Dr. Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has extensive teaching and research interests in African, Caribbean, and African Diaspora history. She holds a B.A. from Princeton and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her current book project, Hartford Bound, examines African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian migration to the Greater Hartford region through the lens of housing and socio-economic mobility.

Dr. Chloe Thurston is an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, where she is also a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Her research spans American political development, political economy, and public policy, with a particular interest in how politics and public policy shape market inequalities along the lines of race and gender. She is the author of the 2018 book At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State (Cambridge University Press) and numerous scholarly articles, and has also published commentaries in The Daily Beast, Ms., and Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, among others. She is currently completing a co-authored book on the rise and fall of a protective debt relief regime in the United States. Thurston received her B.A. in economics and political science from Johns Hopkins University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019-2020, she was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Jack Dougherty is Professor and Director of the Educational Studies Program at Trinity College. He and his students use tools from digital history, data visualization, and web writing to explore the relationship between cities, suburbs, and schools in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut. Jack received his B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College, taught high school social studies in Newark, New Jersey, then earned his Ph.D. in educational policy studies, with a minor in U.S. history, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Trinity, he co-created the Liberal Arts Action Lab while serving as its first Faculty Director (2017-2020), and also led the team that launched the Center for Hartford Engagement and Research (CHER) while serving as its first Director (2018-2020). Learn more about his teaching, scholarship, and community engagement at https://jackdougherty.org.