Benjamin N. Lawrance is a professor of history and, by courtesy, law at the University of Arizona, where he teaches courses in history and law about Africa, slavery, migration, refugees, and asylum. He has published twenty books, including Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. He is the emeritus editor in chief of the African Studies Review.

Joanna Davidson is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa; a coeditor of Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World; and the author of articles in journals such as American Ethnologist and the African Studies Review.