Claudio Saunt, Founder

Claudio Saunt is Richard B. Russell Professor in American History, Regents' Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of four books, including West of the Revolution (2014), Black, White, and Indian (2005), and A New Order of Things (1999). His most recent book, Unworthy Republic (2020), was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the Ridenhour Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has developed several online projects, including the Invasion of America and, with Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana. In 2018, he received an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to produce an online, interactive time-lapse map of the African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1800. Supported by a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship, his current project, "The Land Beneath Our Feet," maps in depth and detail the Cherokee families who lost their homes in the 1830s, creating a virtual representation of the Cherokee Nation just before the United States drove its sixteen thousand citizens off their farms and across the Mississippi River. Department Page | Website

Stephen Berry, Founder

Stephen Berry is the Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia. He is Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Historical Association and the author or editor of five books on nineteenth century America, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War, the Book of the Month Club main selection for March 2008. A co-editor of the UGA Press series, UnCivil Wars, his work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His current research focuses on death and datatification. Department Page | Website

Scott Nesbit

Scott Nesbit is associate professor of digital humanities at the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design. His work explores the intersection between digital tools and humanistic questions, particularly questions touching on the history and spaces of the American South. He has led digital history projects such as Visualizing Emancipation, which used a wide array of textual sources -- ranging from military correspondence to runaway slave advertisements found in southern newspapers -- to map out where and when slavery fell apart during the American Civil War.

Elizabeth Fenn

Principal investigator of the Pox Americana project, Elizabeth Fenn is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Colorado. Fenn's field of study is the early American West, focusing on epidemic disease, Native American, and environmental history. Her 2001 book Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, unearthed the devastating effects of a terrible smallpox epidemic that coursed across the North American continent during the American Revolution. She is also the author of Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People , which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2015.

Andrew Fialka

Andrew Fialka is Assistant Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University; his primary research interest is in spatial history, mapping, and GIS. His dissertation examines federal counter-insurgency policy in Missouri during the Civil War.

Lorien Foote

Lorien Foote is associate professor of history at Texas A&M University. She is the author of The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (2010), which was a finalist and honorable mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize, and Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (2003).

Sergio Bernardes

Sergio Bernardes is Associate Director at the Center for Geospatial Research at the University of Georgia. His primary interests involve innovative processing and analysis of large datasets, including time series of remotely-sensed images, ground-based climate data and derived metrics to assess vegetation responses to natural and anthropogenic environmental changes. He is a NASA Fellow and received the 2014 Excellence-In-Research Award and the 2014 James L. Carmon Award for innovative use of computers in research from the University of Georgia.

In Memorium
Michael Montgomery

Michael Montgomery was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He edited six books on the English of the American South and was the co-editor (with Ellen Johnson) of the volume on language for the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2007). His work was essential to Private Voices. Dr. Montgomery passed away in 2019.