Britt Rusert is Professor of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and incoming executive editor of the Massachusetts Review. She is a 2024-25 NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and was a 2023-24 Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Rusert is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU, 2017) and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Her book on William J. Wilson’s Afric-American Picture Gallery (1859) is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Another book-length project, The Care Underground: Mutual Aid in the Age of Slavery and Abolition, is under contract with Verso.