Documenting the Past
of the Republic

William E. Allen holds a doctorate in History (Atlantic Civilization) from Florida International University, a Master for Teachers of Social Studies (Indiana University, Bloomington), and a Bachelor in History (University of Liberia). Allen has taught history on either side of the Atlantic (University of Liberia) and the United States (e.g., Kennesaw State University). He is the recipient of fellowships from Foundations such as Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Ford.

His publications include “Liberia and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century:

1. Convergence and Effects,” History in Africa, 37 (2010):7-49;
2. "Rethinking the History of Settler Agriculture in Nineteenth-Century Liberia,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 37, 3(2004): 435-462;
3. “Making History in the Bedroom: Americo-Liberians and Indigenous Liberians Sexual Unions, 1880s-c.1950s,” Liberian Studies Journal, 34, 2(2009): 16-31;
4. “Historical Methodology and Writing the Liberian Past: The Case of Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century,” History in Africa, 32 (2005): 21-39.

Allen has a chapter in a book slated for publication by Indiana University Press in September 2026. The book is entitled Met by the Love of Liberty: History and Identity in Americo-Liberian Memory. His chapter is “Becoming Liberian in an American Settlement.”

Allen has served the University as Chairperson of the Department of History, Dean of Liberia College (now The Amos C. Sawyer College of Social Sciences and Humanities), and Vice President for Academic Affairs. He is currently Executive Director of the Center of Diaspora and Migration Studies.

Cassandra Mark-Thiesen is Acting Chair of Transregional Cultures of Knowledge, University of Regensburg. Previously she led the German Research Foundation-funded junior research group ‘African Knowledges and the History Public*ation’ at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth. She was lecturer in Global & African history at the University of Basel. She is a 2016 – 2018 Marie Heim-Vögtlin Fellowship recipient (Swiss National Science Foundation).

She is co-editor of the volume “The Politics of Historical Memory and Commemoration in Africa” (2021). And the author of "Mediators, Contract Men and Colonial Capital: Mechanized Gold Mining in the Gold Coast Colony, 1879-1909" (2018). Her research focuses on social history and the history of technology and knowledge “transfer” in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as digital history and African historical cultures.

D. Elwood Dunn is the Alfred Walter Negley Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Sewanee: University of the South. Retired in 2012 after 31 years at Sewanee, Elwood is the author of numerous books and articles. Among his books are Liberia and the United States During the Cold War: The Limits of Reciprocity (2009); a three-volume compilation of The Annual Messages of the Presidents of Liberia, 1848 to 2010 (2011); coauthor of the Historical Dictionary of Liberia (2001); a two-volume A History of the Episcopal Church of Liberia (1992, 2020); and his personal memoirs titled A Liberian Life... (2022).

Dunn served the government of Liberia in the 1970s as an assistant minister of foreign affairs, a deputy minister of state for presidential affairs, and minister of state for presidential affairs. He is currently a freelance consultant on Liberian and African affairs.