Polarized Politics

David Roediger teaches history and American studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History.” Professor Roediger’s previous books about class and race include “Seizing Freedom,” “The Wages of Whiteness,” and “How Race Survived U.S. History.”

Louis Philippe Römer teaches anthropology at Vassar College. His research focuses on the roles of language and media in politics, as well as on the practices that social movements employ to construct alternative visions of the future. Professor Römer is working on a book titled “Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves.”

Mary Hicks teaches history at the University of Chicago. She is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration, and the making of the early modern world. Professor Hicks is working on a book titled “Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835,” which reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization, and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed Black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. More broadly, she seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between West Africa and Brazil.

Tejasvi Nagaraja is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University’s ILR School. His research explores the intersections of U.S. labor and African American and foreign relations history. Professor Nagaraja is writing a book about America’s World War II experience and generation, reconstructing a far-flung war within the war — among Americans themselves. This transnational story weaves military-industrial labor battles, Black soldiers’ protests against policing and incarceration, and veterans’ debates about America’s role in the world. Professor Nagaraja earned his Ph.D. from New York University and has held fellowships at Harvard University, the New School, and the New York Historical Society. His writing has been published in the journal American Historical Review.

Wendi Muse is a Ph.D. candidate in History at New York University, finishing her dissertation on the sociopolitical impact of radical networks formed between Brazilians and Africans from Portuguese colonies during the Cold War. She also holds a Master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Ms. Muse has nearly two decades of experience in Brazil where, in addition to her scholarly research, she has done extensive work on Black women’s presence in popular culture and political life. She is also the creator of the Left POCket Project and Podcast, focused on the histories of leftists of color, making them readily accessible for the general public.