#slaveryarchive is a hashtag that Ana Lucia Araujo started curating seven years ago in order to gather news associated with slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, including the creation or removal of monuments, the unveiling of museums and exhibitions, and memorials, as well as conferences and books related to these two human atrocities. You can read a brief history of the #slaveryarchive on Araujo’s Tumblr. Near the early days of the global COVID19 pandemic, in March 2020, Alex Gil, Jessica Marie Johnson and Vanessa Holden joined Araujo to form the #slaveryarchive Book Club to discuss and promote books related to the history of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, Africa, and the Atlantic world.

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Ana Lucia Araujo is a full Professor in the Department of History of historically black Howard University in Washington DC. Her work explores the history and memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, including the connections between Dahomey and Brazil. She authored or edited thirteen books on topics related to the history and memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Since 2017, she is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Project Routes of Enslaved Peoples (former Slave Route Project).

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Dr. Vanessa M. Holden has a dual appointment in both the Department of History department and the program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on African American women and slavery in the antebellum South. Her areas of interest are the history resistance and rebellion, gender history, and the history of sex/sexuality. She is the author of Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (University of Illinois Press, July 2021).

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Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020).

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Alex Gil is Senior Lecturer and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities design for different socio-technical environments, and the material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized DH projects and scholarly software, including In The Same Boats and (Un)Silencing Slavery.