Vincenzo Bavaro is Associate Professor of U.S. Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and a B.A. in Comparative studies from “L’Orientale” University. Thanks to a Fulbright grant, he pursued an M.A. in Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College, NH, USA. He is the author of two books: La Città contesa. Sessualità e appropriazione dello spazio urbano a New York negli anni Settanta. (2017) and “Una storia etnica”? Capitale culturale e performance etnica nella letteratura degli Stati Uniti (2013). He has published on several academic journals, and edited with Fiorenzo Iuliano an issue of Ácoma on “La Famiglia Queer”, (2019) and with Shirley G. Lim an issue of Anglistica on “Making Sense of Mess: Marginal Lives, Impossible Spaces, and Global Capital.” (2017). He lived and worked for several years in New York City and Hong Kong, where he taught U.S. Literature and Cultural Studies. In 2019, he was a Fulbright visiting fellow at the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University, New Orleans, for a project on 21st century African American Drama. He is currently the recipient of a National Research Fund (PRIN) from the Italian Ministry of Education, to develop a research on the literary representation and cultural history of California.

Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He received his BA in History from Georgetown University in 2000 and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Iran. His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (Brill, 2007); Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009; expanded edition 2017); Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Bridging Cultures Muslim Journeys Bookshelf; Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, 2014), which was named one of the top books on religion in 2014 by the Independent; Slavery and Islam (Oneworld, 2019), and Islam & Blackness(Oneworld, 2022). He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari. He is also the Director of Research at the Yaqeen Institute and has appeared on, but not watched, ESPN.

Juliette Bourdin is an associate professor of American history at Paris 8 University, France. Part of her research focuses on the relationship between the United States and China, and particularly American perceptions of the Chinese at home and abroad.

Claire Bourhis-Mariotti is a full Professor of African American History and the Co-Director of the research unit TransCrit at the University of Paris 8 in France. Her research concentrates on nineteenth-century African American history, particularly the emigration and colonization movements, early Black organizing, the emergence of Black nationalism, and Black transnationalism. Her latest book, Wanted! A Nation! Black Americans and Haiti, 1804-1893, was published with UGA Press in December 2023. Her forthcoming book (UGA Press, 2025), tentatively titled The Colored Conventions Movement and the Long Struggle for Civil Rights, is a study of antebellum Colored Conventions as a new form of Black collective action that specifically aimed at gathering the free Black community at national and even transnational level to assert free people of color’s respectability and demand equal civil rights. She is also the author of Isaac Mason, une vie d’esclave (PURH, 2021), the French translation and critical edition of a postbellum slave narrative entitled Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (Worcester, Mass., 1893). With Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry and Claire Parfait she co-edited Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom (Routledge) in 2017. She authored a number of essays, articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century African American history. She is an active member of several American and international learned societies, and is, most notably, and the President of the French learned society RéDEHJA (a society whose field of research is the Americas and the Atlantic World from modern times to the mid-nineteenth century) and the Vice-President of the Scientific Board of the Institut des Amériques in Paris.

Saïd Bousbina, associate researcher at the Center for Global Studies, Université Internationale de Rabat, and independent researcher. He holds a Ph.D. from the Université de Paris-1 on the intellectual history of the Tijaniyya brotherhood in nineteenth-century West Africa. While continuing to work on the historical, political, biographical and doctrinal aspects of this tariqa, he turned to the collection, study, analysis, commentary and translation of Arab-African manuscripts. He has notably studied the works of Sheikh Moussa Kamara, part of which was published by Editions du CNRS under the title ‟Florilège au Jardin de l’Histoire des Noirs. Zuhūr al-Basātīn. L’Aristocratie peule et la révolution des clercs musulmans (Vallée du Sénégal)”. His latest publications include manuscripts from Côte d’Ivoire (‟Une source inédite sur la communauté de Yacouba Sylla en Côte d’Ivoire au début des années 1930: Doctrine, réseaux familiaux, cercle de disciples et échanges commerciaux” in Islam et sociétés au sud du Sahara), and Mali (‟A Hidden Repository of Arabic Manuscripts from Mali: The William A. Brown Collection” in the Journal of African History with Mauro Nobili). 

Eric Calderwood is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Department of History, the Program in Medieval Studies, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, the European Union Center, the Center for African Studies, and the Department of Global Studies. He is the author of Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies. His second book, On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus, will be published by Harvard University Press in May 2023. He has also contributed to NPR, the BBC, and Foreign Policy.

Yacine Daddi Addoun is the Scientific Director of Ibadica: The Center for the Study and Research on Ibadism based in Paris. He obtained his PhD degree in History from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 2010. He worked at the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Migrations of African Peoples, and taught as an Assistant professor at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana; and Emory University, Atlanta Georgia.

Dr. Khaled Esseissah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses primarily on Islam, colonialism, slavery, race, and gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century West Africa. His work has appeared in The Journal of African History, The Journal of Black Studies, and he is currently preparing his book manuscript titled “Making Ethical Muslim Citizens: Slavery, Emancipation, and Respectability in Colonial Mauritania, 1902-1960.”

