Anne Valk is the Associate Director for Public Humanities in the Center for Learning in Action and Lecturer in the History Department at Williams College. She is also President of the national Oral History Association. A historian by training, Valk specializes in 20th-century US social history. She has held positions as a tenured faculty member, a center director, a campus administrator, a leader of national boards, and a nationally recognized public humanities scholar. In her past role as Deputy Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, she coordinated the Fox Point Oral History Project and the Mashapaug Pond/Reservoir Triangle Collection Project, leading graduate classes in oral history and public humanities in which students worked actively in these and other communities. Valk’s book, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C., won the Richard Wentworth Prize. She is co-editor with Leslie Brown of Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South, winner of the Oral History Association’s Biennial Book Award. Valk is a co-editor (along with Teresa Mangum) of the University of Iowa book series Humanities and Public Life.

Leslie Brown is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Williams College. After working for the McDonald’s Corporation as a manager and field supervisor, she directly the Higher Education Opportunity Program at Skidmore College, later receiving a certificate in Women’s Studies and A. M. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Duke University. From 1990-1995 she co-ordinated “Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South,” a collaborative research and curriculum project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Brown is the author of Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Urban South (2008), winner of the 2009 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize; editor of the collection of primary source documents, African American Voices: From Emancipation to the Present (2014); and co-editor of Living with Jim Crow.