Shannon C. Eaves | College of Charleston

Shannon C. Eaves earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently works as an Assistant Professor of African American History at the College of Charleston. She specializes in slavery and gender in the antebellum American South. She is finalizing her book, Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South, which will be published by UNC Press. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships from the American Association of University Women and Rutgers University.

Sarah Fouts | University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Sarah Fouts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and director of the Public Humanities Minor program at UMBC. Fouts’s research interests include political economy, food studies, New Orleans, Honduras, and labor. Fouts is a 2022-2023 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow and is the principal investigator for the 2022-2023 ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement grant. Currently, Fouts is working on a book manuscript which uses ethnographic and archival research to analyze the stories of Central American and Mexican food industry workers and day laborers in post-Katrina New Orleans. 

Jermaine Thibodeaux | University of Oklahoma

Jermaine Thibodeaux is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Trained in the department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, his academic interests include African American history, Texas history, carceral histories and Black masculinities. He is currently completing a book project that explores the long and sordid connections between the Texas sugar industry and the rise of the state’s penitentiary system. That project, titled, “The House that Cane Built: Sugar, Race, and the Gendered Formations of the Texas Prison System, 1842-1920,” centers the commodity of sugar in a retelling of the prison system’s history and in so doing, foregrounds Black male convicts and their labor as crucial to the establishment and growth of the Texas carceral landscape.

Terms Ending 2026

Aimee Loiselle | Central Connecticut State University

Aimee Loiselle is an award-winning scholar and assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University who specializes in modern US labor history with an interest in women workers, gender, race, and migration. Her book, Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), uses a transnational framework to study the labor and activism of women in the US textile and apparel industry during the twentieth century. It also examines how the blockbuster movie Norma Rae (1979) and the icon it generated obscured the complex realities of diverse women workers and the labor movement. She is currently researching women in supply chains for hip-hop fashion and development of the Baby Phat brand. It was created by Kimora Lee Simmons, a former model who celebrated her mixed-race ancestry, and marketed as an empowering lifestyle line for women while depending on low-wage workers.

Michael D. Thompson | University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Michael D. Thompson is a UC Foundation Associate Professor of American History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he served as the Head of the History Department from 2018-2023 and is a scholar of the American South and slavery, and the early national and antebellum United States. Dr. Thompson’s first book, Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port, is a study of waterfront labor and laborers in Charleston, South Carolina, between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The manuscript for this project was awarded the Hines Prize from the College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program. Dr. Thompson’s scholarship also has appeared in Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad, and he is researching the history of enslavement in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, Tennessee. Mike previously served a term on the Southern Labor Studies Association’s Board of Directors, and he currently is organizing the SLSA’s 2024 conference in Chattanooga.

Viola Franziska Müller | Wageningen University

Viola Franziska Müller is a historian of slavery and labor in the 19th-century Americas. She is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Wageningen University. Viola is the author of Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), and co-editor of Moving Workers: Historical Perspectives on Labour, Coercion and Im/mobilities (Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2023) and Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Work Relations through History and Art (London: UCL Press, 2024). She serves as Book Review Editor at the Journal of Global Slavery and is part of the working group “Labour and Coercion” of the European Labour History Network (ELHN).