Susanna Ashton is a full Professor with the Department of English at Clemson University. Among other awards, she has been a Fulbright scholar in Ireland and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society, and held archival fellowships at Emory University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. For 2021-2022 she is the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African And African American Research at Harvard University. She has published work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as works on book history, authorship, libraries, copyright, and the author Charles W. Chesnutt. In 2018 that volume won an award for the best scholarly work on Chesnutt by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society. She is currently at work on a biography of John Andrew Jackson and is a 2021-22 Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Thomas Lewis Johnson (1836-1921) was one of the most widely traveled and published Black religious figures of the late nineteenth century. Born enslaved in Virginia, he became a Baptist minister, international lecturer, missionary, and author whose work carried him from the American South to England and West Africa. A close associate of the celebrated preacher Charles H. Spurgeon, Johnson advocated for greater roles for Black missionaries and religious leaders while building a remarkable career within transatlantic evangelical networks. His memoir, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, preserves an important account of slavery, emancipation, faith, and Black global citizenship.

Susanna Ashton is a full Professor with the Department of English at Clemson University. Among other awards, she has been a Fulbright scholar in Ireland and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society, and held archival fellowships at Emory University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. For 2021-2022 she is the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African And African American Research at Harvard University. She has published work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as works on book history, authorship, libraries, copyright, and the author Charles W. Chesnutt. In 2018 that volume won an award for the best scholarly work on Chesnutt by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society. She is currently at work on a biography of John Andrew Jackson and is a 2021-22 Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Thomas Lewis Johnson (1836-1921) was one of the most widely traveled and published Black religious figures of the late nineteenth century. Born enslaved in Virginia, he became a Baptist minister, international lecturer, missionary, and author whose work carried him from the American South to England and West Africa. A close associate of the celebrated preacher Charles H. Spurgeon, Johnson advocated for greater roles for Black missionaries and religious leaders while building a remarkable career within transatlantic evangelical networks. His memoir, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, preserves an important account of slavery, emancipation, faith, and Black global citizenship.

Susanna Ashton is a full Professor with the Department of English at Clemson University. Among other awards, she has been a Fulbright scholar in Ireland and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society, and held archival fellowships at Emory University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. For 2021-2022 she is the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African And African American Research at Harvard University. She has published work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as works on book history, authorship, libraries, copyright, and the author Charles W. Chesnutt. In 2018 that volume won an award for the best scholarly work on Chesnutt by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society. She is currently at work on a biography of John Andrew Jackson and is a 2021-22 Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Thomas Lewis Johnson (1836-1921) was one of the most widely traveled and published Black religious figures of the late nineteenth century. Born enslaved in Virginia, he became a Baptist minister, international lecturer, missionary, and author whose work carried him from the American South to England and West Africa. A close associate of the celebrated preacher Charles H. Spurgeon, Johnson advocated for greater roles for Black missionaries and religious leaders while building a remarkable career within transatlantic evangelical networks. His memoir, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, preserves an important account of slavery, emancipation, faith, and Black global citizenship.