Marina Moskowitz is one of the leading scholars of material culture, in particular in the American context beginning the eighteenth century. She completed her doctoral degree at Yale and went on to a highly successful career as a member of the faculty of the University of Glasgow in Scotland in History and American studies. Her primary areas of research and academic interest focus on the cultural history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, on a remarkably wide range of topics: from visual culture such as architecture and landscape, and material culture, such as business and market history. She has done important work on the culture of the middle classes and cultural geography. She is exploring what “American-ness” meant to the Revolutionary generation, and what it means today, in particular by examining the legacies of textile production and use in what now constitutes the United States. The place of textile production in the new nation cannot be overstated—stemming as it did from the geography of its raw materials and production. Moskowitz proposes to ask the question “What was (and what is) an American textile?”

Simon Newman is a world-renowned historian of the social and political history of early America, with particular reference to the American Revolution, the early modern British Atlantic world, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the development of plantation slavery; historical and modern understandings of American history and society. He continues to publish highly influential, indeed ground-breaking scholarship, on the history of enslaved people, focusing in particular on those who tried to escape to freedom. With the support of the Leverhulme Trust led a major study of enslaved people who were brought to Scotland and England in the eighteenth century, and who then escaped. He has also worked on research about enslaved people who escaped from their owners in Jamaica and Britain’s other Caribbean colonies. Newman has also helped initiate a report into the degree to which the University of Glasgow benefitted financially from Atlantic World racial slavery. Glasgow was the first British university to undertake such a study and to develop a program of reparative justice as a result. Newman is currently working on a collaborative digital project that will have a public impact on freedom seekers and early American media.