Michelle Moyd is Red Cedar Distinguished Associate Professor of History at MSU. Her book,Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, was published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Radical History Review, International Labor and Working Class History, and Slavery and Abolition. She is currently at work on Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current project is a cultural and social history that explores the meanings of race and Blackness in the Soviet Union and East Germany. Additionally, she is a global subject matter expert on race and foreign policy in Russo-American and Russo-Ukrainian relations. Her writing and interviews have been featured in and on The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Vice News, and The Moscow Times.

Ethelene Whitmire is a writer and professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Whitmire is the author of The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram and Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian. Her research has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Lois Roth Foundation, and American Scandinavian Foundation. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s from Rutgers University – New Brunswick and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.

Marissa J. Moorman is a Professor of African Cultural Studies at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola. She is the author of two books: Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) and Intonations: a Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, 1945-Recent Times (Ohio University Press, 2008). Fellowships from ACLS, Fulbright Hays, and the SSRC have supported her research.

Eliana Văgălău is an Associate Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago.  Her research on francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary philosophy focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as on questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and sexuality. As a founding member of the Collectif Jean-Claude Charles, she dedicates much of her work to making visible the work of this fundamental Haitian author. She has published translations of literary and philosophical texts and is currently completing an essay on contemporary French Caribbean fiction.

Michael McEachrane is a Senior Research Fellow at the first in the world Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic (CBESA) at Carnegie Mellon University, and does research in Black European Studies, Postcolonial/Decolonial Studies and Human Rights Studies. Dr. McEachrane is also an international human rights activist for people of African descent and a UN mandate holder. As a researcher he is, among other things, the editor of the first book in English on people of African descent in the Nordic region, Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe and a book with decolonial and political perspectives on Sweden, Decolonial Sweden.

Silke Hackenesch is an Associate Professor at the Institute of North American History at the University of Cologne. She specializes in 20th century Childhood and Adoption Studies, Black American History, Commodity History, Critical Race and Gender Studies, and Transnational History. Silke is the author of Chocolate and Blackness: A Cultural History (Campus, 2017) and has edited the volume Adoption Across Race and Nations: U.S. Histories and Legacies with Ohio State University Press (2022). Her second monograph Colorblind Love or Racial Responsibility? The Adoption of Black German Children to Postwar America is forthcoming with New York University Press (2027).

Cristina Lombardi-Diop is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian Studies Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on African and Afropean literature as well as Italian literature and cultural history. She is coeditor, with Caterina Romeo, of Postcolonial Italy (2012) and coauthor, with Gaia Giuliani, of Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (2013). A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and several academic awards, Lombardi-Diop has published extensively on topics including white colonial femininity, the Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean, and African cultural spaces and diasporic writing in Italy. She has also edited two journal special issues: one on Postcolonial Europe (2016) and another on Afrofuturismo: Spazi, corpi, estetiche, pensiero dell’afrotopia (2019).

Jamele Watkins researches the intersection of race and gender in the German speaking world. Her current book project, Roses for Angela (currently under review with a university press), focuses on East German transnational solidarity Angela Davis during her imprisonment. She has published on Black hair in Germany, Black German theater, and archives. As an assistant professor in German Studies at University of Minnesota, she joyfully teaches everything from the premodern to the present. She received her Ph.D. degree in German Studies from University of Massachusetts Amherst and thereafter received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University.