FOUNDING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Jennie K. Williams, Ph.D. is a historian with expertise in American slavery and the digital humanities, data and data ethics. Her book, Oceans of Kinfolk: African American Ancestral History & the Antebellum Coastwise Traffic of Enslaved Persons to New Orleans is forthcoming from UNC Press. Dr. Williams is the author of Kinfolkology’s five databases which collectively contain the names of over 85,000 enslaved African Americans. She regularly collaborates with scholars, museums, cultural institutions, and design teams to ensure that sites and projects interpreting slavery and African American history are grounded in rigorous scholarship and Descendant-centered interpretation. Her consulting work includes historical research, interpretive planning, genealogical research, and advising on ethical approaches to representing slavery in public and digital spaces.

CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD

A native of Plateau, Alabama, also known as Africatown, Darron is the great-great-grandson of Clotilda slave ship survivor “Kupollee,” one of the last 110 Africans to be illegally brought to America from Africa in 1860. He is the former President of the Clotilda Descendants Association (2019-2022), is an alumnus of the University of Texas at El Paso and was the first African American sportswriter at the Mobile Press Register.

VICE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD

Jamelle Bouie is a political analyst and columnist for The New York Times, known for his incisive commentary on U.S. politics, history, and culture. A former chief political correspondent for Slate and political analyst for CBS News, Bouie brings historical depth and sharp insight to contemporary issues. His writing regularly explores the legacies of slavery, Reconstruction, and civil rights, connecting them to current political debates and challenging readers to consider how the past shapes the present and future of American democracy.

TREASURER

Edward E. Baptist, Ph.D. is a Professor of History at Cornell University. He is an internationally-recognized historian of the 19th-century United States, particularly the history of the enslavement of African Americans in the South and its intersections with American capitalism.  He is the author of numerous books, including The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014). He is also the Co-Founder of Freedom on the Move: a database of fugitives from slavery.

SECRETARY

Laura Rosanne Adderley is a historian of the African Diaspora whose scholarship focuses on the Atlantic slave trade, Black enslavement in the Americas, Caribbean history, and the long nineteenth-century era of abolition and emancipation. She serves as Associate Professor of History at Tulane University, where she is also affiliated with Africana Studies and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Her award-winning book, “New Negroes from Africa”: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (2006), examined the experiences of Africans liberated from illegally operating slave ships and resettled throughout the Caribbean. Adderley’s current research explores the lives of Africans rescued from slave ships, the politics of emancipation, and the meanings of freedom in the post-abolition Atlantic world. She is also deeply engaged in public history initiatives centered on Black historical memory, archives, and community education.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and literary scholar whose work explores Black history, memory, kinship, and the enduring legacies of the African Diaspora. She is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, a groundbreaking meditation on the life and world of Phillis Wheatley Peters that won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, became a national bestseller, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and one of the most celebrated literary works of 2021, earning the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Professor Jeffers’ essays and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and The New York Times. A recipient of fellowships and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Library of Congress, she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2020. Jeffers is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Oklahoma and is widely recognized as one of the foremost literary voices chronicling Black Southern history, womanhood, and ancestral memory in contemporary American literature.

Anne Doris is a senior operations executive in the cable, media, and telecommunications sectors, with a career spanning leadership of $100M–$3B enterprises. She served as COO at Academic Partnerships, and as Communications executive, Anne led key initiatives across the United States and in South America. Anne has also served as a Professor of Practice at Penn State, and she holds an MBA in Marketing Management from Long Island University as well as a BA in Journalism from City College of New York.

SENIOR ADVISOR FOR PROGRAMS, PARTNERSHIPS, AND SUSTAINABILITY

Regina Brayboy is a senior executive, civic leader, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of public history, community wellbeing, and institutional change. She brings a cross-sector perspective shaped by leadership across nonprofits, philanthropy, public service, healthcare, and cultural organizations. She is the author of the forthcoming children’s book Finding Young Charley, a work of historical fiction rooted in ancestral research and place-based memory.

SCHOLAR RESEARCHER (COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY)

Hannah Butler is a PhD student of statistics at Colorado State University. Part of her doctoral dissertation is to use statistical modelling to reconstruct data from heavily fractured, heterogeneous records on individuals while prioritizing humane data practices. This work is anticipated to aid in making links between individuals in the Oceans of Kinfolk and Louisiana Kindred databases. Once a version of the model is finalized, she plans to design an accompanying interactive visualization for the community to explore the stories in the data.

SCHOLAR RESEARCHER (UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH)

Hunter Moyler is a second-year student in the University of Pittsburgh's history PhD program. He is originally from Virginia and earned a BA in English and Journalism from the University of Richmond. While an undergrad, he worked for the university's Race & Racism Project, which strove to document the school's history of racism, slavery, and its relationship with the city--the erstwhile capital of the Confederate States. After a stint as a full-time reporter for Newsweek, he completed a master's degree in Public History at Northeastern University in Boston. Following his graduation from Northeastern, Hunter spent just over three years working at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, where he was Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's research assistant. In this capacity, he assisted Dr. Kendi in research and fact-checking his book projects and educational social media content.

Hunter’s current research focuses on the experience of Black Appalachian people, free and enslaved, during the Early Republic period of United States history. In particular, he is interested in the experienced of enslaved miners in the 1820s through the 1850s.

RESEARCH INTERN (UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)

Harry is currently a student at the University of Virginia hoping to graduate with a degree in history. Besides working with Kinfolkology, Harry also spends his time at Agecroft Hall and Gardens as a Tour Guide and the Rare Book School as a Collections Assistant.

PHOTOGRAPHY & VIDEOGRAPHY

CJ Jackson is a third-generation Virginian with six years of professional photography experience.

Lawrie Balfour is an American philosopher and James Hart Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. She is known for her works on political theory. Dr. Balfour is the author of Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom (Oxford University Press), Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press), and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Cornell University Press). She is currently working on a book (provisionally) entitled Reparations Unbound: Dilemmas of Dismantling Racial Injustice.

BK Fulton is the Chairman & CEO of Soulidifly Productions, an award-winning filmmaker and producer, civil rights activist, business executive, philanthropist and attorney. BK sits on several boards including, TowneBank, the Library of Virginia, Advantage Testing Foundation, Lewis Latimer House Museum, The National Center of Women’s Innovations, and the Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation.  His professional memberships include the Producers Guild of America (PGA), the Writers Guild of America, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, the Alpha Beta Boule, the Executive Leadership Council, and the Business Leaders Hall of Fame.

Kim Forde-Mazrui is the Mortimer M. Caplin Professor of Law at the University of Virginia where he teaches Racial Justice and Law; Race and Criminal Justice.

Janelle S. Peifer, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Richmond. Her teaching and research focus on trauma and post-traumatic resilience and flourishing.

Joshua Rothman, Ph.D. is an American historian. He is a professor and chair for the department of history at the University of Alabama. His most recent book is The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America.

Ryan Snow serves as Counsel with the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. His work focuses on litigation and advocacy defending and advancing the fundamental right to vote, and to ensure that all Americans have equal and meaningful access to our democracy, regardless of race, wealth, age, language, dis/ability, or other identity or circumstance.

Karin Wulf is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director & Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, and Professor of History at Brown University.  A historian of gender, family, and politics in early British America, she writes for public and academic audiences about #VastEarlyAmerica, scholarly communications, and the humanities.  Lineage:  Genealogy and the Politics of Connection in Early America is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, as is Genealogy: A Very Short Introduction.