About the Contributors

Adrienne Chudzinski is a history instructor at Stanford Online High School in Palo Alto, California. She received her PhD from Indiana University, and her research explores the rich political and cultural afterlife of racial violence in Birmingham, Alabama, as it relates to the mythology of the civil rights movement and public memories of the Black freedom struggle in the United States. Chudzinski taught previously at Miami University, has worked in several history museums, including the National Museum of American History and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museum, and served as an editorial assistant at the American Historical Review.

Kami Fletcher is an associate professor of history at Albright College. She received her PhD in history from Morgan State University in 2013. Her research centers on African American burial grounds and late nineteenth/early twentieth century Black male and female undertakers. She is the author of "Real Business: Maryland's First Black Cemetery Journey's into the Enterprise of Death, 1807-1920" (Thanatological Studies, April 2015) and coeditor of Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed, which examines the internal and/or external drives among ethnic, religious, and racial groups to separate their dead (University Press of Mississippi, March 2020). Fletcher's work has been featured on the websites Black Perspectives, the Order of Good Death, and Death & the Maiden and the podcast The Rise of Charm City. She serves on the international board of the journal Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying and is an associate member of the Death and Culture Network based at the University of York. For more, visit www.kamifletcher.weebly.com and contact her on Twitter using @kamifletcher36.

Joy M. Giguere is an associate professor of history at Penn State York, where she teaches courses on American history, the history of technology, the history of Western medicine, African American history, the Civil War era, and the history of death and mourning. Her research has been published in a variety of history journals, and she is the author of Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014). Her forthcoming book is Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth Century American Society and Culture (University of Michigan Press). You can learn more about her work here: https://sites.psu.edu/joygiguere/

Antoinette Jackson is professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, founder of the Black Cemetery Network, and director of the USF Heritage Research Lab and USF Living Heritage Institute. Her most recent book, Heritage, Tourism, and Race: The Other Side of Leisure, was published by Routledge in April 2020. Twitter: @AntoinetteJax; LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/antoinettetjackson

Scarlet Jernigan received her PhD in history at Texas Christian University. Her dissertation, "Living in the Urban South: A Study of Antebellum Macon, Georgia," explores the central Georgia city's migration patterns as well as its socioeconomic hierarchy and networks manifested in both life and death. Her research interests include religious and gendered epitaphal language, historical geography, Georgia history, and sectional cultural differences. She has published two articles, "'Why Should a Christian Desire to Sleep Here?' The Unitarian Rural Cemetery Movement and Its Adoption in Macon, Georgia" in Georgia Historical Quarterly (Winter 2015) and "Northside 'Hypocrites' versus Southside 'Racists': Three Atlanta Southern Baptist Churches Respond to Changes in the Racial Status Quo" in Baptist History and Heritage Journal (Fall 2013). She is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Point University in West Point, Georgia.

Brian Palmer is a Richmond, Virginia-based journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and Smithsonian Magazine, and on The Root, BuzzFeed, PBS, and the radio show Reveal. He received the Peabody Award, the National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, and the Online Journalism Award for "Monumental Lies," a 2018 Reveal story about public funding for Confederate sites. Palmer is currently the Joan Konner Visiting Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. He earned his bachelor's in East Asian studies from Brown University and his master's in photography from the School of Visual Arts.

Erin Hollaway Palmer is an editor and graphic designer. Since 2004, she has worked for a variety of national magazines, including National Geographic Adventure, Parade, and, most recently, Inc. She is a founding member of the Friends of East End Cemetery, the all-volunteer nonprofit devoted to the reclamation and documentation of that historic African American burial ground in Richmond, Virginia.

Lynn Rainville is an author, speaker, and public historian who studies ordinary Virginians doing extraordinary things in the past. Since earning a PhD in Near Eastern archaeology, she has spent two decades studying historic cemeteries, gravestones, enslaved communities and their descendants, town poor farms, and Virginia's role in World War I. Her grant-funded research has produced numerous articles and books, including Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2014); Sweet Briar College (Arcadia, 2015); Virginia and the Great War (McFarland, 2017); and Invisible Founders: How Two Centuries of African American Families Transformed a Plantation into a College (Berghahn Books, 2019). In 2019 she was appointed the inaugural director of institutional history at Washington and Lee University, where she is also a professor of anthropology and the Executive Director of the Museums. For more information, see www.lynnrainville.org

Kaniqua L. Robinson is an assistant professor of anthropology at Furman University. Her research focuses on the politics of memory and race. Dr. Robinson is the research consultant and memorialization specialist for the Black Cemetery Network. Twitter: @KaniquaRobinson LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kaniqua-robinson-4015a31aa

Adam Rosenblatt is associate professor of the practice in international comparative studies and cultural anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015) and has written extensively about mass graves, forensic science, and movements to care for the marginalized dead. His second book, Cemetery Citizens: Race and Revision in American Burial Grounds, will be out in early 2024. Adam lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he is the cofounder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory and a board member of the Friends of Geer Cemetery.

Ashley Towle is assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Maine. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Maryland, and a BA in History from Gettysburg College. She is the author of African Americans, Death and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2022).

Carroll Van West received his PhD in history from the College of William and Mary in 1982. He is the Tennessee State Historian as well as the director of the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area. West serves on the board of advisors for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and as a member of the National Historic Landmarks committee of the National Park Service. His public history work covers many states, most recently in Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Iowa, New Mexico, Florida, and Montana. Dr. West's research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern and western history as well as architecture and material culture. His books include Capitalism on the Frontier: Transformation of Billings and the Yellowstone Valley in the 19th Century (Nebraska, 1993); Tennessee's Historic Landscapes (Tennessee, 1995); Tennessee's New Deal Landscape (Tennessee, 2000); and, Nashville Architecture (Tennessee, 2015).
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Shari L. Williams is the first African American woman to earn a PhD in history from Auburn University. She is an independent social and cultural historian who studies the modern American South with a focus on the past, present, and future of rural historic landscapes and cultural traditions in Alabama's Black Belt through the lens of race, gender, and class. Her publications include articles for the Encyclopedia of Alabama and the self-published book Silent for a While, but Not Idle: African American Self-Determination Ignites Educational Opportunity in South Macon County, Alabama 1906-1967. Dr. Williams is the executive director of the Ridge Macon County Archaeology Project located in Warrior Stand, Macon County, Alabama. The Ridge Project provides educational resources and programs centered on racial/cultural groups that, from the 1800s, populated communities along the historic Federal Road through the region, and it works to document and preserve the area's historic cemeteries.