Samuel Kelton Roberts is Associate Professor of History (Columbia University School of Arts & Sciences), and Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences (Columbia Mailman School of Public Health). He writes and lectures widely about black politics and history, especially issues pertaining to public health. He is the author of Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), and is currently researching and writing a book-length project on the policy and politics of race, addiction treatment, and the United States’ War on Drugs between the 1950s and the 1990s, a period which covers the heroin and crack cocaine eras and the early years of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT), and syringe exchange programs (SEPs). Dr. Roberts has served as a member of the Mailman School of Public Health’s Working Group on Mass Incarceration and Public Health, and as the Policy Coordinator of Columbia University’s Criminal Justice Initiative. He also was the organizer of the conferencem “Challenging Punishment: Race, Public Health, and the War on Drugs” (4-5 October 2013, in New York City). He tweets from @SamuelKRoberts. 

Rich Blint  is research affiliate and adjunct assistant professor in the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University and associate director of Columbia University School of the Arts Office of Public Programs and Engagement. He is co-editor (with Douglas Field) of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (Winter 2013); contributing editor of The James Baldwin Review; curator and co-curator, respectively, of the exhibitions The First Sweet Music (2014) and Bigger Than Shadows (2012, with Ian Cofre)).  He is also curator of the exhibition series built environments at Columbia, an initiative conceived to engage contemporary issues in fine art concerning aesthetics, value, difference, and public space.

Blint is at work on his book project, Trembling on the Edge of Confession: James Baldwin and National Innocence in Modern American Culture, and is editor of the 1980s volume of the African American Literature in Transition series being prepared for Cambridge University Press.  He is the 2016-2017 Scholar-in-Residence in the MFA Program in Performance+Performance Studies in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and sits on the boards of Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Critical Investigation: The African Diaspora, and CLAGS: The Center for LGBQT Studies at the Graduate and University Center, CUNY.

Christina Greer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham University - Lincoln Center (Manhattan) campus. Her research and teaching focus on American politics, black ethnic politics, urban politics, quantitative methods, Congress, New York City and New York State politics, campaigns and elections, and public opinion. Prof. Greer's book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press) investigates the increasingly ethnically diverse black populations in the US from Africa and the Caribbean. She finds that both ethnicity and a shared racial identity matter and also affect the policy choices and preferences for black groups. It was the recipient of the WEB du Bois Best Book Award in 2014 given by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Professor Greer is currently writing her second manuscript and conducting research on the history of all African Americans who have run for the executive office in the U.S. Roughly sixty African Americans have run for or been nominated for the executive office since 1872. Her research interests also include mayors and public policy in urban centers. Her previous work has compared criminal activity and political responses in Boston and Baltimore. Prof. Greer received her B. A. from Tufts University and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. She is a member of the board of Project Vote, Executive Council of the Safety Net Project: A Project of the Urban Justice Center and an ardent supporter of FIERCE in NYC and Project South in Atlanta, GA. She is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC and NY1 and is often quoted in media outlets such as the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and the AP. She also writes a weekly column for The Amsterdam News, the oldest black newspaper in the U.S.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studiesat Columbia University, where she has served as director of the Institute for Research in African American studies. In addition to editing several collections of letters and essays she is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008). She is also the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999) co-editor, with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998) and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O’Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Callaloo, and African American Review, and she is also a frequent commentator on WNPR’s News & Notes.

Cheryl D. Hicks is an associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she is a faculty affiliate in Africana Studies and an adjunct faculty member in Women and Gender Studies. She holds a B.A. in American History from the University of Virginia and a M.A. as well as Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University. Her research addresses the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the law. She has published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Her first book, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 received the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians and honorable mentions from the 2011 John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and the 2011 Darlene Clark Hine Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Professor Clarence Taylor is one of a handful of scholars whose work focuses on the civil rights struggle in New York City. He also writes on African-American religion. He has written and edited four books. The first, The Black Churches of Brooklyn (Columbia University Press, 1994), is a critically acclaimed work that centers on the development of the religious community in Brooklyn, New York. It examines the institutional development as well as the social activism of black churches. The black churches of Brooklyn, he argues, not only helped shape the “city of churches” but they also shaped by the cultural changes and social movements of Brooklyn.  

Professor Taylor’s second book, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools(Columbia University Press, 1997), is the most extensive work on Milton Galamison, leader of the New York City School integration struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. This work challenges the southern paradigm on civil rights historiography by exploring the efforts of civil rights activists and organizations in New York. The book has received numerous positive reviews and has been cited by numerous scholars working on modern New York City and northern civil rights history. It was received Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. 

Professor Taylor has been at Baruch College since 2004. His teaching interests are the modern civil rights and Black Power movements, modern New York City History, African American Religion, and African American history from Reconstruction to the present and the history of the American working class.