Project Team
Principal Investigators
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Adjunct Professor in the MSU Department of History. Hall brings a wealth of experience with not only compiling her large-scale database but also with the project's varied audiences, including historians, linguists, anthropologists, creolists and genealogists interested in discovering African Americans' roots in the African continent.
Walter Hawthorne, Professor in the MSU Department of History and Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs in the MSU College of Social Science. Hawthorne has considerable experience with quantitative analysis of data about slavery from primary sources in Brazil.
Dean Rehberger, Director of MATRIX and Associate Professor in the MSU Department of History at MSU. Dean specializes in developing digital technologies for research and teaching. He has run numerous faculty technology and workshops and given presentations for educators and cultural heritage workers from local, national and international audiences. Dean oversees MATRIX project planning, research and development, and coordinating many of the grant-funded projects for the center. His primary areas of research include: high performance computing and big data; digital history, humanities, and social sciences; digital libraries, museums and archives; Internet technologies in the classroom; and hybrid learning environments.
Ethan Watrall, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University. In addition, Ethan is Director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative and the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool at Michigan State University. Ethan’s primary interests lie in the domain of digital cultural heritage and digital archaeology, with particular focus on serious games & meaningful play, mobile & geospatial (mostly within the context of public outreach and engagement), and linked open archaeological data.
Daryle Williams Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the University of Maryland. His main research areas are nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil, Atlantic slavery, and digital humanities. Williams' publications include The Rio de Janeiro Reader: Politics, History, Culture (Duke University Press, 2015), Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (Duke, 2001), and several articles and book chapters on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian cultural history. He serves as Project Director on Slave Biographies and Co-Principal Investigator on African-American History and Culture and Digital Humanities. His current work-in-progress is “The Broken Paths of Freedom: Free Africans in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Slave Society. Williams has held grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship Program, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
Contributing Researcher
Brian Mitchell, Professor in the History Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and is currently working on several digital projects which pertain to free blacks in the Antebellum South and commemoration of the 1919 Elaine Riot.
Advisory Board
Manuel Barcia, Manuel Barcia, Associate Professor of Latin American History and Deputy Director at the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds.
Maria del Carmen Barcia Zequeira, professor of history at the University of Havana
O. Vernon Burton, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, a Professor of History and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson University CyberInstitute, and Founding Director/Advisor at the Institute for Computing inHumanities, Arts, and Social Science (ICHASS) at University of Illinois, Champaign.
Matt D. Childs, Director of the History Center at the University of South Carolina
Gabino La Rosa Corzo, Professor Honoris Causa, University of Havana
Edda L. Fields-Black, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University
Manolo Florentino, Faculty Member in the Department of History at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Member of the TSTD2 Steering Committee.
Linda Heywood, Professor of African History and African-American Studies at Boston University, Winner of the Herskovits prize of the African Studies Association 2008.
Mark Kornbluh, Dean of College of Arts & Sciences, University of Kentucky, Founder of H-Net, First Director of the Matrix digital humanities center at Michigan State University.
Paul F. LaChance, Invited Professor of History, University of Ottawa, Member of TSTD2 Development Team, Data Specialist and Editorial Board Member for the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave.
Paul Lovejoy, Distinguished Research Professor and Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History at York University, Director of Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, and Head of UNESCO Slave Trade Archives Project.
Kristin Mann, Professor in the Department of History at Emory University
Steven Mintz, Director of Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center
Assan Sarr, Assistant Professor of History and African Studies at Ohio University
Ibrahima Seck, Assistant Professor of History, Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal.
Development Team
Catherine Foley, Project Manager
Lindsey Gish, Research Assistant
Caitlin Holman, Research Assistant
Daniel Jaquint, Designer
Ramata Koumare, Programmer
Paul LaChance, Visiting Professor
Madalyn Parker, Programmer
Joseph Deming, Programmer
