Canter Brown, Jr. is professor of history at Fort Valley State University. His many publications include the award-winning volumes Florida’s Peace River Frontier (Orlando, 1991) and Ossian Bingley Hart, Florida’s Loyalist Reconstruction Governor (Baton Rouge, 1997).
Adrian Castro is a poet, performer, babalawo, and herbalist. Born in Miami, a place which has provided fertile ground for the rhythmic Afro-Latino style in which he writes and performs. He is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey, (Coffee House Press, 1997), Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time, (Coffee House Press, 2005), Handling Destiny, (Coffee House Press, 2009), and has been published in many literary anthologies.
Amanda Carlson is associate professor of art history at University of Hartford. As a specialist in African art studies, Dr. Carlson has conducted research in the Cross River region of Nigeria on nsibidi (an indigenous writing system), masquerades, and women’s ritual performances. Her other research interests include African photography and contemporary art. Publications include the essay “Nsibidi: Old and New Scripts” in Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (National Museum for African Art, 2007) and “Calabar Carnival: A Trinidadian Tradition Returns to Africa” in African Arts (2010).
Sagrario Cruz-Carretero is an anthropologist and historian who has studied cultural and historical aspects of African descendants in Mexico since 1987. She currently teaches “Ethnic Studies” and “Traditional Medicine in Mexico” at Universidad Veracruzana. She is co-curator of the exhibition “The African Presence in México: from Yanga to the Present” at The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago (2006).
Andrew K. Frank is associate professor at Florida State University in Native American History. His recent publications include Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005); “The Return of the Native: Innovative Traditions in the Southeast,” in Frank Towers, Brian Schoen, and L. Diane Barnes, eds., New Histories of the Old South: Slavery, Sectionalism and the Nineteenth-Century’s Modern World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); “Family Ties: Indian Countrymen, George Stinson and Creek Sovereignty,” in Craig Thompson Friend and Anya Jabour, eds., Family Values in the Old South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 189-209.
Michael V. Gannon, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida, earned graduate degrees from Catholic University, Washington, D.C., the Université de Louvain, Belgium, and the University of Florida. His research has focused on the Spanish colonial history of Florida. Among his many publications are those that address Florida: Rebel Bishop, The Cross in the Sand, Florida: A Short History, and The New History of Florida. Others include Spanish Influence in the Caribbean, Florida and Louisiana, 1500-1800, and The Hispanic Experience in North America. The Florida Historical Society awarded him the first Arthur W. Thompson Prize in Florida History. Juan Carlos I of Spain conferred on him the highest academic award of that country, "Knight Commander of the Order of Isabel la Católica. The St. Augustine Historical Society awarded him its Award for Excellence. Gannon has served on the Board of Directors of the Florida Humanities Council and as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Historical St. Augustine Research Institute.
Rosalyn Howard is associate professor of anthropology and Director of the North American Indian Studies Program at the University of Central Florida. Among her publications is the book entitled Black Seminoles in the Bahamas, an ethnohistorical study of the Black Seminole descendant community of Red Bays, Andros Island, Bahamas.
Antoinette Jackson is associate professor of anthropology at University of South Florida. Her research covers plantation communities in the U.S. and the Caribbean. She is interested in heritage research and the business of heritage research management in public spaces and critically analyzes the interpretation and representation of culture (such as heritage tourism) as a community and/or national resource from a cultural anthropological perspective.
Jane Landers is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She numerous publications include Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) and Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005).
Thomas Larose is associate professor of art history and Chair of the Department of Art & Design at Virginia State University. A specialist in African and Native American art, his current research focuses on Native American rock art in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States.
Ivor Miller is a cultural historian specializing in the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas. He is the author of Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City (University Press of Mississippi) and Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba (University Press of Mississippi, 2009). He is currently teaching courses on African Diaspora in the Department of History at the University of Calabar, in Calabar, Nigeria.
Nathaniel Millett is assistant professor of history at Saint Louis University. His research focuses on the Atlantic world and borderlands of colonial and revolutionary North America. Recent publications include, “Defining Freedom in the Atlantic-Borderlands of the Revolutionary Southeast,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Fall 2007) and forthcoming article entitled “An Analysis of the Role of the Study of the African Diaspora within the Field of Atlantic History,” in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.
Kara Morrow is assistant professor of art history at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her publications include, “Bakongo Afterlife and Cosmological Direction: Translation of African Culture into North Florida Cemeteries,” in Athanor (2001). Her current research explores aspects of public and private devotion in New Orleans’ Holt Cemetery.
Joseph M. Murphy is the Paul and Chandler Tagliabue Professor of Interfaith Studies and Dialogue in the Theology Department at Georgetown University. He is the author of Santería: An African Religion in America and Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. With Mei-Mei Sanford he has edited the volume Osun across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas.
Ade Ofunniyin is an anthropologist. His academic work addresses the interaction of Yoruba-Americans in the American southeast and Yoruba in Nigeria, specifically in the city of Oṣogbo.
Robin Poynor is professor of art history at the University of Florida. He is the co-author A History of Art in Africa, [Abrams, 2000 and Pearson education 2008] written with Monica Blackmun Visona and Herbert M. Cole. Other books include Nigerian Sculpture: Bridges to Power (1984), African Art at the Harn Museum: Spirit Eyes, Human Hands (1995), and Kongo across the Waters (2013).
Terry Rey is associate professor of African and African Diasporic Religions at Temple University. His recent publications include Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City (Rutgers, 2009), Òrìsà Devotion as World Religion (Wisconsin, 2007), and Bourdieu on Religion (Equinox, 2007).
Larry Eugene Rivers is professor of history at Valdosta State University. He has authored, among other works, the award-winning Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville, 2000). In collaboration with Canter Brown, he has written Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord: The Beginnings of the AME Church in Florida, 1865-1895 (Gainesville, 2001) and For a Great and Grand Purpose: The Beginnings of the AMEZ Church in Florida, 1864-1905 (Gainesville, 2004). They also co-edited The Varieties of Women’s Experiences: Portraits of Southern Women in the Post-Civil War Century (Gainesville, 2009) and, with Professor Richard Mathews of the University of Tampa, John Willis Menard’s Lays in Summer Lands (Tampa, 2002).
Andrew Warnes is reader in American studies in the School of English, University of Leeds (UK). He writes about transatlantic cultures of food and commodity consumption in addition to popular music. His recent publications include Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture and the Invention of America’s First Food (Athens and London: University of Georgia, 2008) and “Tricky’s Maxinquaye: Rhizomes, Rap and the Resuscitation of the Blues,” Atlantic Studies (2009).
Vibert White is associate professor of History at University of Central Florida. His publications include the book Inside the Nation: A Personal and Historical Testimony of a Black Muslim (University Press of Florida, 2001).