Mayte Green-Mercado is an Associate Professor of History and Newark Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. She also directs the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies minor in the department of History. She teaches courses on Islamic civilization, medieval and early modern Mediterranean and Iberian history, race in the pre-modern Mediterranean, as well as migration and displacement. She has published articles on early modern apocalypticism, the conversion of Iberian Muslims, and race and ethnicity in early modern Spain. Her first book, Visions of Deliverance. Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cornell, 2019), won the Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the Best First Book in Mediterranean Studies from The Mediterranean Seminar. It examines the political culture of Moriscos through their deployment of End Time prophecies. Her current book project, tentatively titled Mediterranean Displacements. Morisco Migrations in the Sixteenth Century traces Morisco migratory patterns around the Mediterranean basin before their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609. She is founder and co-director of the Mediterranean Displacements Project at Rutgers-Newark.

Bruce S. Hall is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, having previously taught at Duke University, University at Buffalo (SUNY), and the Johns Hopkins University. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2005). His first book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) was the co-winner of the American Historical Association’s Martin Klein Prize for best book in African History in 2012. Much of his research has been based in Timbuktu, Mali and he is currently continuing research focused on circum-Saharan commercial networks connecting Ghadames and Timbuktu in the nineteenth century. His research focuses on the social, economic and intellectual history of the West African Sahel and Sahara.

Craig Koslofsky teaches and supervises graduate research in early modern German, European, and Atlantic history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A first-generation college student, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1994. His publications in Reformation history, the history of daily life, and the history of the body cover the period from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In 2011 he published the award-winning study Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe with Cambridge University Press. He has recently co-edited two books on race and early modern skin: Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (with Katherine Dauge-Roth, 2023) and A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger (with Roberto Zaugg, 2020). In 2023 he worked with the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Düsseldorf) to produce a short documentary on the history of skin, available in German and English at L.I.S.A Gerda Henkel Stiftung. His global history of early modern skin, The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World, will appear with Cambridge in 2025.

Sébastien Lefait is a Professor at Aix-Marseille University. His research focuses on the way in which the arts of representation interact with human societies. His work therefore examines the areas of interference between a socio-cultural issue and its textual or audiovisual renditions, showing the existence of bilateral influences. In particular, he studies surveillance societies and their impact on fiction, the overlapping areas between American literature and contemporary visual culture, racial tensions and the challenges of their representation, post-September 11 paranoia and the corresponding media vehicles, the influence of military fiction on armed conflicts, etc. In his works, he concentrates on the ways in which artworks and cultural productions, beyond merely reflecting a state of reality, can act as vehicles of change. He is currently working, with Olivier Esteves (Lille University) on a book project provisionally entitled Selma Not Chicago : Hollywood’s Obscuring of Racism in the North.

Ismael M. Montana, Ph.D. (2007), is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University and a historian of slavery in Ottoman-Tunisia and the western Mediterranean rim. He is the author of The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013) and a co-editor of Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton: Africa World Press in 2009). His most recent book, Blacks of Tunis in al-Timbuktāwī’s Hatk al-Sitr: A West African Jihadist’s Perspectives on Bori, Religious Deviance, and Race and Enslavement in Ottoman Tunisia. With Translation and Critical Annotation (Brill, January 2024) examines the intersection of indigenous African religious practice of Bori, jihad, and race and enslavement in the context of the African Diaspora to the Islamic World. Montana is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Global Slavery. He is also the of the West Africa Research Association (WARA); a non-profit academic organization that promotes research on West Africa and its diaspora and facilitates exchanges between West African scholars and their counterparts in the region, in the US, and elsewhere.

Mauro Nobili is a historian of pre-colonial and early-colonial West Africa. His research examines the political and intellectual history of Muslim societies in the region from the late Middle Ages to the early colonial period, focusing specifically but not exclusively on modern-day Republic of Mali. His research has led to several publications that appeared in journals, including History in Africa and the Journal of African History, book chapters, two collections of essays, and two monographs, the latest being: Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

M’hamed Oualdi is professor of history at Sciences Po-Paris. He is a historian of Early Modern and Modern North Africa. Prior to joining Sciences Po, he was assistant and then associate professor at Princeton University (2013-2019) and maître de conferences at Inalco-Paris (2010-2013). His current project, funded by a European Research Council consolidator grant (2019-2026), explores the narratives and ego-documents that North African slaves in Europe and European, African men and women enslaved in the Maghreb wrote or signed in the Maghreb in the 18th-19th century. His second book A Slave between Empires (published in 2020 by Columbia University Press) is centered around a case study: the life a former slave and Ottoman dignitary and the many conflicts over his inheritance from the 1880s to 1920. It argues for a reinterpretation of the colonial period by studying what preceded and moreover overlapped with European colonialism: namely the Ottoman provincial culture developed on these southern shores of the Mediterranean for more than three centuries, from the second half of the 16th century to the 1910s.

