Adriana Méndez Rodenas is Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Literatures in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Trained in Romance Studies at Cornell University (Ph.D) and Duke University (M.A.), she was professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and came to the University of Missouri to direct the Afro-Romance Institute (2017-2021). Professor Méndez Rodenas’ areas of research are transatlantic studies, Caribbean literature, and travel writing. Her books explore the connection between gender and nineteenth-century Spanish American history. Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (1998) retrieves a pivotal figure in Cuban letters, followed by critical editions of Merlin’s Les esclaves dans les colonies espagnoles (2005) and Viaje a la Habana (2009). Transatlantic Travels to Nineteenth Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (2014) traces the rise of Spanish American nationalism as documented in women’s travels. Currently she is engaged in Transatlantic Sketches: Fredrika Bremer’s American Journey (1851-1853) and the Iconography of the Plantation, a book on a pioneering Swedish novelist and early feminist whose travels to the U.S. and Cuba during the ante-bellum era show a comparative view of plantation society. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Notre Dame Center for Advanced Studies, and the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

She serves on the editorial board of Karib-Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies and Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana (IILI).

Email: mendezah@missouri.edu

 

Mary Stegmaier is an Associate Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs and the Vice Provost for International Programs at the University of Missouri. Her research concentrates on elections and voting behavior in the U.S. and Europe, and has been published in a variety of political science journals including the British Journal of Political Science, East European Politics & Societies, Electoral Studies, Political Behavior, Politics & Policy, Public Choice, and the Annual Review of Political Science. She serves on several journal editorial boards, including the International Journal of Forecasting, Political Science Research and Methods, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, and Politics & Policy. In addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journals, her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Brookings Institution Blog, the Democratic Audit, and the London School of Economics Blogs.  Dr. Stegmaier has also served as an international election observer with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Albania, Macedonia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan.

Daive Dunkley is an Associate Professor in the MU Department of Black Studies and an affiliate faculty member at the Kinder Institute and in the Departments of History and Religious Studies. His research focuses on the history and culture of the Caribbean and the wider Black Atlantic, and he has authored publications exploring slave resistance, British colonialism, decolonization, and the politics of the Rastafari. He is the author, co-author, or editor of several books, including Readings in Caribbean History and Culture: Breaking Ground (2011), Agency of the Enslaved: Jamaica and the Culture of Freedom in the Atlantic World (2013), Leonard Percival Howell and the Genesis of the Rastafari (2015), and Black Resistance in the Americas (2019). Additionally, his book chapters and articles include “Enslaved Africans and the Transformation of Society in Brazil and the Caribbean: A View from the Churches,” published in the collection The African Heritage in Brazil and the Caribbean (2011), and “The Politics of Repatriation and the First Rastafari, 1932-1940,” published in Souls (2018). Prof. Dunkley has a strong desire to educate others about Black history and its implications for the present.

MU History Postdoctoral Fellow, emholmes@missouri.edu
Erin Holmes holds a B.A. in History from the College of William and Mary, a Certificate in Early American History and Museum Studies from the National Institute of American History and Democracy, a Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina, and a Certificate in Historical Archaeology and Cultural Resource Management from the USC Department of Anthropology. Her manuscript project, The House that Slavery Built: Social and Material Transformation in the British Atlantic World, 1670-1831, explores how the built environment—buildings, landscapes, objects, and the spaces in between—shaped the experience of slavery within the plantation house, transforming colonial identity to create the conditions that made the American Revolution possible. Her research has been funded by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, among others, and from 2017-2019, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society.

 

