Brenda E. Stevenson is an expert on race and gender, US race riots, and southern and African-American family during the colonial and antebellum eras. Stevenson’s Academy project is a study of enslaved women and the institution of US slavery from the early colonial era through the Antebellum period. She begins with indigenous forms of female slavery in West and West Central Africa before following the kidnapped girls and women to the “New World.”