Our Project Team
Meet the team of scholars behind the Freedom Seekers Project
Antonio T. Bly
Antonio T. Bly is the Peter H. Shattuck Endowed Chair at California State University, Sacramento. He is a book historian whose work explores the intersection of history, memory, historical imagination, and print culture. His recent work, Escaping Matrimony, documents eloping advertisements that appeared in colonial newspapers before the American Revolution.
Simon P. Newman
Simon P. Newman is Sir Denis Brogan Professor of History (Emeritus) at the University of Glasgow, and an honorary fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a historian of the social history of early modern British America, with a particular focus on slavery and resistance to enslavement by escape. He is the author of Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (2022), the joint winner of the 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Billy G. Smith
Billy G. Smith is Emeritus Malone Professor of History and Distinguished Professor of Letters & Science at Montana State University. For the past four decades, he has studied class, poverty, working humans, women, enslaved people, urban spaces, and disease in early America and the Atlantic World.
Gloria Whiting
Gloria McCahon Whiting is E. Gordon Fox Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a social historian of early America with interests in the history of slavery and race as well as women, gender, and family. Her first book is Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England (2024).
Graduate Project Assistants
Isaac Lee
Isaac Lee is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation and research explores the histories of race, slavery, and colonialism in the early modern Atlantic world.
Jesse Gant
Jesse Gant is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UW-Madison. His dissertation, “The Aliened Americans: The Antislavery Movement in the American West,” explores the long history of emancipation North and West of the Ohio River between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
Undergraduate Interns
Margaret Shreiner
Margaret Shreiner is an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison double majoring in Journalism and History with a certificate in Digital Media Analytics. This semester, Margaret researched post-Revolutionary War Philadelphia while writing about Alice. She also explored the history of tavern culture in early America while writing the story of Edward Tamar.
Sara Ortenzio
Sara Ortenzio is pursuing a Genetics major and History certificate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As an intern, Sara researched enslaved women and children in the Caribbean for her story about Monday. She has also explored slavery’s relationship to horse racing in early North Carolina for her story about Charles Thompson .