Cécile Accilien is Associate Professor of  Haitian Studies and Director of the Institute of Haitian Studies in the Department of African and African-American Studies. Her primary areas of interest include Haitian Studies, Gender Studies and Film Studies. 

Shawn Leigh Alexander, who received his PhD from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004, is a Professor of African and African American Studies and the director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas. His area of research concentration is African American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries. 

Clarence Lang is Professor of African and African-American Studies at The University of Kansas, and a former Langston Hughes Visiting Professor.  He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. 

Liz MacGonagle is an African historian in the Departments of History and African & African American Studies. She is the Director of the Kansas African Studies Center (KASC). In her research, she crosses historical, geographical, and theoretical boundaries to link nation, culture, and ethnicity to processes of identity formation in African and Diasporan settings.