Eddie Glaude (William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center for African American Studies, Princeton University)

Eddie Glaude is William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, and Chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. His research interests include American pragmatism, specifically the work of John Dewey, and African American religious history and its place in American public life. His books include Is it Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2002); In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (University of Chicago Press); and Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America, which won the 2002 Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize. In addition, he co-edited African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology (2004) with Cornel West.

Matthew Harper (Director, African/African-American Studies Program, University of Central Arkansas)

Matthew Harper is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the African/African-American Studies Program at the University of Central Arkansas. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his dissertation focused on the tension between ideas of Exodus and Jubilee in 19th-century African-American culture and politics. His research interests include African American religion and politics; slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction in the American South.

Paul Harvey (Professor of History, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs)

Paul Harvey is Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. In addition to co-editing The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, he has published Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity; and Freedom's Coming: Religious Cultures and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era. His most recent books are Moses, Jesus and the Trickster in the Evangelical South and The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in American History, co-authored with Edward J. Blum. He is the creator and “blogmeister” of the nationally known professional scholarly blog Religion in American History and serves on the Board of Editors for the Journal of Southern History and American Nineteenth Century History, as well as Religion Compass.

Missy Dehn Kubitschek (Professor of English, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis)

Missy Dehn Kubitschek is a Professor of English, Africana Studies, Women's Studies, and American Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. Since earning her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, she has published on African American literature, Victorian literature and multicultural American women's literature. Her seminal book Claiming the Heritage: African American Women Novelists and History (University Press of Mississippi) received the Eudora Welty Prize in 1992. In addition, she has published a monograph on Toni Morrison and essays in African American Review, Melus, CLA Journal and Frontiers. She is currently working on a book focusing on intertextual relationships in multicultural American fiction.

Ed Pavlić (Professor of English, University of Georgia)

Ed Pavlić is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. His forthcoming book, Visiting Hours at the Colored Line, was selected for the 2013 American Poetry Series. His previous volumes of poetry include But Here Are Small Clear Refractions, Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway, Labors Lost Left Unfinished, and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, which was selected by Adrienne Rich for The American Poetry Review's Honickman First Book Prize. His critical study, Crossroads Modernism, incorporates his essay on David Bradley, which won the Darwin Turner Prize. He is currently working on a project based on James Baldwin's letters to his brother David.

Barbara D. Savage (Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania)

Barbara D. Savage is a Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History in the Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in twentieth century African American history; the history of American religious and social reform movements; and the history of the relationship between media and politics. Her most recent book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press), which examines debates about the public responsibility of black churches and the role of religion in racial leadership, won the 2012 Grawemeyer Prize in Religion. She also is the author of Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race (University of North Carolina Press), which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Award for the best book in American history in the period 1916-1966. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press), a collection of new work from scholars associated with a three-year Ford funded project coordinated with Professor R. Marie Griffith at Princeton University.

Josef Sorett (Assistant Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Columbia University)

Josef Sorett is an Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is an interdisciplinary historian of religion in America, with a particular focus on black communities and cultures in the United States. His research and teaching interests include American religious history; African American religions; hip hop, popular culture and the arts; gender and sexuality; and the role of religion in public life. Josef earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University; and he holds a B.S. from Oral Roberts University and an M.Div. from Boston University. His essays and reviews have been published in Culture and Religion, Callaloo, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and PNEUMA: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, as well as in such popular on-line publications, as Religion Dispatches, ABC News' Spirituality, and the Washington Post’s “On Faith” column. His forthcoming book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press) illumines how religion has figured into debates about black art and culture. He is also editing an anthology that explores the sexual politics of black churches.

Craig Werner (Senior Fellow in Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity, Institute for Research in the Humanities University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies and Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse; Higher Ground: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul; and A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. His current projects include a book about the place of music in the experience of Vietnam veterans; and a study of the relationship between the theology of Howard Thurman and the political activism of Bayard Rustin.