Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies. He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Brown is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020), and he is producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and the short video series The Bigger Picture (2022) for PBS Digital Studios.
Koritha Mitchell is a literary historian, cultural critic, and professor of English. She is the feminist scholar who coined the term know-your-place aggression to emphasize that marginalized groups are attacked for succeeding, not because they have done something wrong. Mitchell is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching and author of the 2020 book From Slave Cabins to the White House. She is also editor of Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy and of the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Her public commentary has appeared in outlets such as Time, Black Perspectives, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, MSNBC, CNN, and Good Morning America. In October 2023, she was recognized as a champion of women in the public sphere with a Progressive Women's Voices IMPACT Award from the Women's Media Center.
After 18 years at Ohio State University, Mitchell now teaches at Boston University. She is also serving as president of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows for calendar year 2024. Online, she’s @ProfKori, and more information can always be found at korithamitchell.com
The Democratic Knowledge Project (DKP) at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is offering this institute in partnership with Project Zero, a research group based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). The Center for Ethics seeks to strengthen teaching and research about pressing ethical issues; to foster sound norms of ethical reasoning and civic discussion; and to share the work of our community in the public interest. An initiative of the Center for Ethics, the DKP seeks to identify, strengthen, and disseminate the knowledge, dispositions, capacities, and skills civic participants need to sustain healthy democratic life. The DKP partners with Project Zero to design, deliver, and conduct research on civics learning and civics-focused professional learning opportunities. Project Zero’s mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity for individuals and groups.