Steering committee

Daina Ramey Berry is Professor of History and Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was formerly the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Chair of the History Department (the first person of color to take this role). Dr. Berry is a “scholar of the enslaved” and a specialist on gender and slavery as well as Black women’s history in the United States. She is the award-winning author/editor of six books. Her most recent publication, A Black Women’s History of the United States, co-authored with Kali Nicole Gross, is an empowering testament of Black women’s ability to build communities in the face of oppression, and their continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Professor Berry completed her BA, MA, and PhD in African American Studies and U.S. History at the University of California Los Angeles.

Monica Muñoz Martinez is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Born and raised in Texas, she received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Martinez is the author of the award-winning book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, and the primary investigator for the digital recovery project Mapping Violence: Racial Terror in Texas 1900-1930.  Martinez is a founding member of Refusing to Forget an award-winning non-profit organization that calls for restorative justice for histories of racial violence in Texas. Her research has been featured by media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and NBC. In 2017 Martinez was selected for the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program awarded to the “country’s most creative thinkers.” In 2019, she was included in NBC News’s list, “Latino 20” recognizing twenty celebrities, CEOs, activists, and scholars using their voice to empower Latino communities. 

Joshua Frens-String is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin where his research and teaching focuses on the history of modern Latin America. He is the author of Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (forthcoming in 2021 from University of California Press). In addition to his teaching and scholarly work, Dr. Frens-String also has experience in the worlds of academic and popular publishing, having served as managing editor of the Radical History Review (2011-2013) and managing editor of the North American Congress on Latin America's Report on the Americas and its popular news site, NACLA.org (2015-2017).

Raymond Hyser is the Digital Humanities Developer for Not Even Past and a PhD student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and his BA in History and Art History from the University of Virginia. He focuses on environmental history and the history of science within trans-imperial spaces during the nineteenth century with a special interest in world history and digital humanities. His current research traces the agricultural knowledge networks of coffee cultivation between the West Indies and South Asia during the long nineteenth century.