Photo credit: A. Lecomte

Damani J. Partridge is a Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also an affiliate with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the vice president/president elect of the German Studies Association. He has published broadly on questions of noncitizen politics, liberation, affect, urban futures, sexuality, decolonization, Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, Blackness,  intersectional, Indigenous, Black, and POC feminisms, corporate formations, and supply-chain capitalism. In addition, he has made and worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the United States and Canada, and currently directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin (see filmingfuturecities.org). His first book, Hypersexuality and headscarves: Race, sex, and citizenship in the new Germany, was published in the New Anthropologies of Europe series with Indiana University Press in 2012. His most recent book, Blackness as a universal claim: Holocaust heritage, noncitizen politics, and Black power in Berlin was published with the University of California Press in 2023. 

Photo credit: Amil Dave

Brian Sandberg is a Professor of History at Northern Illinois University who works on religion, violence, gender, and political culture in Renaissance France and Italy, the European Wars of Religion (1560s-1640s), and the early modern Mediterranean World. He authored a monograph entitled, Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Sandberg has held fellowships from the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris, the Fulbright Research Scholar Program, the Institute for Research in the Humanities (University of Wisconsin-Madison), the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Medici Archive Project), and the European University Institute. He has published an interpretive essay, War and Conflict in the Early Modern World, 1500-1700 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) and a collective volume, The Grand Ducal Medici and their Archive (1537-1743), edited by Alessio Assonitis and Brian Sandberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016). He served a term as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at NIU, and is currently working on a monograph on A Virile Courage: Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion 1559-1629.

Amanda Smith is the Academic Coordinator of the European Union Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research engages Afrocentric women-centered perspectives on Black women’s contemporary written representations of themselves and their worlds in Europe and the United States. In focusing on Black women’s ability to decenter the white male gaze, she demonstrates the consequent possibilities of Black beauty, joy, creativity, and ultimately Black life they create. She is the author of a forthcoming publication in Études Francophones entitled “Shifting the Peripheries: Confluent Corporealities in a Radical French Afrofeminist Manifesto.” She is currently working on a book manuscript derived from her doctoral thesis entitled “21st Century Black Beauty Resistance: Collectivism, Individuality, and In/Visibility in Black French Women’s Writing.”

Gabriel Solis is Professor of Music and Divisional Dean of the Arts at the University of Washington. He is an ethnomusicologist and music historian whose research focuses on music and racialization in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. His studies of jazz, rock, and other African American musical traditions have had a global scope, looking most recently at the life of Black music as a resource in Indigenous communities in the Southwestern Pacific, from the late-19^th century to the present. His work has been supported by the NEH, AHRC, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and the Madden Fund for technology and the arts.

Eleonora Stoppino specializes in the literature and culture of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, with concentrations on epic and romance, Early Modern travel narratives, Medieval and Renaissance conduct texts, gender studies, and animal studies. She works comparatively across different geographic areas of the Mediterranean, including Italy, Provence, France, Spain, and Catalonia. She has published articles on Boccaccio, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, the Italian epic tradition, and medieval conduct literature. My book, Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando furioso appeared in 2011 with Fordham University Press, and it is a study of the intersections of epic, gender, and genealogy in Ludovico Ariosto. She is currently working on a book on animals, education, and contagion in medieval and early modern literature.

Dr. Cord J. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley, where he specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages and the histories of race and racism. The author of Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking and a host of articles on race and the Middle Ages as well as the editor of important volumes on the topic, Whitaker has led significant initiatives in diversity and inclusion within medieval studies and beyond. He is currently a member of the editorial boards for PMLA, the flagship journal for literary and language studies; Exemplaria, a journal of theory in medieval and early modern studies; and Speculum, the most revered interdisciplinary journal in medieval studies. He also leads an international team of editors in the development of a new themed issue on race for Speculum. Whitaker currently chairs the Presidential Commission on Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Wellesley and regularly helps clients large and small develop and implement antiracist organizational strategies as a Senior Antiracism Consultant at Sagely LLC.

Oksana Byington is the Office Support Specialist at European Union Center at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Oksana serves as the contact point for university employees, students, affiliates, and guests. Please contact Oksana at oksana92@illinois.edu if you have any questions about the work of European Union Center at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Markian Dobczansky is Associate Director of the European Union Center. He teaches classes in European Studies and serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the MAEUS program. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. in Russian/Soviet history from Stanford University with a dissertation on the politics of culture in twentieth-century Kharkiv. His research interests include the history of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and Russia, the politics of culture, urban history, and the Cold War. He has also worked in an administrative capacity at the Central Eurasian Studies Society, the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S., and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Dr. Dobczansky is currently an Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He speaks Ukrainian, Russian, and German, and has studied Qazaq and Armenian.

Heather Duncan is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her field of study is Late Antiquity, with an emphasis on the frontier regions of the late Roman Empire. She is particularly interested in identity formation, cultural contact, material culture, and the use of landscape and structures. Her dissertation research is focused on the Kingdom of the Gepids on the Danubian frontier.

Negin Keshavarzian is a law student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign college of law. She has a strong interest in exploring the intersections of law and humanities. Her research interests are broad, spanning areas such as Middle East studies, legal theory, philosophy of law, and criminology. She is particularly interested in examining how the humanities can shape our understanding of legal systems and their impact on society. She is driven to challenge dominant narratives and explore alternative perspectives, drawing on her interdisciplinary background to inform her research and advocacy work.