About Us

Project Personnel

  • Richard Benjamin is Visiting Professor of Slavery and Public Engagement at the university of Liverpool and past director of the International Slavery Museum. Benjamin's work focuses on slavery, public engagement, and issues related to contemporary human trafficking.
  • Stephen Berry is Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia where he also serves as Associate Academic Director for Digital Humanities at UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. He is Co-Director, with Claudio Saunt, of the Center for Virtual History (eHistory.org). His digital projects, including CSI:Dixie and Private Voices, have been awarded major grants from the NEH, ACLS, and Mellon Foundation.
  • Ama Biney is a Pan African scholar-activist, historian and political scientist. Biney spent ten years as a journalist for West Africa Magazine before taking her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is program Director of the MA in International Slavery Studies and Lecturer in Black British History at University of Liverpool.
  • Katie Ireland is a specialist in corpus linguistics and digital humanities at the University of Georgia, where she heads the university's Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DigiLab), a state-of-the-art instruction space founded with support from the UGA Libraries and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. Her own research is primarily situated in studies of language variation, utilizing computational, interdisciplinary and corpus-based methods to analyze variation in English over time through the present day.
  • Tracey Johnson is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She specializes in social movements, the history of education, urban and political history, and the history of Black art and artists. She received her doctorate in African American and African Diasporic History from Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
  • Stephen Kenny is Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He has published extensively on medical racism in the context of American slavery and Jim Crow segregation and is currently working on a book examining human experimentation in the US before and after the Civil War. His research on the close links between slave traders, doctors, and hospitals was used to develop the exhibition, Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave, 1808-1865, and featured in a public radio broadcast on the topic of New Orleans’ Touro Infirmary and the slave trade.
  • Michael Tadman is Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Liverpool. His volume, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989, expanded 1996), revolutionized scholarship on the domestic slave trade and continues to feature prominently in public history presentations on the topic, including The National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Project Advisory Board

  • Robert Adams, Executive Director, Penn School National Landmark Historic District
  • Nicholas Allen, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia
  • Miles Greenwood, Director, International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, England
  • Tianming Liu, Distinguished Research Professor of Computer Science, University of Georgia
  • Tiya Miles, Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
  • David Okech, Georgia Athletics Association Endowed Professor on Human Trafficking Implementation Reach and Director, Center on Human Trafficking Reseach & Outreach (CENHTRO), University of Georgia
  • Amy Murrell Taylor, T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History, University of Kentucky