Taylor Shelton, Executive Editor (Georgia State University)
Taylor Shelton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University and the Executive Editor of Atlanta Studies. Broadly trained as a geographer, his interests lie in the ways that maps and data can be used to represent, reproduce and challenge urban social and environmental injustices, especially related to housing and property ownership. Taylor first moved to Atlanta in 2015 for a one-year stint as a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech, returning in 2020 to take his current position at GSU. Since that time, he has been active in Atlanta-based research, including through the publication of his blog, Mapping Atlanta. You can reach him at atlstudies@gmail.com for any journal-related inquiries.
Folashade Alao (Atlanta Regional Commission)
A graduate of Spelman College and Emory University, Folashade is a transportation planner at the Atlanta Regional Commission specializing in clean transportation. She focuses on developing and implementing strategies to advance sustainable and equitable transportation solutions, with a particular emphasis on electric vehicles (EVs) and alternative fuels. Folashade brings a diverse background to her work. She works across planning areas integrating climate resilience strategies as well as workforce development, and community development considerations to develop and implement sustainable transportation solutions that benefit communities and minimize environmental impact. Her academic foundation in American Studies informs her approach to planning for a more equitable and sustainable transportation system. She earned her PhD from Emory University Institute of Liberal Arts.
Rosalind Bentley (Southern Foodways Alliance)
A native of Florida’s panhandle, Rosalind Bentley is deputy editor at the Southern Foodways Alliance and editor-at-large for the Oxford American. Most recently, Bentley served as senior arts and culture writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she worked for 18 years. Bentley has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, the Oxford American, Southern Living, Saveur and Essence. As an enterprise writer at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work on the newspaper’s “Issues of Race” series. A graduate of Florida A&M University, she received her MFA in narrative non-fiction from the University of Georgia.
Brennan Collins (Georgia State University)
Brennan Collins is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education at Georgia State University for High-Impact Practices, Digital Pedagogy, and Atlanta Studies. He is also Director of the Teagle Foundation funded Experiential, Project-Based, Interdisciplinary (EPIC) program. The interdisciplinary nature and technology focus of these programs allow him to work with a diverse faculty in exploring inventive pedagogies. He is particularly interested in creating transdisciplinary and interinstitutional projects and platforms that explore the urban landscape to develop student critical thinking and create opportunities for community engagement. This work explores the intersection of the Humanities with the emerging fields of mapping, digital heritage, data visualization and curation, and immersive learning. He teaches courses in Multiethnic U.S. Literature and comics.
Clinton Fluker (Emory University)
Clinton Fluker is the Senior Director of Culture, Community, and Partner Engagement with the Michael C. Carlos Museum and Emory Libraries. In that role, Fluker engages with Atlanta’s current and historic arts and activist communities to further cultural and scholarly activities across the Atlanta community. Prior to this, Fluker was the Rose Library curator of African American collections and the Assistant Director of Engagement and Scholarship at the Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library where he supervised the Archives Research Center and the GLAM Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning, taught in the Humanities Ph.D. program at Clark Atlanta University, and was the co-editor of The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Art + Design (2019).
Katherine Hankins (Georgia State University)
Katherine Hankins is an urban geographer and Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University. She examines urban change and how social and spatial inequalities are expressed and contested in the urban landscape, primarily at the neighborhood scale. In her work, she’s examined both the large urban development projects that have shaped neighborhood spaces and the ways in which various actors and organizations respond to such projects, whether through everyday acts, or “quiet politics,” or through sustained neighborhood activism. She has lived and worked in Atlanta since 2001.
Edward Hatfield (New Georgia Encyclopedia)
Edward Hatfield is the Managing Editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia and a member of the editorial board at the Georgia Historical Quarterly. He has a PhD in History from Emory University and his research examines the politics of metropolitan planning in Atlanta during the latter half of the Twentieth Century.
Na’Taki Osborne Jelks (Spelman College)
A Spelman and Emory Alum, Na’Taki Osborne Jelks is a nationally-recognized leader in engaging urban communities and youth of color in environmental stewardship through hands-on watershed and land restoration initiatives, environmental education, and training. In 2001, Jelks co-founded the Atlanta Earth Tomorrow® Program. In addition to her work with the National Wildlife Federation, Jelks is board chairperson of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, a community-based organization that recently launched the Atlanta Children’s Forest Network in partnership with the USDA Forest Service and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to engage Atlanta youth and families in environmental education, service learning, and outdoor physical activity on over 355 acres of publicly owned, forested greenspace in Southwest Atlanta.
Jesse P. Karlsberg (Emory University)
Jesse P. Karlsberg, Senior Digital Scholarship Strategist at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and associated faculty in the Department of Music at Emory University, is a scholar of vernacular American music and digital humanities. Jesse is project director of the National Endowment for the Humanities–funded Sounding Spirit Collaborative, which supports research and teaching with vernacular southern sacred music, and project director of Readux, a platform for browsing, annotating, and publishing with digitized books.
LeeAnn Lands (Kennesaw State University)
LeeAnn Lands is a professor of history at Kennesaw State University where she teaches courses on the late 20th century US, urban and suburban history, and historical methods. She is the author of Culture of Property: Race, Class, and Housing Landscapes in Atlanta, 1880-1950 (University of Georgia Press, 2009), Poor Atlanta: Poverty, Race, and the Limits of Sunbelt Development (University of Georgia Press, 2023), and several articles on housing, social welfare, and antipoverty organizing.
Louise E. Shaw (David J. Sencer CDC Museum)
Louise E. Shaw recently retired after 23 years as the Senior Curator of the David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There, Shaw was responsible for curating The Story of CDC, a permanent exhibition tracing the history of history. She also organized temporary history and art exhibitions that cover a range of topics relevant to CDC and to public health, including Health is a Human Right: Achieving Health Equity, Ebola: People + Public Health + Political Will, and Stand & Witness: Art in the Time of COVID-19. A longtime Atlanta cultural worker, she launched her career at what is now the Atlanta History Center.
Kali-Ahset Amen (Johns Hopkins University)
Rebecca Burns (University of Georgia)
Rico Chapman (Jackson State University)
Joe Crespino (Emory University)
Tim Crimmins (Georgia State University)
Prentiss Dantzler (University of Toronto)
Marni Davis (Georgia State University)
Kayla Edgett (University of Georgia)
Andrea Jackson Gavin (Harvard University)
Joseph A. Hurley (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Hank Klibanoff (Emory University)
Calinda Lee (Sources Cultural Resource Management)
Michael Leo Owens (Emory University)
Seumalu Elora Lee Raymond (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Akira Drake Rodriguez (University of Pennsylvania)
Charles Steffen (Georgia State University)
Lawrence Vale (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Stewart Varner (University of Pennsylvania)
Danielle Wiggins (California Institute of Technology)
Kerrie Cotten Williams (Library of Congress)