Thom Lambert received his J.D. from the University of Chicago and currently serves as Professor and Wall Chair in Corporate Law and Governance at the University of Missouri School of Law. His scholarship focuses on antitrust, corporate, and regulatory matters, and he is the co-author of Antitrust Law: Interpretation and Implementation (5th ed., Foundation Press, 2013) and the author or co-author of over 20 scholarly articles, which have appeared in journals and publications including, Antitrust Bulletin, the Boston College Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and the Yale Journal on Regulation. He also blogs regularly at “Truth on the Market,” a site focused on academic commentary on antitrust, business, and economic legal issues. He is a past recipient of the Law School’s Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award for teaching excellence; the MU-wide Gold Chalk Award for Excellence in Teaching at the graduate level; and the 2007 and 2011 Shook Hardy & Bacon Excellence in Research Awards for best law faculty scholarship. Prior to joining the faculty at the Law School, he practiced law in the Chicago office of Sidley Austin; served as a John M. Olin Fellow at Northwestern University School of Law and the Center for the Study of American Business; and clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Professor S. David Mitchell is a member of the University of Missouri School of Law faculty. He teaches Torts, Advanced Torts, Criminal Justice Administrations, Collateral Consequences of Sentencing, and Law & Society, and his research is on the collateral consequences of sentencing and ex-offender reentry. He earned his J.D. and Ph.D. (Sociology) from the University of Pennsylvania, and before joining the faculty at University of Missouri, he worked as a Scholar in Residence in the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has served as a law clerk to the Honorable Andre M. Davis (D. Md.) and is currently a member of the Missouri Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is also an Affiliate of the Black Studies and Sociology Departments.  Recently, he has served as the Chair of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Council.  In 2015, he was a recipient of the MU President’s Award for Community Engagement.

Robert L. Smale is Associate Professor of History at MU. After earning B.A. degrees in History and Spanish at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, he went on to complete his M.A. and Ph.D. in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he specialized in the study of Latin America. His research focuses on the political and social history of South America’s Andean nations. He is the author of “I Sweat the Flavor of Tin”: Labor Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia (2010). He regularly teaches courses on the history of constitutional democracy in Latin America and the region’s revolutionary traditions.

Bob Bailey is a 1968 graduate of Marist College and a 1979 graduate of the University of Missouri -Columbia School of Law, where he commenced his career after graduation. In 1983, Prof. Bailey became the City of Columbia’s Municipal Judge, serving for four years before returning to the MU Law School full time in 1987 as the Assistant Dean and Senior Fellow. Prof. Bailey is also Vice President of the National Academy of Arbitrators and has an active labor and sports arbitration practice. In addition, he is a Commissioner for the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniformed State Laws (NCCUSL), and he serves on the Uniform Athlete Agent Act and the Veterans Court Act drafting committees. Prof. Bailey is actively involved in campus committee work and chairs the mid-month Institutional Review Board (IRB), and he has a long history of community services. Presently, he chairs Boone County Family Resources, an agency providing services to 1,300 developmentally disabled citizens, and in the past, he has chaired the Family Health Center, the Central Missouri Food Bank, and the Regional Aids Inter-Faith Network (RAIN). He served as Director of the Law School’s nationally renowned Center for Dispute Resolution from 2005-2013, and he teaches Arbitration, a Lawyering Seminar, a first-year Lawyering class, and a Freshman Interest Group (FIG). Prof. Bailey is married to Sharon, and they have two daughters and four grandchildren.

Peverill Squire is Professor of Political Science and holds the Hicks and Martha Griffiths Chair in American Political Institutions. He received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California-Berkeley. In recent years he has authored The Rise of the Representative: Lawmakers and Constituents in Colonial America (2017) and The Evolution of American Legislatures: Colonies, Territories and States, 1619-2009 (2012); co-authored Why States Matter (second edition, 2017); State Legislatures Today: Politics under the Domes (second edition, 2015); 101 Chambers: Congress, State Legislatures, and the Future of Legislative Studies (2005); and Who Runs for the Legislature? (2001); and co-edited Legislatures: Comparative Perspectives on Representative Assemblies (2002). Professor Squire’s research centers on American politics with an emphasis on legislatures, and for many years, he served as the senior editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly. He regularly teaches undergraduate courses on American state government and American legislatures and graduate courses on legislative institutions, the evolution of American legislatures, and American state politics.

Peter Vallentyne is Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri. He writes on issues of liberty and equality in the theory of justice (and left-libertarianism in particular) and, more recently on enforcement rights (rights to protect primary rights). He was associate editor of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics and of Ethics; he was co-editor of Economics and Philosophy; and he is currently associate editor of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association and of Social Choice and Welfare. He edited Equality and Justice (2003, 6 volumes) and Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement (1991), and he co-edited, with Hillel Steiner, The Origins of Left Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings and Left Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (2000). He has held an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and directed a National Endowments for the Humanities project on ethics across the curriculum. He can be contacted at Vallentynep@missouri.edu.