Mike Jirik, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of Missouri where he studies Black history and Africana intellectual traditions across time and space. His research and teaching focus on slavery and universities, slavery and abolition, and the history of Black Studies as well as the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction and Black freedom movements. He is the author of Dissenting Forces: A History of Abolition and Black Thought in Higher Learning (New York University Press). His writing has been published in The New England Quarterly, Slavery & Abolition, the Journal of American Studies, History of Education Quarterly, and Journal of Interdisciplinary History, among others. His work has been supported by the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, American Antiquarian Society, the Organization of American Historians, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.