Nemata Blyden (M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University) is the Armstead L. Robinson Professor of 19th Century African American History at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia (pending approval of the Board of Visitors). A scholar specializing in African American, African Diaspora, and African history, Nemata Blyden is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019), and West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: A diaspora in reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000). Among her publications are “‘Back to Africa’ The Migration of New World Blacks to Sierra Leone and Liberia”, in Organization of American Historians  Magazine of History, Volume 18, Number 3 (April 2004); “The search for Anna Erskine: African American Women in Nineteenth-Century Liberia” in Catherine Higgs, Barbara Moss & Earline Rae Ferguson, Stepping Forward: Black women in Africa and the Americas (Ohio University Press, 2002); “Between Africa and America: Recalibrating Black Americans' Relationship to the Diaspora, with Dr. Jeannette Eileen Jones, Perspectives on History, September 2020, Volume 58, Issue 6; “This na true story of our history”: South Carolina in Sierra Leone's historical memory” in Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Volume 12, Issue 3, 2015. Her principal thematic interests have included nineteenth century African American history, African and American and Caribbean migrations to Africa and African American engagement with Africa. Professor Blyden was a consultant for In Motion: The African American Migration Experience for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York) and is a CoPI for “To Enter Africa from America”: The United States, Africa, and the New Imperialism, 1847-1919 with Jeannette Eileen Jones (PI), Nadia Nurhussein, and John Cullen Gruesser.