Lawrie Balfour is James Hart Professor of Politics and a core member of the American Studies faculty at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom; Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois; and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Her articles on race, gender, democracy, and literature have appeared in Political Theory, American Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, American Political Science Review, Hypatia, The Du Bois Review, Annual Review of Political Science, and other journals and edited volumes. She is currently working on a book (provisionally) entitled Reparations Unbound: Dilemmas of Dismantling Racial Injustice. From 2017-21, Lawrie was the Editor of Political Theory.  

Deva Woodly is a professor of political science at Brown University. She is the author of Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford 2021) and The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford 2015). She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Her research covers a variety of topics, from media and communication to political understandings of economics, to race and imagination, and social movements. In each case, she focuses on the impacts of public discourse on the political meanings of social and economic issues as well as how those common understandings change democratic practice and public policy. Her work centers the perspective of ordinary citizens and political challengers with an eye toward how the demos impacts political action and shapes political possibilities. 

Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice, with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. The professorship was created to honor the legacy of Bond, the civil rights champion and former University of Virginia professor. Gaines’ current research is on the problems and projects of racial integration in the United States during and after the civil rights movement.

He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Book Prize. His book, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gaines is a past president of the American Studies Association (2009-10).

His current research is on the integrationist projects of African American activists, artists and intellectuals, interventions that redefined blackness and acknowledged the relationship of structural and ideological forms of racism to racial capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia.