JoAnna Poblete is a professor of history, the John D. and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and chair of the History Department at Claremont Graduate Uni­versity. Her research interests connect colonialism and empire, migration and labor, oral history, comparative ethnic studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, Caribbean Studies, indigenous history, environmental history, identity, and gender in twentieth-century U.S. history. She has written two books on U.S. colonialism in Oceania, several articles on comparative subjectivities, and two articles about St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, among others. Dr. Poblete is also deeply committed to community-engaged scholarship, providing a variety of community workshops and public programming, in addition to co-creating presentations and research with community collaborators.

Marisa J. Fuentes is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the histories of gender, slavery, the Caribbean and Black Atlantic worlds. She is the author of the award-winning book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), which won book prizes from the Association of Black Women Historians, The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and The Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize from the Caribbean Studies Association. She is also co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I to III (Rutgers University Press, 2016-2021), and the ‘Slavery and the Archive’ special issue in History of the Present (2016). In March 2023, Fuentes was elected to the Society of American Historians which “honors literary distinction in the writing of history and biography.”  Most recently, in April 2024, Fuentes was elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Fuentes’s recent publications include the “Afterword,” with Sarah Haley in Saidiya Hartman’s Second edition of Scenes of Subjection (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022), “Slavery’s Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives” (English Language Notes 21), “Genres of History and the Practice of Loss: Attending to Silence in Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands” (Small Axe 2021), and  “‘Attending to Black Death:’ Black Women’s Bodies in the Archive and the Afterlife of Captivity—A Reflection” (Diacritics 2020). Her next book, Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, explores the connections between capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the disposability of black lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Teachers attend a summer excursion to a historical city in America.