A public historian and teacher, Marie Tyler-McGraw has researched and published extensively in African American history. Her Ph.D. in American Studies at George Washington University was followed by postdoctoral appointments to research free Blacks in Richmond, Virginia, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She was a historian at the Valentine/Richmond History Center in Richmond, Virginia, where she wrote a history of the city, At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia and its People (Chapel Hill, 1994), and an extensive exhibit essay, published as a book, In Bondage and Freedom. She was a program officer in the Division of Higher Education at the National Endowment for the Humanities, a historian in the Office of the Chief Historian at the National Park Service, and served on the boards of the Organization of American Historians, the National Council on Public History, and West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Her study of the African colonization movement in Virginia was published as An African Republic (Chapel Hill, 2007) and traced the varied reactions of Black and white Virginians to the idea of a nation for free or emancipated Blacks in Africa. The study demonstrated the shift in motives over the antebellum decades as the Virginia colonizers reflected national politics and became overtly proslavery. With Deborah Lee, she co-created a database and content for a website, “Virginia Emigrants to Liberia,” to use data on Black families that did not appear in the book. With support from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Virginia Center for Digital History, the website went online in 2008.
An independent historian, consultant, and author with an MA in history and a PhD in cultural studies from George Mason University, Deborah Lee researches, writes, and presents on Virginia history. She benefited from fellowships at Virginia Humanities, the Virginia Historical Society, and Duke University. She has collaborated with various local and regional history organizations to produce books, articles, maps, guides, documentary films, and direct an oral history project, all mostly related to Virginia's African American history. The heart of her work is the antislavery movement in the Mid-Atlantic region across racial, gender, religious, and ethnic boundaries. She is the author of Honoring Their Paths: African American Contributions Along the Journey Through Hallowed Ground and co-author, with Marie Tyler-McGraw and the Virginia Center for Digital History, of the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia website launched in 2008.
Jane Ailes has had careers divided into areas of research in the biological sciences and the humanities that share some techniques in research methods, data collection and preservation, relational database design and maintenance, and data analysis. Since 2001, she has specialized in African American history research in the 18th and 19th century records of the Mid-Atlantic states. In both careers, large projects and large data sets were managed. Past employers have included the Smithsonian Institution, University of Maine, University of Washington, National Marine Fisheries Service, and as a self-employed consultant/researcher. She has a BA in Biology from Bridgewater College.
Dr. Worthy Martin is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. For over 20 years he has had a substantial research appointment with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and is currently Director of IATH. Professor Martin is the primary information architect on numerous digital humanities projects through IATH. A partial list of those projects includes: The Chaco Research Archive, Digital Yoknapatawpha, The Collective Biographies of Women, The Life of the Buddha, Voting Viva Voce: Unlocking the Social Logic of Past Politics, Jefferson's University - Early Life Project, 1819-1870, Soundscape Architecture, Social Networks in Archival Context, The Independent Works of William Tyndale, and Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection.
Dr. Susanna Klosko is Digital Humanities Project Designer/Manager at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), University of Virginia. Susanna collaborates with scholars in the conceptualization and design of digital humanities projects, particularly in designing the information and data architecture of historical databases. She has a PhD from Brandeis University (Jewish Studies) and a BA from William & Mary (History).
At the creation of the original Virginia Emigrants to Liberia website in 2007-2008, Scot French was an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and director of the Virginia Center for Digital History. He is now an associate professor of history and associate director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research at University of Central Florida. He is the author of The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
