Edward E. Baptist is a Professor of History at Cornell University. He is a historian of the United States. he focuses on the history of the enslavement of African Americans in the South, its intersections with American capitalism, the evolution of racialized policing, and Black resistance to policing.  He is the author of numerous books, including The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books.)

As the former director of Cornell’s is the Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), William Block helped to found FOTM.

Christy Hyman is the Kosciusko Foundation Visiting Professor at the University of Warsaw in the Artes Liberales Colloquium. She is a digital humanist, wildlife activist, and environmental advocate. She earned her PhD in Geography from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Her research centers on the cultural and political agency of African American communities in the Gullah Geechie Corridor of South Carolina and the Great Dismal Swamp region of the Virginia/North Carolina borderlands. Utilizing Geographic Information Systems, Christy explores how digital cartography can illuminate the human experience while addressing the effects of oppressive societal systems on sustainable futures. Christy is the author of two influential books: The Cultural Heritage Resilience of the Great Dismal Swamp (Bloomsbury, 2025) and is completing Pest Control: Birds, Black Folk, and the History of Environmental Consciousness in the U.S. South, under contract with LSU Press.

Mary Niall Mitchell is Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair in New Orleans Studies, Gordon Mueller Professor of Public History, and Director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans. She is the author of Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (NYU Press, 2008) and has published online for Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Commonplace.

Joshua D. Rothman is a historian of slavery, capitalism, and the American South. He is the chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama and the author of several acclaimed books, including Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (2003), Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (2012), and The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (2021).

Nikki M. Taylor is professor of history at Howard University. Her research focuses on African-American history in the nineteenth century, particularly in Ohio and Kentucky. Taylor has won several fellowships including Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson. She is also the Principal Investigator of two institutional grants, including the $5 million Mellon Just Futures grant (2021) and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Grant ($480k in 2017).