About Princeton & Slavery

Richard Anderson is a doctoral candidate in twentieth-century American political, urban, and labor history. His dissertation examines urban machine politics and American liberalism in Chicago between 1945 and 1966. From 2011-2014, Richard coordinated the Public History Initiative, a working group within the Princeton History Department. He sits on the Committee on Advocacy of the National Council on Public History and co-edits the NCPH blog, History@Work. In 2014 Richard served as a research resident at the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. He is currently a member of the Princeton Public Library’s Humanities Council. Richard received a B.A. in history from Northeastern Illinois University, an M.S. in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an M.A. in history (with a graduate certificate in Public History) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Teal Arcadi is a PhD candidate in Princeton’s Department of History. He studies economic life in America from the Civil War onwards, with a particular interest in rural political economy. He has worked on the Princeton & Slavery Project since early 2016 as a writer and researcher. Before coming to Princeton, he graduated from Cornell with an AB (summa cum laude) in history, and then worked for Public Agenda Foundation, a civic engagement think tank in New York City.

Megan Armknecht is a PhD Candidate in History at Princeton, where she studies the importance of households in the structure of 19th-century U.S. diplomacy.

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.

Andre Fernando Biehl is a senior at Princeton High School (PHS) with a strong interest in history, environmental and social justice, and civic engagement. Biehl carried out an independent study project on the role of slavery in the founding of Princeton township. He has volunteered at Arm in Arm and Migrant Worker Outreach in New Jersey. As an editor of the Latino Migrant Teen Journal, Biehl interviewed civil rights and farmworker activist Dolores Huerta. Biehl has also volunteered at Imazon, an environmental organization in the Brazilian Amazon. He founded VivaAmazon, a PHS club working with youth living in an Afro-Brazilian riverbank community.

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.

Brett Diehl received his AB in History from Princeton in 2015. Subsequently, he has completed a two-year MPhil in Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford as a Sachs Scholar. He is currently preparing to enter law school.

Ryan Dukeman is a 2017 graduate of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, with minors in American Studies & French. His work focused on American and comparative political development, historical institutionalism, and international trade politics. Ryan was in the 2016 Princeton & Slavery Project undergraduate seminar, where his research explored the early funding sources of Princeton and their ties to slavery, as well as those of Princeton's endowed professorships.

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.

Maeve Glass is a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on the development of constitutional law, commercial law, and federalism. She began her studies at Yale, before completing her law degree at Columbia Law School and her PhD in history at Princeton. Her dissertation and current book project, “These United States: A History of the Fracturing of America,” offers a new account of the origins and development of the Constitution.

Mike Glass studies twentieth-century American urban and education history. His current research project examines conflicts over housing and schools in metropolitan New York City. In particular, he is interested in how social, political, and economic forces interacted to create and maintain segregation and inequality. Mike received his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2008, an M.S. in Education from the City College of New York in 2010, and an M.A. in History from Hunter College in 2015. Before coming to Princeton, Mike taught history in New York City public schools from 2008 to 2015.

Julia Grummitt is a graduate student in Princeton’s history department studying visual culture in 19th-century North America.

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).

Sven “Trip” Henningson graduated from Princeton University in 2016. While at Princeton, he majored in history and completed certificates in German Language and Culture as well as Humanistic Studies. Henningson wrote his senior thesis on the Cold War foreign relations of U.S. labor unions under Professor Robert A. Karl. He was also active as the varsity coxswain for Princeton’s lightweight rowing team and served as the vice president of Cloister Inn. Since graduation, Henningson has been living in DC where he works as a strategy consultant and moonlights as a weekend historian.

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.

Cailin Hong is a member of the Class of 2017 with an interest in race, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. Her independent work focused on the exemption of the Western hemisphere in the 1924 National Origins Act. Her interest in the Princeton & Slavery Project was motivated by her interest in public history and work in Princeton's Mudd Manuscript Library.

Ian Iverson ('2018) is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, titled "Moderate Men and Conservative Influences: Illinois and the Politics of Union, 1854-1861," examines the role of conservatism, Unionism, and political moderation in partisan realignment prior to the American Civil War. He has also written on the history of proslavery thought at the University of Virginia and is a contributor to Jefferson's University: The Early Life.

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.

Izzy Kasdin currently serves as the Executive Director of the Historical Society of Princeton. She graduated from Princeton University in 2014 with an A.B. in History and a Certificate in American Studies. She received her M.Phil. in Archaeological Heritage and Museums at the University of Cambridge in 2015 as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her research has focused on American world's fairs and segregation in Princeton, investigating how history is used to craft boundaries in American identity, both in the past and in the present. Her senior thesis was awarded the C.O. Joline Prize in American History.

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.

Zena Kesselman graduated Princeton University in 2017 with a degree in History and a certificate in Applications of Computer Programming. Her independent work centered on narratives of immigration and assimilation in the twentieth-century United States; her senior thesis followed the experiences of Korean-Americans before and after World War II.

Rob Konkel is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Princeton. He is interested in twentieth-century global history, and his current research examines interwar efforts to create and manage a global economy. Previously, he has written a historical account of the concept of poverty at the World Bank. Rob completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan and received a master's degree from Oxford University.

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.

Ellen Li (Class of 2022) is an undergraduate in comparative literature at Princeton University, pursuing certificates in Latin American Studies and Journalism. She is interested in histories of race, migration, politics and media. She is also a writer and editor for The Daily Princetonian.

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.

John T. Lowe is a Ph.D. Candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds a M.Div., and Th.M. from Southern Seminary, and a B.A. in History from the University of Louisville. He is the editor for Jonathan Edwards within the Enlightenment: Controversy, Experience, & Thought (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). His dissertation, “The Practice that Prevails: Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, and Race” is part of his research that focuses on race and religion in early America.

Jessica Mack is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Princeton. Her research examines linkages between higher education and political transformation in modern Mexico. Her dissertation project traces intellectual and spatial change at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) alongside profound shifts in Mexico’s post-revolutionary public sphere. Jessica holds a B.A. in history from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in history from Princeton University. Her broader interests include public history and memory, space and urban history, and global higher education networks.

Grace Masback is an undergraduate member of Princeton University’s Class of 2021. She is planning to major in History of Near Eastern Studies. Grace is originally from Portland, Oregon.

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.

Samuel Niu is an undergraduate member of Princeton University's Class of 2019. He is majoring in History with a minor in East Asian Studies.

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.

Meagan Raker graduated from Princeton in 2018 with a degree in History and certificates in Theater and Musical Theater. Her senior thesis focused on the utilization of the 1914 Christmas Truce in children’s literature. Meagan was a student in the Fall 2018 Princeton & Slavery Seminar and was thrilled to be a part of the project’s launch at the Princeton & Slavery Symposium.

Lesa Redmond graduated from Princeton University in 2017 with a degree in History and a certificate in African American studies. Her independent research focused on Princeton University's connection to slavery. For her senior thesis, she explored Princeton's sixth President, John Knox Witherspoon, and his ties to slavery.

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. 

Paris Amanda Spies-Gans is a Ph.D. candidate in Princeton University’s Department of History with a focus on gender, print, and visual culture in early modern and Revolutionary-era Europe. Her dissertation explores the implications of the Revolutionary era for women artists in Britain and France. Paris received her A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard College in 2009, an M.A. in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010, and an M.A. in History from Princeton in 2013. She has been involved in the Princeton Public History Initiative from its inception.

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.