Patricia Ann Lott is an Associate Professor of American Studies, African American and Africana Studies, and English at Ursinus. Lott earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in African American Studies, her M.A. in African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.A. in English from Dillard University in New Orleans. She is a 2019-20 recipient of the Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She also held the inaugural Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, the Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and a UNCF/Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Lott’s current manuscript, “Memory’s Ruins: The U.S. North’s Forgotten Confederacies with Racial Slavery,” uses the shock evoked by contemporary excavations of bondage’s past lives in the U.S. North to construct a critical genealogy of how that history escaped public collective memory. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to trace conflicting portrayals of the North’s confederacies with slavocracy and abolitionism in the region’s nineteenth-century commercial, legal, print, visual, and performance cultures. The work also deliberates on how the disavowal of racial slavery in the North has circumscribed the range and kinds of politics that people mobilize to confront racism, regionalism, and reparation in the afterbirth of emancipation into the contemporary.