Keynote Speaker

Presenter Biographies

Matt Clavin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of West Florida. His specialties are early American cultural and intellectual history. His research focuses on race, slavery, and abolition in the United States and Atlantic World, with a focus on the public memory of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. 

Deborah Freeland is Senior Designer for the Division of Outreach and Continuing Education at the University of Mississippi. She has worked as editor/curator of historic photography, designer, illustrator, and museum exhibition curator.  

Sharon Heist is an historian and consultant.  She is currently working on a history of the UCST. 

Leonne M. Hudson is associate professor of history at Kent State University where he teaches courses on 19th Century America.  He has published one monograph and one edited volume, and several articles on the Civil War era.    

John Hutchins is a U.S. army veteran and practicing attorney in Colorado.  He has twice received the Westerners International Historical Writing Award, and was presented an historical writing award from the U.S. Army Historical Center. 

Bennie McRae is an historian, publisher and editor of Lest We Forget magazine.  He is a frequent consultant and lecturer on black military history, with emphasis on the Civil War.  
Jeffery S. Prushankin received his PhD from the University of Arkansas in 2000 and teaches Civil War and Military History at Penn State Abington College. He is the author of A Crisis in Confederate Command: Edmund Kirby Smith, Richard Taylor, and the Army of the Trans-Mississippi (Louisiana State University Press, 2005) and several articles.  

Kelly Selby is a PhD candidate at Kent State University.  She is adjunct professor at Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio, and Cuyahoga Community College in Parma, Ohio. 

David Slay is a PhD candidate at Texas Christian University. His first book Georgia Civil War Manuscript Collection: An Annotated Bibliography is due out next year from the University of Alabama Press.  He is currently coauthoring a biography of Braxton Bragg, editing the memoirs of Benjamin Grubb Humphrey, and working on his dissertation on African-American Union soldiers from Mississippi.