Rita Roberts is the Nathaniel Wright Stephenson Professor of History and Biography at Scripps College and Professor of Africana Studies at the Claremont Colleges. She is the author of several articles and two books, Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Political Thought, 1776-1863 (LSU Press, 2010) and I Can’t Wait to Call You My Wife: African American Correspondence in the Civil War Era (Chronicle Books, 2022).  Professor Roberts, now transitioning to retirement, is currently researching southern free black experience from the early colonial era to the late nineteenth century and the role of race in the history of the U.S. asylums.