Contributors

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• Contributors

DAVID W. BLIGHT is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University. He is the author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018), American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011), and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001).

JIM DOWNS is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (2021). His other books include Sick from Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012) and Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (2016). He has published essays in the Atlantic, New Yorker, Washington Post, New York Times, Vice, Slate, Lancet, LA Times, among others. He is the editor of Civil War History. Downs is the Gilder Lehrman–National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College.

CHERYL FINLEY is director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College and associate professor of art history at Cornell University. Finley leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest historically Black college and university consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts professionals. She has written widely on photography for academic and popular publications, including Aperture, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, Art Forum and Small Axe. She is also the award-winning author of Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (2018). Finley’s current research examines the global art economy, focusing on the relationship among artists, museums, biennials and migration in the book project, “Black Art Futures,” and the interdisciplinary project “Mapping Art History at HBCUs.”

MATTHEW FOX-AMATO is associate professor of history at the University of Idaho. He is the author of Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (2019), the runner-up for the 2021 Shapiro Book Prize of the Huntington Library, a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, and a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award. The book was also named one of the Advocate’s “Must-Read Books on Race and Hate.” Currently, Fox-Amato is working on two books, the first examining the memory of American slavery in photography and other forms of visual culture and the second book the history of the White House photographer.

IAN IVERSON is an editorial specialist at the Kentucky Historical Society’s Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. He is a graduate of Princeton University and completed his PhD at the University of Virginia in 2022. He is currently revising his dissertation, “Moderate Men and Conservative Influences: Illinois and the Politics of Union, 1854–1861,” for book publication.

GREGORY LASKI is the author of Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (2018). He is currently civilian associate professor of English at the US Air Force Academy. A Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library in 2021–22, he is at work on a new book project: an intellectual history of revenge in the long Reconstruction era.

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS is associate professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University and the founder of the Vision and Justice Project. Her books and edited volumes include The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (2014) and Carrie Mae Weems (2021), which won the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize, and the “Vision and Justice” issue Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. She was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2022. Her forthcoming publications include Caucasian War: How Race Changed Sight in America (2023), Vision & Justice (2024), and Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law (Spring 2023).” She is also on the Civil War History editorial board.

JAMES G. MENDEZ is currently the senior associate dean of student affairs and assistant professor in the Department of Medical Education at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. He is the author of A Great Sacrifice...