Scott Heerman is a historian of slavery and emancipation in comparative contexts. He was a 2018 NEH Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a 2023-24 Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His first book is The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865.  He is currently at work on a project that examines the international history of kidnapping and re-enslavement,  provisionally entitled Freedom’s Ensemble: Abduction and Belonging in the Age of Atlantic Emancipations, 1750-1860.