Dr. Margo Groenewoud is a Caribbean lecturer and researcher working at the intersection of humanities and social sciences, with a track record in programme development, project management and digital humanities. She obtained a PhD degree at the University of Leiden (humanities) and the University of Curaçao (social sciences). As social historian she specializes in the twentieth century Dutch Caribbean, with as particular interests postcolonialism, social justice, cultural history and digital humanities. She is senior lecturer at the University of Curaçao and board member of the University of Curaçao Research Institute (UCRI). Current research projects include Traveling Caribbean Heritage (NWO, 2018-2021) and the Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities Institute (NEH, 2019-2020). Dr. Groenewoud teaches social justice and community development at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences and is involved in ZonMw funded Participatory Action Research in Public and Mental Health, studying policies and practices relative to equity and inclusion in small island developing societies.
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is Director of Africana Studies, Dean’s Professor of Culture and Social Justice, and Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic who works at the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her scholarship and teaching in Africana Studies includes expertise on Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean literature, Haiti, and the diaspora. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014), as well as the forthcoming Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism, Literary Ethics, and Haitian Fiction (University of Virginia Press) and A Trumpet of Conscience for the 21st Century: King’s Call to Justice (Orbis Press). She is also a regular contributor to media outlets like The Boston Globe, Ms. Magazine, WGBH, America Magazine, and Cognoscenti.
Julie Kim is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. She has published articles on eighteenth-century Afro-Caribbean medicine, indigenous land rights, natural history, and early Caribbean plantation economies. She is currently writing a book manuscript about the Afro-Caribbean artist John Tyley and his work as a botanical illustrator in the early Atlantic world. Her research and teaching interests include early Caribbean literature and culture, the early Americas, the eighteenth century, empire and colonialism, slavery, the history of science, food, and the environment.
Vidyaratha Kissoon lives and works in Guyana. He manages the digital collections of the Caribbean International Resource Network. These collections include the archives hosted on the Digital Library of the Caribbean. He came to this archival work through an active interest in gender justice and LGBTIQ+ equality. In September 2020, he joined with other colleagues in initial conversations about building community archives in the Caribbean.
Minkah Makalani is Director of the Center for Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939, and is currently writing a study of C. L. R. James’s return to Trinidad, tentatively titled, Calypso Conquered the World: C.L.R. James and the Politically Unimaginable in Trinidad.
Aida Montero has served as a professional consultant and information advisor in the Dominican Republic. She has led projects focused on the design, creation and implementation of specialized libraries and the improvement of the infrastructure of information and knowledge management centers nationwide. She has participated in conferences, courses, seminars, and workshops on libraries, access to information and knowledge management systems worldwide, which has allowed her to be aware of the trends of libraries and the challenges they face in a global framework.
Matthew J. Smith is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Previously he taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica where he was Professor of Caribbean History. His research is pan-Caribbean with special interest in Haiti and Jamaica.
Hadassah St. Hubert, Ph.D is a historian and independent scholar. She is the former Council on Library Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). Her research interests focus on visual culture and the representation of developing nations at World’s Fairs and Expositions. Her experience includes digital humanities, archival preservation, collaborations across cultural institutions, and digitizing endangered collections.
Kimberly Takahata is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Villanova University, where she focuses on literature of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and works at the intersection of early American literature and Indigenous Studies. Her current project examines settler descriptions of Indigenous remains as sites of anticolonial expressions and literary sovereignty. In addition to serving as a co-editor of Digital Grainger, she is also an editor for Insurrect!, an online publication devoted to anticolonial frameworks and critiques of racial capitalism in Early American Studies.