and the American Indian. In the 1970s he encouraged American Indians to apply for admission to Princeton, especially those from reservations in the Southwest. Once on campus he served as their informal advisor and after they graduated continued to mentor many of them.

Dan Ewert is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Princeton. He studies twentieth-century American history, with a focus on urban history, policing, and mass incarceration. In addition to contributing to the Princeton & Slavery Project, Dan is currently involved in a project to map urban unrest in Trenton, NJ in April of 1968. He received his B.A. in History from Yale in 2012, summa cum laude. His current academic interests stem from working as a public defense investigator in Brooklyn and teaching immigration history at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan.

Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2011), winner of the James Russell Lowell Award for the best book by a member of the Modern Languages Association, and of the Melville J. Herskovits Award, given by the African Studies Association for the most important scholarly work in African studies. He is currently completing a book on Atlantic Slavery and the Cultures of Modernity.

Gabrielle Girard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Princeton. Her dissertation research focuses on human rights in Argentina during the 1980s, and how Argentine innovations in human rights during this period circulated globally. She holds a B.A. in history and Spanish from Cornell University.

Nicholas Guyatt holds a BA and M.Phil. from Cambridge and completed his Ph.D. at Princeton under the supervision of Daniel T. Rodgers. Having taught at Princeton, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and the University of York, he joined the History Faculty at Cambridge in 2014. He has been a faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2009-10), a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2013-14), and the Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute in the University of Oxford (2013-14).

Craig Hollander is an assistant professor of American history at The College of New Jersey. Before joining the TCNJ faculty, Professor Hollander was the Behrman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. His dissertation, titled "Against a Sea of Troubles: Slave Trade Suppressionism During the Early Republic," won both the 2014 C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association and the 2014 SHEAR Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Professor Hollander’s manuscript is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press for publication in the Early American Studies Series.

Matthew Karp is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on the U.S. Civil War era and the nineteenth-century world. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, was published by Harvard University Press in 2016.

Midori Kawaue is a PhD student in the History of Science department at Princeton University. Her research uncovers how the interactions between the indigenous population and colonial settlers from the 17th to 19th centuries produced new scientific knowledge at a global level. She is the co-editor of James Riley Weaver’s Civil War: The Diary of a Union Cavalry Officer and Prisoner of War, 1863–1865 (2019). In 2017, she received the Gilder Lehrman History Scholar Award for her work in American history.

Sara Krolewski is a past winner of the Class of 1859 Prize.

Bryan LaPointe is a history PhD student at Princeton. He focuses on American political and social history of the 19th century, as well as slavery, antislavery, and emancipation during the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras in the U.S. and the larger Atlantic world. Before coming to Princeton, he earned a BA in history with high honors (along with a French minor) from the University of Michigan.

Daniel J. Linke received bachelors and master’s degrees from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, and worked at three other archival repositories including the University of Oklahoma, and the New York State Archives before arriving at Princeton University in 1994. First serving as the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library’s assistant archivist, he was promoted in July 2002 to his current position, the University Archivist and Curator of Public Policy Papers. As head of the Mudd library, he is responsible for collection development and oversees the library’s public service and technical service work as well.

Shelby Lohr is a doctoral student in Princeton's history department. Her work links book history, marginality, and politics in nineteenth century America. Before beginning her Ph.D., Shelby ran a literacy program for preschoolers in Chicago's South Side. She received an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Georgia State University.

Maynard is the author of the award-winning books Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency and Princeton: America's Campus.

James Moorhead is professor of history emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary where he taught the history of American Christianity for thirty-three years.  Prior to coming to Princeton in 1984, he taught for nine years at North Carolina State University.  Among his publications are American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869 (1978), World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880-1925 (1999), and Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (2012).  He continues to serve as senior editor of the Journal of Presbyterian History.

Isabela Morales is an author and public historian. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (2022), is a multi-generational history of one African American family’s migration from Alabama across the U.S. West and South after emancipation. She received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019, an M.A. in history from Princeton in 2014, and a B.A. in history and American Studies from the University of Alabama in 2012. She has been involved in the Princeton & Slavery Project since its founding as a researcher, contributing writer, editor, and project manager.

Gary B. Nash (’1955, *1964) is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist.

Gregory Nobles is Professor of History Emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1983 to 2016, specializing in early American history and environmental history. He is the author of John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman (2017) and The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2022).

Jonathan Ort is a Master of Divinity candidate at Yale Divinity School. He graduated from Princeton in 2021 with an A.B. in History and certificates in African Studies and Spanish Language & Culture. Jon is a co-recipient of Princeton’s Laurence Hutton Prize in History. His senior thesis, which challenged the dominant narrative about Jamaica’s 1938 anticolonial protests, received the Barbara Hadley Stein Prize in Latin American History. In 2020, Jon served as Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s independent student newspaper.

Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History at Princeton University, is the founder and director of the Princeton & Slavery Project. Her work focuses on western American history, visual culture, and race. Her many publications include Print the Legend: Photography in the American West (2002) and Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (2009). She is also the editor of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (1991) and co-editor of The Oxford History of the American West (1994). Before coming to Princeton in 2009, she taught at Amherst College, and worked as a museum curator and director.

My current research focuses on slavery, race, illicit sex and the law in in the early Atlantic World. I received my Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in 2014. My undergraduate thesis looked at illicit liaisons between white women and black men as well as the freedom suits of their children in colonial Virginia and Maryland. I also worked at the New-York Historical Society, where I helped produce curricula for students and teachers and worked closely with the curatorial team on the new Center for Women’s History, which opened in March 2017. My other interests include gradual emancipation and it’s legal ramifications, public history, women’s history, and African American history more broadly. 

Sylvie Thode is a past winner of the Class of 1859 Prize.

Joseph Yannielli received his PhD from Yale and was the Perkins Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Humanities Council. He is an expert on the history of slavery and abolition, with a special focus on America, West Africa, and the wider world during the nineteenth century. His other areas of interest include political and social movements, missionaries and religion, capitalism and globalization, and the United States in the world. At present, he is completing a book about the Mendi Mission and the role of Africa in the American abolition of slavery. He is the founding manager and lead developer of the Princeton and Slavery website and several other digital history projects.