Shaun Ossei-Owusu is a Presidential Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, and a scholar of the history of the legal profession. He was previously the Kellis E. Parker Teaching Fellow at Columbia Law School.

Shaun received his JD and PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and practiced in the Appeals Unit at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and the international law firm Sidley Austin LLP. In addition to spending three years as a fellow at the American Bar Foundation, the leading legal think tank in socio-legal research, his work has been published in a host of scholarly journals as well as general outlets such as The American Prospect, Salon, Jacobin, Huffington Post, and Medium.

The National Science Foundation, the Law and Society Association, the American Bar Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities have all funded Shaun’s research. He has also received early-career awards from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the New York-Historical Society and American Society for Legal History for the research for his upcoming book, The People’s Champ.

Dan Berger has been writing about the history of twentieth century US social movements for almost two decades. An associate professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell and affiliate associate professor of history at the UW Seattle, he regularly contributes journalistic commentary on issues of policing, prisons, and activism. He blogs for Black Perspectives, the online publication of the African American Intellectual History Society, and has published articles in Dissent, Jacobin, Truthout, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Dan coordinates the Washington Prison History Project, a digital archive which gathers documentary evidence of prisoner activism in the Pacific Northwest in the age of mass incarceration.

In 2005, Dan co-edited the anthology Letters From Young Activists, which gathered writings from young people around the country. The next year, he published Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. The book provided the first in depth account of the rise and fall of the controversial 1970s-era anti-imperialist organization from its antecedents in the Students for Democratic Society to successive clandestine efforts to combat racism and imperialism. That effort heightened his interest in studying the history of the carceral state as a form of political repression. In Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era , published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014, he showed incarcerated people to be at the center of civil rights and Black Power organizing. The book won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize for the best book dealing with the history of race relations in the United States from the Organization of American Historians. It locates the origins of mass incarceration in campaigns against Black radicals—who resisted such advances through protest and print culture that continue to inspire opposition to mass incarceration.

Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History project. A political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the far-right, Hemmer is author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016. She is co-founder and co-editor of Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post. She is also a columnist for Vox and The Age in Melbourne. She co-hosts Past Present, a weekly podcast where three historians discuss the latest news in American politics and culture, and is the producer and host of A12: The Story of Charlottesville, a six-part podcast series on the white-power terrorism in Charlottesville in 2017.

She writes frequently about history and politics and her articles have been published in national and international news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, U.S. News & World Report, New Republic, and she has been interviewed on the PBS NewsHour, CNN, NPR, NBC News, and elsewhere.

Nicole Hemmer earned her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in U.S. history from Columbia University, and has won fellowships from the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement at Purdue University, the Hoover Institution, the Miller Center of Public Affairs, and the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Robert C. Lieberman is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His teaching and research interests include American political development, race and American politics, public policy, and inequality.

He is the author of two books. Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State won the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association, the Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University, and Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling Award. Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective won the Best Book Prize of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).

Professor Lieberman is also the co-editor of Democratization in America: A Comparative-Historical Analysis, Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Post-Racist Era, and The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development He is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals as well as in Foreign Affairs.

He has served as provost of the Johns Hopkins University and as dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Andrew Whitby is an economist with interests in econometrics and data science; and the economics of technology, creativity, innovation and growth. He has been a Data Scientist at the World Bank, working in the Development Data Group of the Chief Economist on all kinds of data questions He holds a PhD in economics from Balliol College, Oxford, where he specialized in econometrics, and he previously was a Research Fellow at the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta). He has written on topics concerning data, demography and the digital economy, and was co-editor of the World Bank’s Atlas of the Sustainable Development Goals 2018 (and 2017).

Andrew was co-host of “Between Two Geeks”, a podcast about development and data, launched by the World Bank in 2017 and he maintains a blog at andrewwhitby.com/blog, which receives a steady ~1500 visitors per month.