Jessamyn R. Abel is associate professor in the Asian Studies and History Departments and Affiliated Faculty of the School of International Affairs at Penn State. She is a historian of modern Japan with interests in democratization, technology, infrastructure, sports, and international relations. Her recently published book, Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train, views 1960s Japan through the window of the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, showing how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use as a means of transportation to perform cultural and sociological functions. Her first book, The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964, examines the transwar development of Japanese internationalism. Her current research focuses on postwar Japan to examine the role of public institutions in shaping democracy by promoting democratic thought and practice.

Tony Frazier is a historian of modern Europe, with a specialty in the comparative history of slavery and emancipation in modern Britain. He has secondary interests in African American history and digital history. He conducts research in Black British history, material culture, Atlantic slavery, African American intellectual history and memory. Dr. Frazier has taught courses in Early Modern European History, Modern European History, British History, African American history, African Diaspora, United States, and World History. He currently serves on the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA).

He is currently writing his book manuscript tentatively titled Slaves Without Wages: Runaway Black Slaves and Servants in Eighteenth-Century London. This project investigates the meaning of freedom and liberty in English society, particularly as it relates to enslaved Black people, both before and after the 1772 Somerset Case. His research has been funded by the National Humanities Center.

After the completion of the book, he will continue to work on a digital history project that documents the origins of Emancipation Days and memory in African American communities after the Civil War.

Ekaterina Haskins is professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Visual Studies at Penn State. Her research and teaching encompass rhetorical theory and history, public memory, and visual culture.  She is the author of three monographs, including Popular Memories: Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic Citizenship (U of South Carolina Press, 2015) and Remembering the War, Forgetting the Terror: Appeals to Family Memory in Putin's Russia (Penn State Press, 2024). Her recent scholarship investigates the rhetoric and politics of public memory in Russia and post-Soviet countries.  Haskins is a recipient of multiple awards, including the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division of the National Communication Association (2018) and the Everett Lee Hunt Award from the Eastern Communication Association (2005) for her book Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle.

Anna Peterson is associate professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. Her research focuses on imperial Greek literature, ancient epistolography, ancient comedy, and human-environment relations. Her first book, Laughter on the Fringes: The Reception of Old Comedy in the Imperial Greek World, examined the impact of Aristophanic comedy on imperial-era Greek literature, showing how later Greeks renegotiated and reinvented the aggressive and self-reflexive humor of Athenian Old Comedy. She is also the co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Greek Literary Topographies in the Roman Imperial World. Her current research project investigates the depictions of the city of Athens in imperial-era Greek literature.

Christina Snyder is the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State. Snyder earned her A.B. in Anthropology from the University of Georgia and her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Snyder is working on her third book, American Abolitions: The Slow Death and Many Afterlives of Slavery. Demonstrating that anti-slavery movements are as old as chattel slavery itself, this book examines efforts to abolish or prohibit slavery in North America from the 1500s to the 1800s.

Snyder is also the author of Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) and Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard, 2010). These books received a wide range of accolades, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the John H. Dunning Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize, and the John C. Ewers Prize. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the  John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Michael J. Steudeman studies the rhetoric of education policy in the United States. His research considers how national education discourses reframe social problems, cultivate feelings of national belonging, and adjudicate exclusions from public life. In his book Absence of National Feeling: Education Debates in the Reconstruction Congress (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming in 2025), Steudeman analyzes the central role that schools played in the idealistic visions and tragic compromises of Reconstruction Era legislators. In addition to studying educational rhetoric, Steudeman also writes about topics of neurodiversity, demagoguery, and presidential rhetoric. His research has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and History of Education Quarterly. He teaches courses on a range of topics, including Landmark Speeches, Argumentation, Rhetorics of Public Policy, and Rhetorical Criticism.