This story originally appeared on UMass Amherst News.
The Slavery North Initiative at UMass Amherst has announced its cohort of Fall 2025 Fellows.
Each fellow will conduct independent research on a topic related to the Slavery North’s mandate areas, propelling the scholarship and artistic creation forward on the histories of transatlantic slavery in the understudied regions of Canada and the U.S. North.
“We are thrilled to welcome such a talented and dynamic group of artists and academics to Slavery North,” says Charmaine A. Nelson, founding director of Slavery North and provost professor of art history at UMass Amherst. “Their distinct research expertise and disciplinary pathways – fine arts, English, history, art education and journalism – demonstrate the breadth of the research being generated about these vitally important and yet desperately understudied histories.”
Fall 2025 Slavery North Fellows
Camille Turner is an artist and scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Turner joins Slavery North as an Artist-in-Residence Fellow to develop a research-creation project focusing on experiences of Africans carried as chattel on ships constructed for the transatlantic trade in New England and Newfoundland.
Sherry Johnson is an associate professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and joins Slavery North as a Visiting Professor Fellow. Johnson’s research considers Lawrence Hill’s “The Book of Negroes” (2007) and uses digital Black studies to rethink intersections of prolonged black histories and Canadian national identity.
Fábio Cascadura is a doctoral candidate in history at York University in Toronto and joins Slavery North as a Graduate Student Fellow. He is conducting archival research on the Ganges Affair, a case involving the capture of slave vessels by the U.S. Navy and the subsequent “liberation” of African captives in Pennsylvania in 1800.
María Sparrow is a multidisciplinary artist based in Franklin County. She joins Slavery North as an Artist-in-Residence Fellow to undertake a comparative examination of the dress of enslaved women in Massachusetts and in Salta, Argentina, during the 17th century.
David Montero is an investigative journalist and author who joins Slavery North for his second year as an Artist-in-Residence Fellow. His project investigates the Boylston family of Boston who amassed a substantial fortune – and enduring prestige – by trafficking thousands of African people into slavery in the 1760s.
Olivia Haynes is a doctoral candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst, where she also completed the graduate certificate in Public History. Her work reimagines how we understand reproduction, community, survival, and Black futurity under slavery and its legacies.
Tim Hastings is a doctoral candidate in the history department at UMass Amherst studying early American history, public history, and Atlantic World slavery and the African Diaspora. His research focuses on histories of slavery in northern New England, focusing on New Hampshire.
Abi Mbaye is a doctoral student at UMass Amherst and a Black feminist scholar specializing in English with a focus on American studies. Her research is centered around critical issues faced by Black women, including health disparities, migration impacts, historical trauma, Black feminist thought and revolutionary politics.
