Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom

Notes on Contributors

· 263 · Notes on Contributors Cameron Blevins graduated from Pomona College in 2008 and is pursuing a Ph.D. in American history at Stanford University. With support from the Hart Institute for American History, he completed his undergraduate research on Venture Smith by investigating slavery in early New England and the exploring the application of digital methodology within historical scholarship. Vincent Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland , specializes in eighteenth-century transatlantic historical and literary studies. Author of more than a hundred articles and reviews, he has also written and edited ten books, most recently the award-winning Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Anna Mae Duane is an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the director of UConn’s American Studies program. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Colonial Violence and the Making of the Child-Victim (2010). Her other publications include Hope is the First Great Blessing: Leaves from the African Free School Presentation Book, 1812– 1826, and forthcoming essays in the Cambridge History of the American Novel and the Norton edition of Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple. Robert P. Forbes is an assistant professor of History and American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Torrington. His research focuses on the impact of slavery on American institutions. He is the author of The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. Anne L. Hiskes is an associate professor of philosophy and director of the Program on Science and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. Her scholarly papers and publications focus on interactions between science and human values and on the ethics of stem cell research. James O. Horton is the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and Histtory at George Washington University and Historian Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. · 264 · Notes on Contributors Paul E. Lovejoy, Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History, York University, holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples at York University. He has published more than thirty books and one hundred papers and articles. Heather Nelson is a graduate of the University of Connecticut’s Professional Science Master’s program in applied genomics, where she worked on several forensic DNA typing projects. She is currently a scientist in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. Poet Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks, and the former (2001–2006) Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut. She is a professor emerita at the University of Connecticut and the founder and director of the writers’ colony Soul Mountain Retreat. Craig O’Connor holds a Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics from the University of Connecticut, where he conducted research into autosomal and Y chromosomal identity typing for forensic applications. He is currently a forensic scientist in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. David Richardson is a professor of economic history and director of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull, U.K. In 2004 he was Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, where he met Chandler Saint and began work with him and Robert Forbes on the life of Venture Smith. His primary research interest is transatlantic slavery, on which he has published and edited various books and numerous articles. Chandler B. Saint, a historian and preservationist, is president of the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights and co-director of the Documenting Venture Smith Project. In 1997 led the effort the to save from the wrecking ball the birthplace of Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother Henry Ward Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut, and to establish their homestead as the core of the Beecher House Center. He is the coauthor of Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith. James Brewer Stewart is James Wallace Professor of History, Emeritus , at Macalester College and president of the National Board of the Beecher House Society. He has published ten books and over a hundred articles and Notes...